4
London, on my return, was in what Bertrand called “its tadpole condition: all head and no body”. The residential streets and squares were deserted; the clubs and newspaper-offices were thronged.
“I had to cancel leave all round,” he explained, as we left our dismantled house for dinner at the Eclectic. “Now that the peace-treaty’s out of the way, the government is looking for fresh triumphs. Happy thought: an Irish policy! I felt it was time for us to define our attitude.”
“Hasn’t it been defined for us,” I asked, “by the impetuous gentleman who invented ‘self-determination’? What’s good enough for Czecho-Slovakia should be good enough for Ireland.”
“How do you propose to apply it?,” he asked.
Literally, I told him: by electing a constituent assembly on universal suffrage and then by enforcing on all Ireland whatever constitution the assembly framed.
“But that,” said my father-in-law, who had invited himself to dine with us, “means coercing Ulster.”
As I felt we could hardly have too many opinions in our symposium, I urged Frank Jellaby and Carstairs to join us; and every party was represented by the time that Roger Dainton pulled a chair to the end of the table.
“I detest coercion,” I said; “but, if it has to be applied, I’d sooner coerce the few than the many. Because ministers refused to coerce Ulster in 1913, the rest of Ireland has been coerced ever since. And I never know why a thing should be called coercion in one country and ‘maintaining law and order’ in every other.”
Having propounded my own policy, I was free to listen while others propounded theirs. Our speeches, at this date, would make melancholy reading, for every one said precisely what was expected of him and precisely what he had said a hundred times before. Writing now at two years’ remove, I believe and hope that Ireland is on the road to a settlement; and this dinner two years ago lingers in my recollection as one more heart-breaking proof that, if the Irish were incapable of governing themselves, the English were no less incapable of governing them. Crawleigh, a former viceroy; John Carstairs, a retired diplomat; my uncle and Dainton, Jellaby and I, with some hundred years of parliamentary experience between us, all talked with the white-hot irreconcilability of Capulets and Montagues. It was this temper, I reminded myself from time to time, that kept me exiled from the County Kerry: it was this temper that tore me from Barbara’s side. In the years that followed, when I tried to mark the rock on which my life split, I always thought of this fatuous debate and of the pale, angry faces round our echoing table.
It was something, I suppose, that no one prayed for a new Cromwell, though I attribute this moderation to a doubt whether even Cromwell could now “reconquer” Ireland and to a fear that those who had drawn the sword might be the first to perish by the sword. In the last six years Ireland had made the dire discovery that the north had won an advantage by threats of violence and that, if the south wished to redress the balance, it must employ the same means.
“Can’t we cut out ancient history?,” I suggested, as my patience wore thin. “We need a policy to meet the present position; and the present position is an evenly matched civil war.”
As the phrase left my lips, I wondered whether the war was any longer an even match. Two days before, I heard from Hornbeck that a mail-train had been held up and the contents of the lord lieutenant’s bag forwarded, after perusal, with an endorsement “Passed by the Censor I. R. A.”; my agent reported that stores were being looted and ammunition seized. If attacks on private persons and on property were still rare, this was due to prudence on the one side and to intimidation on the other. Some one, however, would soon be shot because he refused to be intimidated; the shooting would be avenged; there would be reprisals against the avengers; and, worst fate of all, no one would be allowed to remain neutral.
“It’s begun already,” said Dainton. “That man they murdered in Limerick . . .”
“That spy they shot?,” Jellaby substituted.
“You call a man a spy for saving British troops from being butchered in an ambush?,” Crawleigh enquired acidly.
“You called Flaherty a spy,” boomed my uncle, “from your place in the House of Lords. He gave exactly similar information to the republican troops.”
“Who were in armed rebellion against the king,” said John Carstairs.
“Whose king?,” asked Jellaby.
The dialogue tripped on with the ease that comes of practice; and most of us were tried players in the farce or tragedy of mistranslating an opponent’s terms. In the interests of peace I begged that we should avoid the more flagrantly question-begging labels; but by now, grown men though we were, each owed himself the satisfaction of just one more stab before he laid down his arms.
“You know who’s at the back of all this?,” enquired Dainton, carefully avoiding my uncle’s eye.
“The bolshevists?,” Bertrand asked indulgently. “You said it was the Germans in ’16. It was the Americans before that. Good God! I’m old enough to remember O’Connell: it always has been somebody else! Will you English never learn that an Irishman’s feeling is for his own country? The more you’re pleased to call a man ‘loyalist’, the more I’d call him ‘traitor’, as I’d say ‘traitor’ to a Pole who boasted of his ‘loyalty’ to Russia or Germany.”
“As your people do say ‘traitor’ to the loyalists who fought for you in this war,” muttered Carstairs. “You’ll hang them all as traitors, of course, when you’ve got your republic?”
My uncle was understood to say that he wished to hang no one; but this laudable restraint won no favour from the rest.
“I should hang Carson and Bonar Law,” said Jellaby, as though he were ordering a well-considered dinner.
“Then you must hang Asquith and Birrell for not hanging them,” said Crawleigh, partly from proconsular devotion to firmness, but chiefly from hatred of liberalism.
“I,” said Dainton, “should be quite content to shoot de Valera as Casement was shot. Like a dog. Hanging’s too good for him. President of the Irish Republic, indeed! It’s treason to the king.”
“If you’re going to hang for treason, you must hang for constructive treason, for constructive mutiny and for acquiescence in constructive treason and mutiny,” I pointed out: “that brings in the covenanters, the Curragh people and the Asquith cabinet.” Dainton, I knew, was a covenanter; and I wanted him to see the implication of his wholesale executions. “Personally, I don’t think hanging or shooting ever does much good . . .”
“It would have been a good thing,” Bertrand interrupted, “if you’d shot the entire 1914 House of Commons.”
“But as a policy for the government in 1920?,” I asked.
I have thought over this dinner a dozen times since; and, when ministers were attacked for permitting the slaughter and reprisals that followed, I would sometimes ask their critics if they could do better than the reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-informed and reasonably sane men who shewed themselves so crass, ignorant and mad at this meeting.
“For all the good we’ve done,” I told Bertrand, as we walked home, “I might as well have been in the country.”
“Don’t leave me yet,” he begged.
And throughout the late summer and early autumn I was torn between Barbara’s entreaties that I should come back to Crawleigh and Bertrand’s reproach that I was deserting him when he most needed me.
As a study in “that which remained” I suppose these barren passions claim their place: in our politics, as in our work and play, our gettings and spendings, our crimes and insanities, we lived more rapidly, more violently. The growing disorders of Ireland were ascribed to a “murder-gang”; in the spirit of the age, they were met by irregular troops, with general instructions to give at least as good as they received. Under the reign of reprisals, there was inaugurated an organized terror for which there had been no parallel since the first French revolution. Burning, looting, killing and torturing were paid back, with interest, in the same currency. Mysterious and fatal lists of names were passed up and down the country; the mails were now intercepted at will; and, when far-scattered, unsuspecting men and women were done to death by simultaneous blows, a whisper of “spy” and “counter-spy”—words that had lost their meaning—explained this opposing secret carnage which no man had power to stop.
Face to face with this slow bleeding to death, I could not shrug my shoulders and drift away for a holiday with Barbara. The peace of the world seemed a madman’s dream when we could not stop this butchery at our doors. Day after day Bertrand and I wrote and talked, interviewed and argued. On one set of lips or another, every public man was by now branded as a traitor who had threatened rebellion in Ulster or a traitor who had broken faith with the South.
“If our own statesmanship is bankrupt, we must look elsewhere,” my uncle pronounced.
For a week he laid siege to the League of Nations, then to the Foreign Office. Simultaneously I went as a suppliant to Crawleigh in the hope that he would forward my petition to the Vatican. On the same day, in almost the same words, we were told that there was no precedent to guide a sovereign power in summoning an arbitrator to settle differences between a government and its subjects.
“You can’t run an empire on those lines,” said my father-in-law.
“You’re not running an empire on your present lines!” I retorted.
He was impregnable. Until the republican leaders came, like the burghers of Calais, barefoot, in their shirts, with ropes round their necks, he would not parley with them; and, unhappily for him, no one was strong enough to compass an unconditional surrender.
As I walked empty-handed away from Berkeley Square, I met Hornbeck returning home from the Admiralty.
“Making a nice, tidy world for heroes to live in?,” he enquired with a grin.
Though his tone was bantering, it was free from malice. Philip Hornbeck had no political predilections and less than no belief in the perfectibility of man. Government, for him, always came back to a whiff of grapeshot, which he was always ready to discharge, always without passion and always without error.
“The problem’s not insoluble,” I maintained. “We settled Quebec; we settled South Africa. We could settle Ireland, if we wanted to; but, of a hundred men who talk of settlements, ninety-nine will only settle on their own terms.”
On reaching Fetter Lane, I found my uncle at work on an appeal to the nation.
“The Foreign Office,” he told me with frozen rage, “wanted to know what business this was of mine. Perhaps we can shew them.”
While he wrote, I hardened my heart to the unpleasantest duty that had befallen me since my marriage. After the usual enquiries when I was coming down to Crawleigh, Barbara let fly such a cloud of reproaches that I was ashamed to finish her letter. A delicate wife was no doubt a nuisance; but ought I not to have thought of that before marrying her? Engrossing as my work was, did I—as a matter of academic interest—rate it higher than her reiterated request that I should come to her when she was more ill and miserable than ever in her life before?
I was halfway to the station when my secretary overtook me with an hysterical telegram: If you love me destroy letter unread; and I should be hard put to say whether telegram or letter was the more disturbing. Crawleigh and the local doctor assured me that she was progressing famously; Bertrand urged me to go with a vehemence more inhibitive than the strongest veto; and, in the end, I lamely begged Barbara to be patient and promised to come at an hour’s notice if she really needed me.
“Peace,” I reminded my uncle, “is only another aspect of war. ‘The last chapter, if you like’ . . .”
“Please God it may be!,” he answered with emotion.