Only a few days before the Ashtown fight I had been joking with Aine Malone and telling her they would have to nurse me if I was wounded. I little thought that my joke of December, 1919, would come true, and that I would be installed in Grantham Street in the care of the Malones. The wound in my leg proved more serious than I expected, and my head too was painful. For three whole months I was laid up, scarcely able to move about at all. I am not so sure that I felt any way anxious to get away from my surroundings. Everyone was kind to me. Peadar Clancy came to see me and gave me the news nearly every day. I have fond, if sad, memories of pleasant hours spent with Peadar as he chatted or read for me. Dick McKee and Sean Treacy and Hogan were all kind too, and came to see me regularly. Peadar and Dick and Sean Treacy alas were not to see another Christmas. But I know they died smiling and happy.
Apart from my good and thoughtful comrades there was an even stronger reason which made me think little of the pain and the indoor confinement. That was my kindest and ever attentive nurse—then Brighid Malone—now my wife. Few people have the good fortune to be nursed through sickness by their future wives whose presence counts for more than all that medical skill can give. But the story of our marriage a year and a half later, in circumstances that a fiction writer would discredit as too far-fetched for any Wild West novel, I must reserve for its proper place in a later chapter.
CHAPTER XVII.
FROM TARA TO TIPPERARY.
At the opening of 1920 I had plenty of leisure, while my wound was healing, to review the year that had passed.
Soloheadbeg had borne fruit. The best tribute was that contained in the official statistics that were now issued from time to time by the British Government regarding “Crime in Ireland.” Crime as such was, of course, almost unknown in Ireland until the arrival of the Black and Tans. When the British Government used the word “crime” in reference to Ireland it generally meant active operations against the Army of Occupation. So it was solemnly announced to the world at the beginning of 1920 that during 1919 scores of attacks had been made on British troops or police, hundreds of raids for arms had been carried out and a dozen policemen (that is, armed spies) had been shot dead. If the British Government thought the publication of these statistics would make us repent of our actions and shed our patriotism it had miscalculated. The only effect was to make us more determined that there would be a much bigger record of such “crimes” to be compiled at the end of 1920. And we kept our resolution!
In these statistics England took good care not to record her own acts of warfare against the civilian population in the same period. She did not tell that Dail Eireann, the elected representative Government of Ireland, had been proclaimed an illegal assembly, and its schemes for developing the country’s industries declared criminal activities. She did not tell the world that the Gaelic League, Cumann na mBan, the Irish Volunteers and Fianna Eireann (the Irish Boy Scouts) had been similarly declared illegal bodies. Nor did she tell of the midnight raids and robberies officially carried out against peaceable citizens by her troops. In a word, to quote an expression used by Arthur Griffith at the time, she had “proclaimed the whole Irish nation as an illegal assembly.”
But lest I should give an unfair picture of the time to the reader unacquainted with Irish events, I must in fairness mention a few things that the English forces in Ireland had not yet done. They had not imposed curfew; they had not murdered men in their beds; they had not burned and bombed towns and villages; they had not shot prisoners “for attempting to escape”; they had not executed prisoners of war, murdered priests and outraged women.
I emphasise the fact that they had not done these things in 1919, because they were guilty of every one of these crimes during the year that was now beginning. In order to follow my narrative it is well to bear this fact in mind, for I may not have occasion to mention these developments of British policy unless they directly bear upon my story.
Indeed while I was yet in Dublin in the home of the Malones, the first Curfew Order was issued. In an encounter with a few I.R.A. men after midnight in February, 1920, a policeman was shot dead in Grafton Street. The British at once issued an order making it a criminal offence for any civilian to be out-of-doors between midnight and 5 a.m. Within a few months that Order was extended to most towns and cities in the south of Ireland; not only extended but made more severe. For instance at one time no one was allowed to leave his house in Limerick after 7 p.m. In Cork the hour was 4 p.m. for a while. It then became customary for the British to clear the streets with volley after volley of rifle fire, scores of men, women and children being murdered in this way during 1920 and 1921. Incidently these curfew regulations gave the Government’s murder gang a free field, for no civilian would be about to see them shooting or looting during the Curfew hours.