Our motor car was the only vehicle that entered or left Dublin without being searched during those five days.
The same bluff as had carried Sean Hogan and myself out of a similar difficulty near Limerick a year before now proved successful at Whitehall, within a few hundred yards of the house where, seven months later, I was to have my biggest fight for life—at Drumcondra.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE BARRACK ATTACKS
Our new plan for more active operations against the British was, in short, to attack them in their strongholds—the police barracks throughout the country. The peelers were now far too cautious to patrol the roads. They seldom if ever ventured any distance from their barracks. We could not meet them in the open. But if the mountain would not come to Mohammed, there was only the other thing to be done. We had got to go to the police and attack them on their own grounds.
At this time, in the spring of 1920, they were rapidly evacuating all outlying barracks in small places where there was a danger that the garrison could be cut off or surprised. They were concentrating on the larger barracks where the garrisons were strengthened and the buildings strongly fortified with steel shutters and barbed wire entanglements. It was at this time that the I.R.A. carried out its most intensive simultaneous series of operations. In one night no less than about a thousand vacated police barracks were burned to the ground—the operations extending to every county in Ireland. In this way we prevented any possibility that those barracks would ever again be occupied by the enemy. A thousand links of the British military chain had been severed.
At this time the peelers had abandoned all pretence of being a police force. They were openly and avowedly a military force not attempting to suppress crime but holding the country by brute force for England. When the R.I.C. uniforms disappeared from a village our I.R.A. police promptly took over the duties that they should have discharged, and right well they did it. The robber and the housebreaker soon learned to have for the I.R.A. a wholesome respect he never had for the R.I.C.
If any reader unacquainted with events in Ireland at that time thinks it incredible that a police force like the R.I.C. should have been so shameless as to allow criminals a free hand I hope I shall convince him by two simple facts. The first is that in cases where our men were found to have arrested men for robbery or other forms of crime, the practice of the British was to have the criminal released and protected and to have the I.R.A. men sent to jail. The newspaper files with accounts of courts-martial on our men on such charges bear out my statement. The second fact, though never revealed in the newspapers, did not come under my personal notice, but I have it from I.R.A. men concerned. In County Meath a most cold-blooded murder was committed by an ex-British soldier. The R.I.C. had clear evidence that he was guilty. They arrested him, but did they try him? No! They released him and advised him to leave the country before he fell into the hands of the I.R.A. But he was arrested by the I.R.A. men within five minutes of his release, and later paid the penalty of his crime.
At this time too the Black and Tans appeared on the scene. A great many are still in doubt as to how they got this name, so it is as well to explain.
The force was recruited by Sir Hamar Greenwood’s instructions early in 1920 to swell the ranks of the R.I.C. and to replace the Irishmen who had resigned from that force in disgust. Greenwood wanted thousands of recruits for carrying out the policy of terrorism which had been decided upon. He could not get them in Ireland. Even in England he found it hard to get any decent men to come on such work. Hence his force was recruited mainly from the lower classes of English ex-soldiers, many of them being known criminals or ex-convicts. They arrived in Ireland in such numbers that the R.I.C. could not possibly equip half of them in the recognised dark blue uniform. There were some black tunics to be had and some black trousers, also some black caps. The military came to their assistance with a supply of khaki. Every man was given some portion of the black uniform to show he was nominally a policeman, but the main portion of the outfit was khaki. When these irregular forces first took up duty in the South you can imagine their grotesque appearance—one man being all in khaki except for a black cap, another all in khaki except for black trousers, and so on, none of them being either completely in black or completely in khaki.