The following week there was another list of deportations. Three from our room were taken, their places being filled the following day by new arrivals from the country. On May 23rd my name was called, with three others from the room. The previous day I had had an interview with solicitor and counsel with a view to getting a statement of the charges against me and to demanding a trial. An officer had been present throughout the interview, although we had protested against his presence. He was under discipline to the very men against whom it was our intention to proceed, and it was a strange thing that he should be present to learn exactly what our case might be and how it was our intention to proceed. A further interview was arranged for two days later, in order that counsel might turn up certain points of law. But in the meantime I received notice that I was to be deported.
I had been, and then was, ill. I was really unfit to travel, especially under these particular conditions. But that was a matter easily mended. When I reported sick on parade I was taken over to the dispensary and ... ... Others who had been summoned to the parade were treated in the same way; and we stood out there till about half-past four, when our escort arrived. It was a beautiful afternoon; the sunlight poured down through a cloudless sky and lay like a sultry blanket on the ground. There were about a hundred and fifty of us, in two companies, for two destinations. We stood there in ranks with soldiers guarding us, while officers busied themselves with papers all about us. I thought of the sun shining on the sea, and clothing the mountains with a new soft beauty, and of the summer that began now to flow back over the earth in Achill. There was time to indulge in reflection to the full.
At five o’clock our guards handed us over to the escort. The barrack guard had been comprised of English troops. The escort was an Irish regiment. Ironic, that an Irish regiment should escort Irishmen for deportation to England. Stranger still when, as we were being marched through the city, the people crowded about us to let us know of their sympathy, and the soldiers were instructed to keep the people back with their rifle-stocks.
We are sometimes derided as a people rent by divisions, but the division in this case was due to the same cause as has created nearly all our other divisions. That cause was symbolised by the scene that was enacted that day. In no way more picturesquely could the fact of a perpetual military conquest have been staged. And when, as we marched down along the quays, most of us saw, for the first time, the havoc wrought in our capital by the guns of the conqueror, that only gave the appropriate scenery without which dramatists have agreed that the work of their artistry cannot be given to the world.
At the North Wall we were put on board a cattle boat. The cattle were herded at one end of the pens, we were being herded at the other end of the pens. When it came to my turn to be penned I was surprised to hear myself accosted by the Embarkation Officer:
“I’m B——, you know.”
“Certainly,” I replied; “we meet again.” But I had not the dimmest notion who he was.