At ten each night every man was required to be off the corridor and balconies, and any conversation in cells after that time had to be conducted softly, in order not to interfere with those who wished to sleep; and within five minutes of the ringing of the bell the prison was clear and quiet. The staff became accustomed, if they had business to execute with us, to resign it into our hands for prosecution. Those who did not do so made a sad affair of their undertaking. Which is a parable. In a phrase, our motto was:
It was interesting to notice our influence on the staff. We never troubled about them; they had their interests and we had ours; and only occasionally the national opposition clashed sharply. Yet they confided in us. With our extended rights the library was opened to us; and the librarian-warder informed us that he was at first afraid to be left alone in the library with any one of us. Apparently he thought we would bite out his windpipe unexpectedly, or playfully split his skull. But when his first visitor, a man from Belfast, contemptuously described his collection of books as “piffle,” and asked that certain other books should be procured from the officers’ library, as he himself declared: “My word, I was surprised. I thought you Sinn Feiners were a wild lot of savages from what I heard of you. But you are men of culture, most of you. It’s a bit of a shock to a man to find out.” The librarian-warder was quite pleased at the widening range of his ethnographical knowledge.
Yet the most interesting member of the staff was the sergeant of the R.A.M.C. He was a Doctor of Literature at Oxford, and also, I believe, a Docteur ès Lettres at the Sorbonne. He had been out at Gallipoli, whence he had been invalided home. As he passed on his rounds he would often come into my cell for a talk. We very seldom spoke on national questions, for I assumed that our orbits of interest on such matters would not cut each other at any point; our conversation was generally on literary or philosophical matters. But once he came up to me with a definite thing to say.
“You know,” he said, “the Government make a great mistake putting men like you into prison. You will never forget it; you can never forget it; no man could who canvasses experience with his intellect. They’re simply a lot of grandfatherly old fools at the top of affairs, and we always make a muddle of things. They should either give you a clear run, and let you make what you can of your country and take the chances; or they should wait their chance and shoot you out of hand and laugh at the racket afterwards. But all this sentimental talk about your country, followed up by all this muddle, simply makes a thinking man sick. All this business,” and he indicated the hundreds of us standing talking about the yard, “is clumsy, it’s idiocy, and it breeds more clumsiness and idiocy for the future.”
“Which of your two alternatives would you adopt?” I asked him.
“Well, you know, one likes to meet a man to whom one can talk; intellect, and all that sort of thing, and culture, and care for art, they’re rare enough in this world, and one wouldn’t altogether care to take the responsibility of destroying any part of it—”
“But you’d shoot me all the same.”
“Yes, I think I would.” He was quite serious. “Quite possibly that’s because I’ve just been seeing a lot of blood; and I don’t think I would have said that two years ago. But just now I’d shoot you. I wouldn’t of course do it in a stupid way. I’d wait till you gave me a chance; and sooner or later you would, for you have your convictions, and they’d lead you into my hand; and then I’d shoot you instantly, and without trial if need be, without waiting anyhow. Of course there’d be trouble afterwards, but I’d wait quietly till that blew over, as it would.”