The Red Hand of Ulster

by George A. Birmingham

The crowd behind us was silent now. The laughter and the play had ceased. Children were crowding round the women seeking for hands to hold. Some of the women, vaguely terror-stricken, looked into the faces of the men. Others had drawn a little apart from the rest of the crowd and stood in a group by themselves, staring out at the battleship. There were middle-aged women and quite young women in this group. I raised my field-glasses and scanned their faces. There was one expression on them, and only one—not fear, but hatred. Women fight sometimes in citizen armies when such things have been called into existence. But it is not their fighting power which makes them important. That is, probably, always quite inconsiderable. What makes them a force to be reckoned with in war is their faculty for hating. They hate with more concentration and intensity than men do. These women were mindful, perhaps, of the girl with the baby whom Clithering had seen shot. They realized, perhaps, the menace for husbands, lovers, and sons which lay in the guns of the black ironclad parading sluggishly before their eyes. Remembering and anticipating death, they hated the source of it with uncompromising bitterness. The men in the crowd seemed crushed into silence by mere wonder and expectation of some unknown thing. They were not, so far as I could judge, afraid. They were not excited. They simply waited to see what was to happen to them and their town.

Once more a string of flags fluttered from the ship’s mast. Once more the answer came from her consorts. Then for the third time she swept round. We saw her foreshortened; then end on; then foreshortened again as her other side swung into view. At that moment—just before the whole length of her lay flat before our eyes she fired. At first I scarcely realized that she had fired. There was a small cloud of white smoke hanging over her near the bow. That was all for the moment. Then came the horrible sound of the great projectile racing through the air. Then it was past.

Some women in the crowd, a few, shrieked aloud. Some girls ran wildly towards the town, driven, I suppose, to seek shelter of some kind. Most of the crowd stood silent. Then from some young men who stood together there came a kind of moaning sound. It gathered volume. It, as it were, took shape. Voice after voice took it up. The whole crowd—many hundreds of men and women—sang together the hymn they had all been singing for months past, “O God, our help in ages past.” I do not know how far back towards the town the singing spread, but it would not surprise me to hear that ten thousand voices joined in it.

Bland had his glasses raised. He was still gazing at the battleship.

“A strange answer,” I said, “to make to the first shell of a bombardment.”

“Yes,” said Bland. “It reminds me of a profane rhyme which I used to hear:

“‘There was a young lady of Zion
Who sang Sunday-school songs to a lion.’

“But hers, I should say, was the more sensible proceeding of the two.”

I was not sure. It is just conceivable—it seemed to me at that moment even likely—that a hymn, sung as that one was, may be the most effective answer to a big gun. There are only certain things which guns can do. When they have destroyed life and ruined buildings their power is spent. But the singing of hymns may, and sometimes does, render men for a time at least, indifferent to the loss of their lives and the ruin of their houses. Against men in the frame of mind which hymn-singing induces the biggest guns are powerless. The original singers fall, perhaps, but the spirit of their singing survives. For each voice silenced by the bursting shells ten voices take up the song.

The battleship, after firing the gun, swung round and once more slowly steamed across the lough. I waited, tense with excitement, for her to turn again. At the next turn, I felt sure, another shell would come. I was wrong. She turned, more slowly than ever as it seemed. No white smoke issued from her. Again she steamed northwards. Again, opposite Carrickfergus, close to the northern shore, she turned. Right in front of her bows the water was suddenly broken. It was as if some one had dropped a huge stone close to her. The spray of the splash must have fallen on her fore deck.