The climax was the Grafton Street ambush, when sixteen passers were wounded by bomb splinters. There were no casualties among the police, and the ambushers got away unscathed.
It is possible in the beginning there were more casualties among the Crown Forces than were acknowledged; but casualties on either side were few. On the heels of the weapon of offence follows always the defensive weapon. It was not long before stout wire netting, sloped at such an angle that bombs aimed at the lorries rolled off on to the ground, was stretched over the tops of the lorries. “Chook, chook, chook!” cried the rebel children as the police flew by, and the following mot went the rounds of Dublin, “The Boers put them in khaki, the Germans put the tin hats on them; but it took the Sinn Feiners to put them into cages.”
“Four years, five years,” Mrs. Erskine Childers said to me one day, “our people can carry on like this, and by that time England will have experienced a social upheaval and Ireland will have come into her own.”
In truth, the Irish people would never be overcome by this glorified police hunt. Though the leaders might be netted one by one, others would spring up like wheat in their places. Where one man went down another would rise up. Old women of seventy carried the guns to the Volunteers in the fields. Children as high as one’s hip acted as spies and messengers. The nation was in travail, but the nation was exalted. The military force which the British Government saw fit to use could only bleed, it could not kill.
CHAPTER XIX
MRS. O’GRADY’S FOREBODINGS
Mrs. O’Grady rose from the ashes in the fender one morning, and balancing herself so that she threw her minimum weight on her bad leg, said:
“They do be saying that poor Mike Collins is dead.”
“Michael Collins!”
“Himself. I was after hearing it from my priest, who knows the priest who attended him.” She sniffed.