CHAPTER XXIII
LAST WEEKS OF WAR.
We did at last seem to be putting the winter behind, and like divers in a sea, to be coming out of darkness and cold. Spring did seem to be arriving. The sun shone, the days lengthened, and the leaves began to poke out of the barren boughs of the lilacs and the hawthorns across the way. One could not do other than grow cheerful with the carolling birds. And surely the Republican Volunteers lying out on the mountains, and surely the police driving up hill and down hill, found time to do as we other men were doing?
These Volunteers lying in ambush, drunk with patriotism and hate, must have been aware of the high blue sky, of the bright white clouds; they must have raised their eyes now and then from the turn of the road round which their prey was to come, to watch the birds wildly wheeling; they must have felt the strong grass pushing up.
And the police driving, driving, driving, furious and foiled, seeking, seeking, seeking their invisible enemy, above the throb of the engines must have heard a little of the singing in the hedges, through the reek of petrol must have drawn in a little of the bouquet of the flowers.
With spring came rumours of a change in policy. It went from mouth to mouth that the British Cabinet was debating a definite peace offer, which would prove acceptable to the Republicans, or as an alternative, the making of real war.
Could Britain survive the humiliation of a truce? Yes. Her very might permitted her to take this step. Her strength was so overwhelming, and so plainly had never been exerted to any extent, that she could make an offer of peace without mortal injury to her prestige. There were no doubt Republican Volunteers, men who had never had a taste of real war, the war of heavy rifle fire and shell fire, who believed the Republican Army the equal of the British Army in the open field; but these men could not be many.
The rumour came and went, and came again.
Rumour brought other news besides talk of peace. The return of the sun had laid the bogey of the long winter nights; but winter had left a mark upon a good many people. Rumour said the men on the run were at the end of their tether. The barber to Michael Collins reported that the Minister of Finance jumped out of his skin at any sound. The barber experienced a good deal of difficulty shaving the Minister. Possibly the said Minister used a safety razor; but the whisper was a sign of the times.
“What I notice most about our boys is the way they have aged,” Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald said to me. “Some of them, who were quite young men at the Rising four years ago, walk and talk like middle-aged men.”
I asked Mrs. Fitzgerald how the leaders with a price on their heads kept their nerve day after day, and her answer was they had no time to think of danger because of the work to get through. These people slept in a different house most nights of the week; but all arrangements were made for them, and when they laid down to sleep, be it by night or by day, they knew those round them put their safety first of all things. They knew they were the chosen of a nation, which had lifted them out of obscurity in a few brief years, and this must have been a stout prop to their courage. Nevertheless, I have been assured the life told on the stoutest, for in this warfare, carried on below the surface, it was in the most secure moment a man found himself destroyed.