“Well, what about things? What’s the good of you if you don’t amuse me?”
“I found the people up there another race as far as outsides go to these people. In a way they’re the complement to the Southerners. If you could scrap the religious question so that North and South could intermarry, I believe a first-class race would be produced. I had a look over the internment camp at Ballykinler while I was in that part of the world.”
“What did you think of the place?”
“It was an internment camp. It doesn’t pretend to be anything better than that. But it was quite a good camp as far as internment camps go. There are about eighteen hundred fellows there in two big enclosures they call cages. Men can go on the run in there if they like. That gives you some idea of the size of the place.”
“It’s pretty country, isn’t it?”
“In good weather; but the men can’t see much more than the mountains. Weather has a lot to do with making a place of that sort bearable or not. The fellows who arrived in the winter must have found it pretty ghastly; but the fellows arriving now haven’t much to complain of beyond the loss of their liberty. In fact, fellows from the slums and from poor country homes were never better off in some ways.”
“That may be; but it must be pretty deadly putting in time.”
“They’ve plenty to do, especially if they like work. The organisation there is quite good. The men are more or less under military discipline, their own military discipline. There’s a commandant, who is an internee, to each cage, and orders trickle through from him. In fact, I find responsible Sinn Feiners saying that it would be a good thing for the nation if all the uneducated fellows could be roped into one of these camps for a bit.”
“They’re educated free, gratis and for nothing?” I asked.
“Arrivals are taken to the commandant’s office and are put through it there, for they are very afraid of spies, and everybody suspects everybody else. Each hut has an intelligence officer to find out what he can about his men, to prevent them talking rashly, and to keep note of all that goes on outside the cages. They try to take the numbers of motor-cars, to remember any faces they can get a glimpse at for future reference, and to glean any information that’s going.”