I do not remember in any other city, great or small, this kind of accident, and I asked myself were these errant wheels, which had run away because somebody had forgotten to screw them up, a sign, a portent that Ireland was not quite an adult nation?
On one of these evening walks, in Dawson Street I think it was, I saw a horse that had jumped into an area, and was standing down there unhurt, eating hay and oats, unable to be got out. For a minute or two I joined the crowd, which was gaping through the railings at this accident. But while we all gaped we were gloomy and suspicious of one another.
For with greater fury than before, the Crossley tenders, choked with police, raced up and down the streets; searching, searching, searching for those butchers, those bakers, those candlestick makers who laid aside their aprons now and then when the hour was propitious and grasped a pistol in their hands; those candlestick makers, those bakers, those butchers who never seemed to leave their counters and untie their aprons from their middles. By day, by night; in storm, in calm, the flying wheels splashed through the mire. Knock, knock, knock. “Open! The military!” Knock, knock knock. “In the King’s name!” Up rattle windows. Out poke heads. “Open, open, or we break in the door.”
The butcher’s wife, the baker’s mother, the candlestick maker’s aunt open the door as slowly as they dare, and the stream of police sweep in like a tide—down into the cellar, out into the garden, up into the attic, through the skylight, everywhere in an instant that the hunted man may not escape; peering into grates for ashes of burned papers, pulling out mantleshelves for hidden arms, examining picture frames for secret documents; and when all is done clattering down from attic and up from basement, pouring down the steps and climbing into the tender, and then at breakneck speed to the next house on the list. Bang, bang, bang! “Open! The military!”
In the week that followed the murders of the officers, the British Government made the supreme effort of this tremendous police hunt—operations in Ireland never assumed the proportions of a war—and in three or four days the prisons were filled. The British Government was altering its tactics, and finding a solution for dealing with this will-o’-the-wisp enemy by arresting all suspects, in preparation for lodging them in one or other of the internment camps under construction. In Dublin the arrests of that week numbered hundreds, and among the prisoners was Arthur Griffith, the father of Sinn Fein.
The funeral of the officers passed along the Liffey, and all the world and his wife went down to the quays to see. Shops were shut, sometimes after a little persuasion by mourning Black-and-Tans, and the streets were left empty. The crowd was reverent; and cases of lack of feeling were rectified by Black-and-Tans posted in lorries at points of vantage. Hats that did not come off as the gun carriages went by were helped off, and three young men who were disrespectful were thrown into the Liffey.
A Mr. Goodbody, of Cork, who was jammed against me, said to a friend, “Michael Collins himself is in the crowd. He do be a profitable man to look at. Indade, and he would have made a good king in a sporty country. But he is headstrong, headstrong.”
Said an old woman, striking me in the stomach with her elbow, to a friend, “Och, ’tis a beautiful sight this, and sure it’s a pity they had to kill those beautiful young men.”
“Indade,” said the friend, poking me over the appendix, “it’s our boys I would like to see dressed out like this. Give me the military, I sez, and not they Black-and-Tans. It will be a grey day for Ireland whan she sees the last iv the military.”
“Sure,” said the first dame, “it is our boys will be all in green then, and that’ll be a grander sight for ye.”