Captain William Redmond, M.P., now in the trenches with the British Army, had also been a delegate from Ireland, and had seen Oom Paul at the Hague in much the same spirit of sympathy; but then Home Rule was not upon the Statute Book, and if that "scrap of paper" bound England, it was certainly no less binding upon Ireland, in that it had been freely entered into by her constitutional representatives.
Probably McBride thought of the motto inscribed upon the flag that the Irish Brigade had used (later presented him by one of the officials of the Boer Republic), which ran:—
"'Tis better to have fought and lost
Than never to have fought at all."
In any case his attitude remained exactly what it had been in 1909, when at the Manchester Martyr celebration he had appealed to his audience never to degrade themselves by entering the British Army, telling them that if ever they wished to fight they ought to wait for the prospect of a German invasion of Ireland.
One of the strangest figures in the rebel ranks was that of the famous Countess Markievicz—formerly a Miss Gore-Booth, daughter of Sir H. W. Gore-Booth, the head of a well-known and respected Sligo family of Cromwellian descent.
It was while in Paris as an art student some fifteen years ago that she imbibed those extreme principles of democracy—almost, one might say, anarchy—with which her name became associated on her return to Dublin after her marriage with a young Polish artist named Count Marckievicz.
Presented at Court, she was not fond of the conventional "society" circles of the Irish capital, and lived for the most part a Bohemian life of her own, becoming notorious by her extreme socialistic opinions.
During the Larkin crisis, when the transport workers and dockers went out on strike, she opened a "soup kitchen" at Liberty Hall.
She was also responsible for the organization of the "National Boy Scouts," an Irish replica of the English original, with a political bias, of course; and these soon attracted hundreds of Dublin lads, and from time to time the Countess would give them lectures and hold reviews and inspections.