(wearing boy's clothes)
The boys took me for one of themselves, and some began to tell me their deeds of prowess in Dublin. Ever since the war began they had gone about to recruiting meetings, putting speakers to rout and sometimes upsetting the platforms. This sounds like rowdyism, but it is only by such tests of courage and strength that the youth of a dominated race can acquire the self-confidence needed later for the real struggle.
They sang for me Madam's "Anti-recruiting Song," which they always used as an accompaniment to their attacks on recruiting-booths. Its first two lines go thus:
The recruiters are raidin' old Dublin, boys!
It's them we'll have to be troublin', boys!
And the last two lines are:
From a Gael with a gun the Briton will run!
And we'll dance at the wake of the Empire, boys!
These disturbances by the Fianna were part of a campaign by which Nationalists hoped to keep Irishmen out of the war and ready for their own fight when the time came. Many were kept at home, but hundreds, thrown out of work by their employers with the direct purpose of making them enter the British army, had to enlist for the pitiful "king's shilling." Nothing so illustrates the complete lack of humor of the British as their method of arousing interest in the war. They declared it was the part of England to "defend the honor and integrity of small nations"!
Even before the war the countess had watched for any opportunity to destroy militarist propaganda. Although England has won the world's heart by explaining she never considered there was danger of war, and for that reason the preparedness of her enemy was an unfair advantage, still, we had heard of the German menace for a long time. It was announced in Dublin that the play, "An Englishman's Home," which had had a long run in London, where it pictured to thousands the invasion of England by the Germans, was to open for an equally long run in the Irish capital to stir us to take precautions against invasion.