After that visit to Germany, I went several times to Ireland, and although there seemed to be no link between these two missions, I am certain now that in the mind of German agents, politicians, and military strategists, the situation in Ireland was not left out of account in their estimate of war chances. With labor “unrest” from the Clyde to Tonypandy, with suffragette outrages revealing a weakness and lack of virility (from the German point of view) in English manhood, and with Ireland on the edge of civil war which would involve great numbers of British troops, England was losing her power of attack and defense. So as we know, German agents, like the Baron von Zedlitz, were writing home in their reports.
Sir Edward Carson, afterward Lord Carson, with F. E. Smith, afterward Lord Birkenhead (so does England reward her rebels!) were arranging a bloody civil war in Ireland, which, but for a Great War, would have spread to England, without let or hindrance from the British government.
When the Home Rule Bill, under Asquith’s premiership, was nearing its last stages, Carson raised an army of Ulstermen and invited every Protestant and Unionist to take a solemn oath in a holy league and covenant to resist Home Rule to the very death. I was an eyewitness of many remarkable and historic scenes when “King Carson,” as he was called in irony by Irish Home Rulers, inspected his troops, made a triumphal progress through Ulster, stirring up old fires of racial and religious hatred.
There was a good deal of play-acting about all this, and Carson was melodramatic in all his speeches and gestures, with a touch of Irving in the rendering of his pose as a grim and resolute patriot and leader of Protestant forces, but there was real passion behind it all, and the sincerity of fanaticism. If it came to the ordeal of battle, these young farmers and shopkeepers who paraded in battalions before Carson and his lieutenants, marching with good discipline, a strong and sturdy type of manhood, would fight with the courage and ruthlessness of men inspired by hatred and bigotry.
The British government pooh-poohed Carson’s “army” and described it as an unarmed rabble. But a very brief inquiry convinced me that large quantities of arms were being imported into Belfast and distributed through Ulster. There was hardly a pretense at secrecy, and the Great Western Railway authorities showed me boxes bearing large red labels with the word “Firearms” boldly printed thereon. The proprietor of one of the Belfast hotels led me down into his cellars and showed me cases of rifles stacked as high as the ceiling. He told me they came from Germany. I went round to the gunsmith shops, and I was told that they were selling cheap revolvers “like hot cakes.” There was hardly a man in Ulster who had not got a firearm of some kind or other. “It’s good for business,” said one of the gunsmiths, laughing candidly, “but one of these days the things will go off, and there will be the devil to pay. Why the British government allows it is beyond understanding.”
The British government did not acknowledge the truth of it. I made a detailed report of my investigations to Robert Donald, who passed it on to Winston Churchill, and his comment was the incredulous remark, “Gibbs has had his leg pulled.” But it was Churchill’s leg that was pulled, very badly, and he must have had a nasty shock when there were full descriptive reports of a gun-running exploit, done with perfect impunity, by the conspiracy of Ulster officers and leaders, military advisers, and men of all classes, down to the jarveys of the jaunting cars. Carson had armed his troops—with German rifles and ammunition.
In view of later history, there must have been some gentlemen of Ulster whose consciences were twinged by those dealings with Germany, and by allusions made in the heat of political speeches to their preference for the German Emperor rather than a Home-rule House of Parliament in Dublin.
Religious fanaticism was at the back of it all in the minds of the rank and file. Catholic laborers were chased out of the shipyards by their Protestant fellow workers, and hardly a day passed without brutal assaults on them, as was proved by the list of patients in the hospitals suffering from bashed heads and bruised bodies. I saw with my own eyes gangs of Ulster Protestants fall upon Catholic citizens and kick them senseless. Needless to say, there was retaliation when the chance came, and woe betide any Ulsterman who ventured alone through the Catholic quarter.
The mediæval malignancy of this vendetta was revealed to me among a thousand other proofs by a draper’s assistant in a shop down the Royal Avenue. I was buying a collar stud or something, and recognizing me as an Englishman, he began to talk politics.