“Then you refuse to raise a little finger to help Susan in her grief, or mother in her agony?” asked Bertram.
His father turned from him.
“Leave my room!”
Bertram left the room, and that night crossed over to Ireland from Holyhead. In his mind was the thought of three other people stricken by this tragedy—those three sisters of Dennis O’Brien, who would be weeping for him now, and praying still to God, who didn’t answer their prayers. The youngest of them—Jane—had said, “What’ll I do if Dennis is taken from us?” She’d had a foreboding of his fate, perhaps a knowledge of his guilt.
Guilt it was. Bertram sickened at the thought of that guerrilla warfare which he had tried to defend to his father, but couldn’t defend in his heart because of loyalty to England and hatred of cruelty. It was all madness and murder, though with some spiritual value behind it, and not ignoble passion. Those young men, mostly boys, who fought for Irish liberty, were willing to die for Ireland, went to their death on the scaffold like martyrs. Yet they adopted methods of war which were Red Indian in their savagery. On the other side, the British Government had abandoned all sanity, all statesmanship, all decency. By a series of stupidities, falsities, betrayal of pledges, they had maddened Irish manhood into this state of rebellion—at least had reopened old wounds, and revived old passions. Now they could find no other policy than that of coercion, meeting Terror by Counter-Terror, trying to break the spirit of the Irish people by raids, searches, shootings, burnings. God! What a horror, after the Great War! And what a mental agony for a man like himself, hating the methods of both sides, seeing the point of view from both sides, divided in sympathy, trying to keep to the middle of the road, between the two extremes. Once again he was called traitor, and felt the word like a wound in his heart. Traitor, though he was loyal to the truth as far as he could see it. Traitor, though he had pledged his soul to loyalty!
XXXII
It was a rough passage from Holyhead, and he felt sick in the smoking saloon, crowded with officers of the Royal Scots, among whom, silent and absorbed in thought or prayer, sat two Irish priests. There was a battalion of soldiers on board—mostly boys of nineteen or so—and most of them were horribly sick as they lay among their kit and rifles. They cursed Ireland, the War Office, Lloyd George, and other powers which had ordained this night passage across the Irish Channel and the “bloody job” at the end of it.
Bertram spoke a few words to one of the officers, a captain with a row of decorations. He had been on service in Ireland before, and was going back from leave.
“What’s it like over there?” asked Bertram.
“Like nothing on earth,” said the officer. “Worse than France, barring barrage-fire. One never knows when one is going to be sniped, or blown up by a bomb thrown from a side street. Not a gentleman’s job! A rotten dirty business.”