But where resistance took a truly epic character was in the house of Thomas Saunders. With twenty-three comrades he held in check all assaults during four entire days. Not content with scalding the bailiffs by means of pumps and cauldrons installed on purpose, he had, by a stroke of genius, the idea of throwing on them hives of bees, that came out enraged from their cells and cruelly stung everything before them. Who knows that there may not be in this a precious indication for future warfare! European strategists may before long add “the chaste dew-drinkers,” as Victor Hugo called them, to the pigeons and the war-dogs. However that may be, Joyce’s mercenaries, burnt, stung, and crest-fallen, were compelled, for three nights running, to retreat on Portumna.
The green flag meanwhile was proudly waving its folds on the summit of Saunders’ house, which enraptured Ireland, intoxicated with joy at the news of this unprecedented siege, immediately baptized Fort Saunders. Agitation was fast spreading over the whole country. The military authorities judged it indispensable to send down 200 mounted men, and to have the place patrolled at night. In Portumna councils of war were held, and serious thoughts were entertained of having recourse to the antique battering-ram and “tortoise” in order to approach the place and succeed in taking it. Three days passed in new preparations and supplementary armaments.
At last, on the 27th of August, a new assault was attempted. It failed like all the others, but the law must, it was felt, at all costs, be enforced; the police interfered about some technical point, took the house at the bayonet’s point and made all its inmates prisoners.
Thus ended, without effusion of blood, this memorable campaign; three weeks’ preparation, eight days’ fighting, a thousand men on foot, enormous expense had been required in order to succeed in evicting four tenants of the Marquis of Clanricarde, out of a number of 316, and that in the midst of scandalous scenes which gave the noisiest publicity to the agrarian cause. Everybody was of opinion that enough had been done, and evictions were stopped.
The affair at Woodford marks a date in the annals of the Irish revolution. One has seen in it peasants living in relatively good circumstances fight for principles and go to the furthest ends of legality,—without overstepping them. Moreover, these events have taken place in a county famed for its violence and represented in Parliament by Mr. Matthew Harris, which is saying enough; (his motto was, till lately, “When you see a landlord, shoot him down like a partridge”). Three or four years sooner such events could not have taken place without involving fifteen or twenty deaths of persons. Here not a single one occurred. One could not but acknowledge that the honour of this was due to the League, to its moderating and constitutional influence. In vain it protested that it had nothing to do with those conflicts; its agents and its general instructions played the first part in it. Therefore it reaped all the fruits of this, came out of the ordeal greater, surrounded with a poetical halo, sovereign. History often has such ironies. At the price of their domestic happiness, four obscure heroes had just won in face of public opinion the cause of the serfs of the glebe against the lords.
CHAPTER XV.
THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN.
Sligo.
In all the cabins I enter, the first object that meets my eyes on the wall, besides a portrait of Parnell or Gladstone, is, enshrined between the bit of sacred palm and the photograph of the emigrant son, a sheet of printed paper, sometimes put under a glass, and headed by these words, “The Plan of Campaign.” This is a summary of the instructions given by the League to its followers in November, 1886, and of the various means by which the position may be made untenable by the landlords.