“Who were in armed rebellion against the king,” said John Carstairs.
“Whose king?,” asked Jellaby.
The dialogue tripped on with the ease that comes of practice; and most of us were tried players in the farce or tragedy of mistranslating an opponent’s terms. In the interests of peace I begged that we should avoid the more flagrantly question-begging labels; but by now, grown men though we were, each owed himself the satisfaction of just one more stab before he laid down his arms.
“You know who’s at the back of all this?,” enquired Dainton, carefully avoiding my uncle’s eye.
“The bolshevists?,” Bertrand asked indulgently. “You said it was the Germans in ’16. It was the Americans before that. Good God! I’m old enough to remember O’Connell: it always has been somebody else! Will you English never learn that an Irishman’s feeling is for his own country? The more you’re pleased to call a man ‘loyalist’, the more I’d call him ‘traitor’, as I’d say ‘traitor’ to a Pole who boasted of his ‘loyalty’ to Russia or Germany.”
“As your people do say ‘traitor’ to the loyalists who fought for you in this war,” muttered Carstairs. “You’ll hang them all as traitors, of course, when you’ve got your republic?”
My uncle was understood to say that he wished to hang no one; but this laudable restraint won no favour from the rest.
“I should hang Carson and Bonar Law,” said Jellaby, as though he were ordering a well-considered dinner.
“Then you must hang Asquith and Birrell for not hanging them,” said Crawleigh, partly from proconsular devotion to firmness, but chiefly from hatred of liberalism.
“I,” said Dainton, “should be quite content to shoot de Valera as Casement was shot. Like a dog. Hanging’s too good for him. President of the Irish Republic, indeed! It’s treason to the king.”