At length there came a time when these columns really got the wind up, stampeded to the western mountains, and this time refused point-blank to return to duty.
In the late spring of 1921 Blake was suddenly called over to England on private business in London, and afterwards went down to the country to spend a few days with the parents of a man with whom he had served in France.
The day after his arrival Blake’s host told him that a Black and Tan, a native of the place, had been murdered in Ireland a few days previously, and was to be buried that day in the parish graveyard, and asked Blake if he would accompany him to the funeral.
When passing through Dublin on his way to England, Blake had seen in the Castle the account of how this unfortunate Black and Tan had met his death—shot in the back when walking in the streets of a small western town with a girl; and not content with that, the murderers had fired a volley at him as he lay wounded on the ground, and even fired several shots after the girl as she fled shrieking up the street. So terrified were the townspeople that, though there were many in the streets at the time, not one dared to even approach the dying constable, and it was not until a full hour afterwards that a passing police patrol found him lying dead in a great pool of blood. Incidentally, the murderers had by then put sixteen miles behind them by means of stolen bicycles.
Blake accepted, expecting to see a large funeral to do honour to the murdered policeman, but to his great surprise and indignation found that only the near relations of the murdered man were present.
Returning from the funeral, Blake happened to see the local police inspector in the main street of the little town, and at once tackled him about the funeral, wanting to know why the local police had not been present as a last mark of respect to a man who had died for his country.
The inspector seemed greatly surprised and rather taken aback, and replied that he could hardly be expected to turn his men out to attend the funeral of a murderer.
For a moment Blake saw red, and but for a natural horror of making a scene in a public place, would probably have knocked the inspector down. Then, thinking that there must be a bad blunder somewhere, he asked whom the Black and Tan had murdered, and how he had met his death. The inspector admitted that the Black and Tan had been murdered, he believed, and then opened out on the crimes and atrocities which the Black and Tans had committed in Ireland—murder, rape, and highway robbery,—in fact, the usual list of atrocities which is generally to be read in the Sinn Fein propaganda pamphlets.
Blake waited patiently until the inspector had given him a harrowing picture of the condition of the south and west of Ireland: heartrending accounts of homeless and starving women and children, old and young men and boys hunted like wild beasts in the mountains and living on berries and roots; shops burnt to the ground and looted by Black and Tans in mufti; and of men and boys shot by Auxiliaries in the dead of night before the eyes of their relations.
He then asked the inspector who had given him this information, adding that he would like to see the proof of it, and at the same time telling him that he was a D.I. in the R.I.C.