Quickly 20,000 troops were massed across the neck of the Ballyrick Peninsula with every available Auxiliary and a large force of R.I.C., while a naval force was standing by off the coast ready to land sailors and marines. All that was wanted was a good weather forecast to start in, and put an end to this great mob of gunmen—the curse of modern Ireland.
The good weather forecast came along all right, and on the morrow they were to get a move on and put an end to this miserable breed of cowardly warfare.
But on the morrow, instead of the Advance, they heard the Stand Fast sounded, and to their dismay learnt that a truce had been proclaimed—a truce with murderers, forsooth!
XXI.
THE TRUCE.
Blake had been educated at a big English public school, where he had learnt that the keynote to an Englishman’s life is straightness. Further, in the British Army he had found that all good Britishers try their level best to run straight.
Early in 1921 there had been a strong rumour in the R.I.C. that the British Government had come to secret terms with Sinn Fein, and that after a period of window-dressing a truce would be declared; then would follow a lot of talk, and the terms of settlement would emerge. It was even reported that a conference had been held in Norway of representatives of the British Government and Sinn Fein, and also a representative from each of the Dominions, and a settlement arrived at.
At the time the Prime Minister fired off one of his loudest and most daring defiances at Sinn Fein: that he would never give in nor would he ever treat with the murder gang in Ireland, that the Crown forces in that country would be supported by all the resources of the Empire, and so on ad nauseam. And this, as Blake heard a cynic remark, was a sign that the sinister rumour was most likely true.
Blake had dismissed the idea with a laugh, but when the truce bomb burst his mind at once flew back to the secret settlement rumour, now months old, and he began to suspect with a horrible fear that they had been sold, and badly sold.
Naturally the first effects on the police were bad. The older men who had been let down before laughed and cried to each other, “Sold again!” but the younger ones, who had yet to learn the ways of politicians, took the matter to heart, and started to brood over it.
There were several questions to which they badly wanted an answer; the chief being, if there was to be this complete surrender, why had it not been made long ago, when the lives of many of their relations and pals in the Army and R.I.C. might have been saved, not to mention the lives of many Loyalists? These valuable lives had been freely given in order that Ireland should be freed from the murderous plague of gunmen, in the same way as during the late war the lives of the Empire’s best were sacrificed in order that we should be freed from the murderous plague of the Boches.