Father John was by nature a kindly and genial man, a lover of sport, of a good horse, and of the society of men, and those two years must have been a perfect hell on earth for him. Not that any one was ever openly rude to him; they just sent him to Coventry and kept him there, hoping to break his heart, and that by refusing to pay him any dues they would gradually freeze him out, and in his place would come one of those fire-eating young priests who would lead them to victory and freedom.
The summer of 1920 was wet and cold, with frosty nights during every month except July. Now, if your potatoes grow in boggy land, and there comes heavy rain followed by a night’s frost, not once but several times, you will have no potatoes, and probably very little crop of any kind. And if your living depends on the potato crop, you stand a good chance of starving, unless the gombeen man will come to your assistance.
By November the whole parish of Annagh practically belonged to M’Andrew, who held a mortgage on nearly every acre of tenanted land, and proceeded to bully the people to his heart’s content.
On a Sunday morning in December, at about 10 o’clock, the hour when the village usually began to come to life, the inhabitants were startled by the screams of a woman, and when they rushed to their doors saw M’Andrew’s servant running out of the village towards Father John’s house. M’Andrew had been murdered during the night without a sound, and the servant had no idea of what had happened until she went to his room to see why he had not got up. All M’Andrew’s books had been burnt, and afterwards the murderers must have cursed the day they did not set a light to the house as well.
On the next day the village woke up to find a company of Auxiliaries billeted in M’Andrew’s house and the yard full of their cars—a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire.
For some time past the police had known that men on the run were hiding in the mountains near Annagh; but though the area came within Blake’s district, it was impossible to keep any control over it, owing to the fact that the Owenmore river and the Slievenamoe Mountains lay between it and Ballybor.
The Auxiliaries spent the day fortifying M’Andrew’s house, and that night started operations, and the inhabitants soon realised that the British Empire was not yet an “also ran.”
Just as it was getting dark the Auxiliaries in Crossleys would suddenly burst out of M’Andrew’s yard, travel perhaps five or ten miles at racing speed, and then surround and round up a village or district, so that the numerous gunmen who had come from the south for a rest cure found it impossible to get any sleep at all.
The local Volunteers at once sent an S.O.S. to Dublin, and received the comforting answer that a flying column would arrive shortly in the district and deal effectively with the Auxiliaries. In the meanwhile they were to harass the enemy by every means in their power and carry on a warfare of attrition—in other words, if they found one or two Cadets alone—if unarmed so much the better—they were to murder them.
At first the local Volunteers were very much afraid of the Auxiliaries, Sinn Fein propaganda having taught them to expect nothing but murder, rape, and looting from the “scum of English prisons and asylums”; but after a few days had passed and nothing dreadful happened to man or woman, they took heart once more and started their usual warfare.