The Auxiliaries were commanded by a Major Jones, and on the Sunday following their arrival in Annagh Jones left alone in a Ford at an early hour to see Blake in Ballybor. The road crosses the mountains through a narrow pass, and near the top of the pass there is a small chapel, a school, a pub, and a few scattered cottages.
On his return Jones passed this chapel as the people were coming out from Mass, blew his horn, and slowed up. After passing through the crowd he noticed a group of youths standing on the right side of the road, and opened his throttle wide, thereby probably saving his life.
When the car was within ten yards of the group every man drew a pistol, and it seemed to Jones as though he was flying through a shower of bullets. However, though the car was riddled, and had any one been sitting in the other three seats they would all have been killed, Jones found himself uninjured, and the old “tin Lizzie,” responding well to the throttle, flew down the hill at twice the pace Henry Ford ever meant her to travel at.
That evening Father John called on Jones and apologised for the outrage, and Jones at once fell under the charm of the priest. Probably his astonishment at Father John’s visit had something to do with it, but in the days to come, when Father John supported his words by deeds, Jones learnt that his first impression had been a correct one.
Returning in the early hours of the morning from a raiding expedition to the south of Annagh, the Auxiliaries were surprised to see a tall priest standing in the middle of the road and holding up his hand. Fearing a trap—there was a blind corner just behind where the priest was standing—they stopped about two hundred yards off and beckoned to the priest to advance.
They were still more surprised to find that the tall priest was Father John, who, having received information after they had started that the Volunteers were going to lay trees across the road at this corner in the hope of smashing up the Auxiliary cars, had spent the whole night walking up and down the road in order that he might warn them of their danger.
Father John drove back to Annagh with the Cadets, and by the time they reached the village every Cadet swore that the priest was the finest man they had yet met in Ireland, and they didn’t believe there was a finer one.
From that on Father John accompanied the Auxiliaries on many a stunt, and there is no doubt that he gave them every help in his power and all information which reached him; but though he would travel anywhere with them, he would never accept hospitality from them, nor would he enter M’Andrew’s house.
About six miles from Annagh, in a hollow of the mountains, is the tiny village of Glenmuck, completely isolated from the rest of the world, and so situated that its presence was quite hidden until you literally walked on top of it. None of the inhabitants, who lived chiefly by making poteen in the winter time and going to England as harvesters in the summer, possessed a cart, for the very good reason that the nearest so-called third-class road was five miles away, and only a goat track passed within a mile of the place.
Here in due course arrived the flying column of the I.R.A., seventy strong, every man mounted on a bicycle and armed with a British service rifle and as many pistols as he could find room for. They were also the proud possessors of a Lewis gun.