The terms were refused. Deasy’s comrades did not hold his action against him. There had been so much killing already; any effort to save one’s life was acceptable.
February was a bleak month, in keeping with the nation’s mood. Henry attended a meeting in Dublin to honor James Connolly, and heard James Larkin, who like Connolly was a hero of the trade union movement, make a speech urging an end to the Irish Civil War. “I ask all Republicans to give up the armed struggle and take up the political, constitutional struggle. Give up your arms. There is no disgrace in peace. There can never be dishonor in peace.”5
The voice of sanity in the mouth of a former firebrand. But who will listen?
LIAM Lynch was on his way to the south for a crisis meeting of the IRA executive. Henry was traveling too, back to Cork and Kerry. In his railway carriage was a stern-faced matron defiantly reading a copy of James Joyce’s new book. When she thought anyone was looking at her, she pretended to be shocked. The book must have been smuggled in from Paris, Henry mused, as no copies of Ulysses were available in Britain or Ireland.
He wondered if she would lend it to him, but lacked the courage to ask her. He turned instead to the newspapers he had bought in the railway station. “Dr. T. A. MacLaughlin has just returned from Berlin,” Henry read. “Dr. MacLaughlin, who has been working as an engineer for Siemens-Schuckert, tells this reporter he has developed a plan for harnessing the Shannon River to provide electricity. Only a third of Dublin, a quarter of Cork City, and a fraction of Limerick City have electric power; most of the nation has none. Dr. MacLaughlin hopes to improve on that situation. He claims his scheme can raise the nation’s power output from 40 million units of electricity per year to 110 million units.”
Think of that! I wonder if Little Business has seen this. If she does, I’ll have a letter from her next time I’m home.
Reading on, Henry learned that on the nineteenth of February, by civic order, Great Brunswick Street was officially renamed Pearse Street in honor of both brothers. By the same order Brunswick Place became Pearse Place, Queen’s Square became Pearse Square, and Queen’s Terrace became Pearse Terrace.
Henry folded the paper and stared out the window. In honor of both brothers. And now we have the War of Brothers. Do you know, Pádraic? Do you know?
THE civil war in the southwest had become bitter beyond imagining, worst of all in Kerry. From their barracks in Tralee, Castleisland, Killarney, Kenmare, and Cahirciveen, Free State troops were enforcing martial law on a largely hostile civilian population. The Free State Army held the towns…but the Republican Army controlled the countryside.
March found Henry in a cold, dismal room in a cold, dismal inn on the road to Castleisland. Kerry was breaking his heart. No part of Ireland was more beautiful to the eye or less generous to the belly than the Kingdom of Kerry. Starved, stony soil; stark mountains and lonely bogs. Rugged headlands defying the sea; crystal lakes reflecting the sky. Cloudshadow and seamist and a folk memory of fairies. Wine-red heather and glowing golden gorse and great armadas of cloud sailing serenely overhead, while mountainy men struggled with all their might to wring bare subsistence from unyielding earth.
Deserted farmsteads bore silent witness to those who had run off to America—there to grieve for Kerry until they died. In the houses still inhabited, terrible stories were told of young men slaughtered: ambushed, shot in the back, dragged from their beds in front of their horrified children, executed without trial. Dead Republicans were left outside of church gates with their faces battered in by rifle butts until their own mothers did not know them.
Suspected informers, Henry learned, were summarily dealt with by the IRA. They were questioned, beaten, and their property and livestock confiscated. Some were innocent. The son of one such man, furious at what had been done to his father, had joined the Free State Army. A lieutenant now stationed at Castleisland, he was reputed to be in charge of torturing IRA captives.
Henry copied down everything he heard, every name and detail, as diligently, as he had once done for the Irish Bulletin. Soon men’s memories would be blurred by experience and time. If the truth was not captured immediately, it would escape forever.
And the truth was appalling.
Henry observed and recorded. He crouched behind hedgerows talking to soldiers from both sides; he stood in muddy fields talking to hill farmers who were being politicized for the first time in their lives, and a terrible image grew in his mind.
A terrible word.
One the bishops would never allow to be published, not in holy Catholic Ireland.
Abortion.
Something viable and full of potential was being cruelly aborted, cut to pieces before its life could begin.
FREE State Army General Headquarters for Kerry Command was in Tralee with Paddy O’Daly, but Hartnett’s Hotel in Castleisland was headquarters for government troops in the immediate area. It was the tallest building in town and the sturdiest. The fourth of March found Henry Mooney there, interviewing members of the Dublin Guard as they relaxed on a Sunday afternoon. Their relaxation was only superficial, however. Posture and language were those of men under siege. The IRA was watching them from the hills, waiting for any sign of weakness. Waiting to fall on them like wolves on lambs, like assassins on Collins.
Henry had perfected the art of encouraging confidences. Soon the soldiers were talking freely.
The casual indifference with which they spoke of torturing Republican prisoners at Hartnett Post appalled Henry. The soldiers seemed to think it an acceptable procedure. They even described the techniques employed in other barracks. “At Ballymullen they use hammers for interrogations,” an officer told Henry. “If that doesn’t work, they tell them they’re going to be shot, march them out blindfolded, shoot all around their heads, then march them back again and say they’ll be executed the next day instead. Not many men can hold their nerve under that.”
“And you do things like that here?” Henry asked, trying to keep any emotion out of his voice.
“We have other methods just as effective.” A contemptuous snort. “Bastards asked for it. Killed the Big Fellow, didn’t they?”
Another officer remarked, “I never see anything. I look out the window and smoke a cigarette.” He winked at Henry.
They all went to Mass this morning, yet this afternoon they make no apologies for torturing fellow human beings. The rules of common decency which once governed these men have been swept away. And they don’t even seem to notice.
When Henry returned to the inn that evening, he could not eat. By the light of a paraffin lamp he wrote: “The greatest tragedy of the Rising was that men like Pearse and Connolly were executed. With them Ireland lost their vision of nationhood linked to human decency.
“No matter how much the British government subsequently sought to blacken their characters, both Connolly and Pearse were highly principled men. Pearse the dedicated teacher lived his life according to the tenets of his faith. Connolly the union organizer was profane and earthy but equally honorable. Between the poles of idealism and pragmatism the two envisioned a nonsectarian republic that would treat all men and women equally, with dignity. They were willing to fight and die to make that republic a reality for the rest of us. It was perhaps an impossible ideal, but it was the best vision of Irish nationhood anyone has ever presented.
“The future those men dreamed was shot dead in Kilmainham yard. What are we putting in its place?”
Next day he rode his bicycle deep into the rugged hills, to a mud-walled cabin with a swaybacked roof. One end of the building was sinking back into the earth from which it came. Henry whispered “Long Live the Republic” at the door and it opened at once.
While he was drinking tea with the woman of the house her husband, a graying strongly built man with a ruddy complexion, arrived. He went straight to the only window and peered out.
“Were ye followed?” his wife asked in a nervous whisper.
“Don’t fret so, woman. Amn’t
I carrying a safe-conduct pass signed by Michael Brennan himself?” His was the classic Kerry accent: convoluted vowels that battered the neighboring consonants into submission.
“How did you get a government pass?” Henry wanted to know.
“I was in the RIC, stationed in Limerick—they didn’t want us within thirty miles of our own homes—and the day before I quit to join the IRA, I went to Brennan bold as brass and asked him for one. Thought it might come in handy. He gave me two in case I lost one, and later I gave the other pass to one of our lads. Fellow called Ned Halloran who did me a good turn.”
Henry leaned forward eagerly. “Ned Halloran? From Clare?”
“The same. Mount Callan accent on him most of the time, but he can talk as posh as an Englishman when he likes.”
“Is he in Kerry?”
“He was last time I saw him. Someone told me the Staters caught him afterward and sent him to Ballymullen. Safe-conduct or no,” the man added in a voice too low for his wife to hear.
Henry went cold. “Ballymullen Barracks in Tralee? Are you sure?”
“Can’t say for certain. You know yourself, you hear so many stories. If I see him, though, I’ll tell him you was asking for him.”
WHEN Henry finally got back to the inn, he felt weary to his marrow. It was too late to go to Tralee that night. If Ned was in custody, perhaps he could pull some strings, get him out before something horrible happened. Henry tossed and turned in his bed, holding imaginary telephone conversations with Mulcahy and Cosgrave. At last he fell into a troubled sleep. Early next morning he set off to Hartnett Post to ask permission to use their telephone, since his inn had none.
He arrived to find the place in turmoil.
A letter in the handwriting of a known local informer had been delivered the evening before. Addressed to the lieutenant whose father had been wrongly accused of informing against the IRA, the letter gave the location of a major IRA weapons dump in Barranarig Wood, Knocknagoshel. It was sufficient to entice the Dublin Guards out of their fortress. Nine men had set off from Hartnett Post that same night.
The letter was a forgery. A mine casing packed with shrapnel and an explosive charge was waiting, buried in a lonely field at the supposed dump site. At two a.m. on March sixth, five members of the Free State Army—three officers of the Dublin Guard and two enlisted men—were blown apart by the trap mine.
The man who had been in charge of torturing IRA prisoners was decapitated by the force of the blast.
A shocked survivor had returned to Hartnett Post with the news. A party was on its way with stretchers to retrieve the injured and the bodies.
“We’ll get the scum who did this,” an officer assured Henry through gritted teeth. “We’ll get every last one of them, never you fear. We’ll give as good as we get, so we will.”
Henry saw the stretcher party return. He wrote, with fingers gone cold, of the looks on their faces; of the limp arm of a corpse dangling from beneath a bloodstained blanket, swinging like the clapper on a bell.
One of the survivors was not expected to live, his legs were so hideously mangled.
Henry took the details of each man’s rank and family and obtained a brief summation of his service record. “Two of the dead officers were Paddy O’Daly’s friends,” the duty officer said. “One of them was his best friend. He’s going to take this hard, very hard. We’re phoning Tralee now to tell him.”
“Tralee!” With a sudden jolt, Henry remembered Ned. “Listen here to me, I desperately need to make a phone call myself; can you arrange it?”
“Not today, I’m afraid; the lines are going to be humming all day.”
Within the hour Henry was on his bicycle, pedaling furiously to Tralee.
He was refused admittance to Ballymullen Barracks. “I’m sorry, sir,” the sentry on duty said, “but we’re not admitting any civilians at the moment.”
“But I’m the press, damnit!”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Well, can I see General O’Daly, then? He knows me.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Perhaps if you come back tomorrow?”
Henry had no choice but to find a room for the night—another damp and dismal hotel, he noted sourly—and wait until dawn. Sleep was impossible. He tried to write a letter to Ella but could not do that either. For a long time he stood at the window, gazing into the moonlit night. The landscape was almost as bright as day. Not a leaf stirred on the trees.
As soon as the sun was up, he returned to Ballymullen Barracks. There was considerable activity, with increased guards at the gate and squads of armed men marching to and fro outside the walls. Lights were still burning in many upstairs windows. Obviously something had happened, but Henry was again refused admittance. “Is this about the bomb at Knocknagoshel?” he wanted to know.
“I cannot tell you, sir,” was all the reply he got.
He waited with increasing anxiety. From time to time he consulted his watch. The hands seemed to have been glued in place.
At last a military lorry with its back covered by canvas drove up. At the sound of its horn a gate was opened and the lorry drove through. Trying to look as if he had permission to be there, Henry ambled over to the gate and peered in.
He counted nine coffins being unloaded from the lorry.
Nine?
Someone noticed Henry watching and slammed the gate.
He walked up the high street to chat with the shopkeepers of Tralee, see what they knew. A few had heard vague rumors of “some trouble at Knocknagoshel” the preceding day, but nothing since. When they learned Henry was a journalist, they tried to get news from him.
He went back to the GHQ to await…what?
At almost three in the afternoon an officer emerged from the main door and beckoned to him. “Are you the reporter?”
“Journalist. Henry Mooney.”
“Well, you’d best come inside then. General O’Daly has a statement to release, and you’ll do.”
Chapter Forty-five
PADDY O’Daly looked up from behind a desk littered with papers, boxes, bits of military paraphernalia, and the dried-out remains of an uneaten sandwich. Henry remembered O’Daly from his days as one of the murderous Twelve Apostles. Then he had been a deceptively gentle-looking “civilian” with a disarming smile and a thick crop of curly hair. Now he was attired in full Free State uniform and an officer’s cap crushed his curls. There was no smile.
“Oh, it’s you, Mooney. Heard you were in Castleisland.”
“Yesterday,” Henry replied.
“Yes. So you know.”
“I know what happened there. What’s happened here?”
O’Daly shifted in his chair. When he spoke his voice was a rapid staccato, as if repeating words memorized by rote. “Immediately following my notification of the atrocity at Knocknagoshel, I issued an order that in future government forces are not to remove any barricades, clear any dumps, or touch any suspected mines. Irregular prisoners are to be fetched from the nearest detention barracks to remove them. This is a necessary precaution to save the lives of our own soldiers, and within hours has proved its value.” O’Daly lifted a sheet of paper from his desk. “Here is a statement for publication.”
Henry read: “While a party of government troops was proceeding from Tralee to Killorglin on the evening of March sixth, they encountered a barricade of stones at Ballyseedy Bridge. The party returned to Tralee and brought out nine Irregulars who were instructed to remove the barricade. While they were engaged in doing so at about two a.m. on March seventh, a trigger mine exploded and the prisoners were killed. Three members of the Free State Army suffered shrapnel wounds.”1
Henry felt sick to his stomach. “Prisoners from Ballymullen.”
O’Daly gave a terse nod.
“May I have their names?”
“They won’t be released until all the next of kin have been notified.”
“Was one of them Ned Halloran?”
“Can’t tell you that. It
may take some time to identify them. A bomb hidden among stones does a lot of damage.”
Henry stared at O’Daly. “Nine IRA men at two in the morning. The exact time and the same number of men as at Knocknagoshel.”
O’Daly stared back at him. “Coincidence,” he said.
BALLYSEEDY Cross was easy to find. Henry had passed by the place many times on his bicycle. But never had he seen the sight that greeted his eyes that evening. A great hole had been gouged in the road. Huge splashes of blood; gobbets of unrecognizable flesh, naked and vulnerable as meat in a butcher’s window. Everywhere. On the crushed grass, in the dripping trees. The air stank of it. And of explosives. And hatred. And death.
Dear Jesus, Ned, was this how it ended for you?
Birds were picking at the shredded flesh.
A few local people appeared, tentatively, at the edge of the woods, or farther down the road, and stared. Eyes wide. Crossing themselves repeatedly. Crying, some of them. One man had a pony and trap. The pony shied violently at the smell of the blood and would come nowhere near, but stood at a distance, trembling.
A cap trampled in the mud. A broken rosary. Part of a sleeve, the buttons still bright, the hand…
“No!” Henry cried, the word torn out of him, wrenched from his guts by grief and horror. “No! They are us! They are us!!!”
He got off his bicycle and vomited into a ditch. Then he made his way to the stream spanned by the nearby bridge and washed his face. There was blood there too, a sticky puddle in the mud on the bank, but he was careful not to touch it. Could not bear to touch it. Its silent voice cried out to him.
He knelt to pray.
I don’t even know what to say to you. Are you blind? Deaf? Dead? What sort of deity are you, to allow this?
“Why bother?” he asked himself aloud. He stood up and brushed off his knees. “That’s me done. I’m through with God.” You hear me? Through with you!
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