Part 10

When his leave was up Blake left for the south by an express train, changing at a junction after about two hours’ run. Here, just as the train was on the point of starting, an armed party of the Royal Fencibles under a subaltern marched on to the platform and took their seats in several different third-class carriages, the officer getting into Blake’s carriage. There was a considerable delay, and Blake expected that, as usual, the guard and driver would refuse to carry armed soldiers, but to his surprise the train started without any incident.

After an hour’s run, the train pulled up with a sudden jerk in a cutting just outside a station, and as the subaltern put his head out of the window to ascertain the cause, the train was raked from end to end by heavy rifle-fire, and the young subaltern collapsed on top of Blake, his head shattered by a dum-dum bullet.

Blake threw himself flat on the floor of the carriage until the fire from the top of the cutting slackened owing to a Lewis gun opening fire from one of the carriages near the engine. Taking the dead boy’s revolver, he then jumped on to the line, and made his way towards the forward carriages, where the soldiers had opened fire with their rifles.

Here he found a gallant Lewis gunner, badly wounded in an arm and leg, firing his gun as fast as he could mount the magazines, and so preventing the Volunteers from leaving their cover at the top of the bank and attacking at close quarters.

So hot was the Lewis gunner’s fire that after five minutes the Volunteers broke off the action and simply vanished. Blake then turned his attention to the wounded civilians, and though he had grown indifferent to dreadful sights through years of war, the awful condition of the dead and wounded in that train made him physically sick.

The majority of the wounds were from flat-nosed bullets, with the most terrible results. In one carriage lay a young woman in a pool of blood, her chest literally blown away by one of these devilish bullets. In another, a middle-aged man was screaming like a mad wild animal, his arm and shoulder shattered, and at his feet lay an old countrywoman, the top of her head blown off.

Very few of the soldiers had been wounded, and under Blake’s command they at once started off in pursuit, only to catch a glimpse of the Volunteers disappearing down a road on bicycles.

After a long delay the train went on, and in order to try and forget the awful scenes he had just witnessed, Blake endeavoured to read two English papers. The first paper, in a long leading article, called for a policy of conciliation in Ireland, while the second (a threepenny edition of the first) recounted at great length a speech made the previous day by a famous legal politician calling loudly upon the Government to withdraw all troops from Ireland, and demanding that the R.I.C. and Auxiliary Cadets should be severely dealt with for their brutal reprisals on innocent people, but never a word about the savage attacks on these same R.I.C. and Cadets by these “innocent people,” or a single thought for the widows and orphans of the murdered policemen. In disgust he threw both papers out of the carriage windows, and consigned all politicians to the bottomless pit.

On arriving at Esker, Blake found that his chief duty was to act as liaison officer between the military and police, and that he would be attached to the staff of the G.O.C. of the district.

He quickly realised that the bad reports of the state of the south had not been exaggerated, and that it was in a far worse state than the west. Ambushes of police and military, attacks on trains, shootings of unarmed soldiers and police in the streets at all hours of the day and night, the finding of dead men riddled with bullets in every kind of place, from an open field to an empty house, and the robbery of mails occurred daily with monotonous regularity; and so accustomed had people of all classes become to this saturnalia of crime, that they thought no more about the murder of a human being than the usual man thinks of killing a rat.

Blake’s principal work consisted of investigating these crimes in company with police and soldiers, and afterwards in making out a report for the General. In addition, he accompanied the General when making tours through the district.

One morning they received news of a terrible ambush of Cadets, and on arriving at the scene of the ambush Blake found the dead bodies of the Cadets still lying on the road. All their equipment and personal effects had been stolen, and their faces smashed in with an axe. Probably in several cases this barbarous mutilation had been committed before the unfortunate Cadets were dead.

Two days afterwards the bodies of the murdered Cadets passed through Esker _en route_ for England. All shops were closed, and great crowds collected in the streets. Blake was greatly struck by the different attitudes of sections of the crowd, some taking their hats off with every mark of reverence and sympathy when the coffins passed, while others kept their hats on until ordered by the officers to uncover, and many showed plainly by their faces that they were in full sympathy with the murderers.

Conditions in the south were now rapidly drifting into a war of extermination, and every morning brought fresh reports of men shot the previous night, either in bed before the eyes of their relations, or else against a wall outside their homes.

One evening word came to headquarters through the secret service that a baker in an outlying village was to be shot that night. It appeared that the baker, a moderate Sinn Feiner, had been chosen by the Inner Circle to take part in one of their nightly “executions,” and had refused. So the edict had gone forth that if the baker would not commit murder, he should be murdered himself.

The General at once sent Blake with a party of soldiers to try and save the baker’s life, but, missing their way in the dark, they arrived a few minutes too late. They found the unfortunate man lying on his bed shot through the head, while the only occupant of the house, the murdered man’s sister, sat white-faced by the bedside moaning and wringing her hands.

They could get nothing out of the sister, except that a party of armed and masked men, in “trench coats” as ever, had suddenly burst into the house and insisted that her brother should accompany them for some unknown purpose, and that he had refused. For a time they argued with him, until another man rushed into the house, calling out to them to be quick as the soldiers were near. Whereupon they shot the baker as he lay in bed, with the sister looking on, and then left the house hurriedly.

There seemed nothing to be done, and Blake was on the point of leaving when his eye caught a piece of white paper under the bed, which turned out to be the baker’s death-warrant for treason, signed by the C.M.A. of the I.R.A.

On his return Blake handed the death-warrant to the Intelligence people, who returned it shortly, saying that they could make nothing of it. After showing it to the General, Blake put the warrant away, and thought no more about it.

Some weeks afterwards, owing to the shooting of soldiers and police in the streets after dark, the curfew was advanced an hour. As a result, the number of curfew prisoners greatly increased—so much so on the first night that there was no room in the usual detention quarters, and the officer of the guard was obliged to use an empty office for the overflow.

While the General was working in his office after dinner, the officer of the guard brought a note from the Mayor of the town, who, he explained, had been found on the streets after curfew hour by a patrol, and was now a prisoner in the office below. The note requested a personal interview with the G.O.C., and stated that the matter was of the highest importance. The General passed the note to Blake, who was puzzled by the familiarity of the writing, but unable to remember where he had seen it before.

After some hesitation the General decided to see the Mayor, who was brought in by the officer of the guard, and left alone with the General and Blake. After beating about the bush for some time, the Mayor asked that he might be kept under arrest and, if possible, deported by sea to England, as he was in great danger of assassination, but would give no reason for the danger, only stating that he had received threatening letters.

The General explained that under no circumstances would he allow the Mayor to be detained under arrest or deported, unless he could show sufficient reasons. The Mayor replied that he considered the threatening letters an ample justification for his request; he had not brought the letters with him, but that if allowed to go home with a guard he would fetch them. But the General, being determined to get all the information he could out of the man, and knowing that once he had granted his request it would be impossible to get anything out of him, refused.

By now Blake had identified the Mayor’s handwriting with the writing on the baker’s death-warrant, and getting out the latter, placed the two papers in front of the General, who at once taxed the Mayor with being the head of the Inner Circle in Esker. This he denied, but on being confronted with the two papers, broke down and made a complete confession.

It appeared that for a long time past he had been the leader of Sinn Fein in that district, and though himself a moderate man, he had been unable to control the wild men, who had forced him, as head of the Inner Circle, to sign the death-warrants of the men condemned to be “executed,” or, in other words, the men they wished out of the way. After a time, being a very religious man, his conscience had rebelled against wholesale murder, and he had refused to sign any more death-warrants.

Whereupon the wild men, being afraid that the Mayor might give them away, had signed his death-warrant themselves, and that very morning he had received by post a warning to prepare for death.

The General was now quite satisfied to order his arrest and deportation forthwith; but the Mayor asked that he should be allowed to go home to say good-bye to his family, and that he might be arrested in his own house at some early hour in the morning. It was now nearly midnight, and the General, after granting his request, arranged that a patrol should arrest him at 4 A.M.

At 4 A.M. to the minute Blake drove up to the Mayor’s house in a lorry with an officer and fifteen men, but at once saw that something was wrong. Instead of the house being in complete darkness, most of the windows were lit up, and the loud wails of women could be heard in an upstairs room.

Leaving the officer to post sentries at the front and back of the house, Blake knocked at the door, which was opened after some delay by a woman, who, on seeing a police officer, tried to slam the door in his face. Blake, however, managed to slip into the hall, and asked the woman what was wrong, but she ran upstairs, calling out to some one above that the police had returned.

On the first landing the woman was joined by another woman and a man, and after a lot of trouble Blake at last got out of them that an hour previously a party of tall men in black mackintoshes, with soft hats pulled over their eyes, had gained admittance to the house, and made their way straight to the Mayor’s bedroom, where they found him kneeling down by his bed praying. After pushing the Mayor’s wife out of the room they shot him, threw his body on the bed, and rushed out of the house.

Blake asked to be shown the Mayor’s body, and the man led him to a bedroom at the back and opened the door. After making certain that the dead man was the Mayor, Blake left and drove straight back to the General.

That day the town was seething with excitement, and it was openly stated by many men that the Mayor had been murdered by the police.

Shortly afterwards a public inquiry was held, and it was clearly proved that every policeman in the town could be satisfactorily accounted for during the night of the murder, and, moreover, that every round of rifle and revolver ammunition could also be accounted for. However, this did not suit the Sinn Feiners, and a verdict of “guilty” was brought in against the authorities, though there can be no possible doubt in any unbiassed mind that the Mayor of Esker was murdered either by, or by the orders of, the Inner Circle.

When he went home, after his interview with the G.O.C., the natural assumption was that he had been giving information, and the Inner Circle determined that he should give no more. Whether they knew that he was to be arrested and deported at 4 A.M., and deliberately forestalled the arrest, or whether they merely knew that he was at headquarters, and were waiting to murder him on the first favourable opportunity, is not clear, and does not affect the question of the guilt of the murder.

XII. A BRUTAL MURDER.

The childlike trust which so many Englishmen have in their institutions is a source of never-ending wonder to Irishmen, more especially the Englishman’s blind faith in the integrity of the Post Office in both countries. Long after Sinn Fein had made the Irish Post Office its chief source of information, the Government and public continued happily and blindly to confide their confidential correspondence to the tender mercies of the King’s enemies, and at the same time expressed their bewildered astonishment at the uncanny amount of information that the Sinn Fein Secret Service was able to obtain.

It is highly doubtful if Blake would ever have even thought of obtaining information from the mail bags, if a young subaltern, who commanded a platoon of the Blankshires temporarily stationed in the Ballybor Police Barracks, had not made the suggestion one night at dinner, and had even offered to carry out the operation himself if Blake had any official qualms. At first Blake refused, knowing that the authorities did not approve of tampering with the public’s private letters; but being desperately hard up for certain information he gave in, and it was arranged that Jones, the subaltern, should carry out the search.

A cross-country letter in the west of Ireland will often take nowadays any time from three to five days to arrive at a town only twenty miles away, and of the chief reasons of this delay one is that the mails often lie for twelve to twenty-four hours in a head post office before being sent out to rural sub-offices for distribution, or in a railway van at some junction awaiting a connection. This was well known to Blake, who had often to complain of delay in delivery of official letters, and also of letters from the “Castle” being frequently opened in the post.

Examining the mails in the Ballybor Post Office was out of the question, owing to the almost unbelievable fact that the staff, from the postmaster to the charwoman who washed out the tiled floors of the post office every morning, were Sinn Feiners, one and all, so that there only remained to search the mails in the train.

At this period the western railways were slowly dying from a creeping paralysis caused by the engine-drivers and guards refusing to carry the armed forces of the Crown, quite oblivious of the fact that it was only possible to pay the railway men’s enormous wages through the Government subsidy. For a time some lines shut down, but a goods train managed to reach Ballybor six days a week with mails and the bare necessities of life for the inhabitants—chiefly porter barrels. By good luck the guard on this train chanced to be a Loyalist—probably the only one on the line—and it was arranged with him that the mails should be searched by Jones while the mail van waited in a siding for several hours at a junction about sixteen miles from Ballybor.

Disguised as harvestmen, Jones and his servant were dropped at night from a Crossley close to the junction and admitted to the mail van by the guard; they at once set to work with electric torches, the batman opening the letters, whilst Jones read and made a note of any useful information, and when they had finished returned in the car to Ballybor Barracks.

On returning to the barracks, Blake and Jones went carefully through the information, and found that one letter addressed to a noted Sinn Feiner, Mr Pat Hegarty, who lived near a village called Lissamore, about eight miles away, gave sufficient evidence on which to hang Mr Hegarty. The writer stated that on the 3rd inst. Hegarty was to expect the arrival of an officer of the I.R.A. in uniform, who would come from the direction of Castleport on a bicycle about 10 P.M. Hegarty was to keep this officer in his house, place the new supply of American arms at his disposal for ambushes, and the officer would not leave the district until Blake had been either killed or kidnapped.

Some months previous to this Blake had been in the south on special duty, and during his absence, MacNot, the D.I. who relieved him temporarily, had called a truce with the Volunteers as long as all appeared well on paper, with the result that the Volunteers had been able to make full preparations for a second effort to wipe out the police in the district. Soon after his return to Ballybor Blake heard strong rumours of a second landing of American arms during his absence—this time, at night at Ballybor quay—and the letter confirmed the rumours.

On the night mentioned in the letter, Blake and Jones, accompanied by a police sergeant and two constables, left Ballybor Barracks in a car after dark in the opposite direction to that in which the village of Lissamore lay, and after going about three miles turned off at a byroad and proceeded by unfrequented roads, until they reached a small wood about half a mile from Hegarty’s house on the Castleport road; here they blocked the road with the car, and waited for their victim.

There was bright starlight, and punctually at 9.45 they saw a cyclist approaching from the direction of Castleport; but so dark was it in the wood that the cyclist only avoided running into the car by throwing himself off, to be quickly seized by two stalwart policemen before he could let go of his handle-bars, gagged and well tied up. They then took him into the wood, removed his uniform, dressed him in an old police uniform, and finally deposited him at the bottom of the car.

Jones then put on the Volunteer officer’s uniform, took his bicycle, and rode on to Hegarty’s house, while the police backed the car up a bohereen and waited there. Before starting out they had arranged that Jones should camouflage his English voice by a Yankee twang, as a brogue was quite beyond his powers.

On arriving at Hegarty’s house, Jones leant his bicycle against the wall, and gave three mysterious knocks at the door. For quite two minutes there was no answer, and just as he was preparing to knock again, the door opened about three inches, and a girl’s voice asked in a whisper who was there, and what he wanted at that time of night.

Now, unfortunately, the letter had not given the name of the I.R.A. officer, so Jones, being afraid to give a name lest the Hegartys might know the officer’s real name, muttered that he was a republican officer, and had come to see Pat Hegarty. The door at once closed, and he could hear the girl open and close a door at the back of the house, and for fully ten minutes nothing further occurred.

This was not part of the play which Jones and Blake had carefully rehearsed in the barracks that afternoon, and Jones was quite nonplussed what to do next. Being young and impetuous, he was just on the point of ruining the whole show by breaking in the door, when it opened and the girl’s voice told him to come in.

The room was pitch dark, and for a second Jones hesitated; but the girl laid her hand on his sleeve, and led him through to a lighted room at the back, where he found Hegarty with his wife and son about to sit down to supper. Hegarty bade him welcome, and the meal started.

After they had eaten for some time in silence, Hegarty asked him several questions about where he had been recently, and of prominent Volunteers in other parts of the country. Jones made the best answers he could, not forgetting to keep up his American accent, and mentioned casually that he had only recently come over from the States, where his parents had been living for some years.

For a time there was silence again, but Jones could feel that the eyes of Maria Hegarty were on him all the time; and presently she began to ask most awkward questions about places and people in the States, and Jones was hard put to it to avoid suspicion. Luckily Maria mentioned that her friends lived in the Eastern States, so that it was easy for Jones’s people to live far away in the west, and the situation was saved.

Supper over, the women cleared the table and retired, while Hegarty produced a large jar of poteen and tumblers, and the three men settled themselves round the fire to drink and talk. For the next two hours Jones extracted all the information he could out of the Hegartys, who, though shy at first, warmed up after several glasses of poteen, and Jones learnt from young Hegarty that the arms were kept under the floors of a disused Protestant school-house in the rectory grounds at Cloonalla, the rector of which was a notorious Loyalist, and would have died sooner than conceal arms knowingly for the rebels.

At this point Jones, who had never tasted poteen before, suddenly realised that he was nearly drunk, and that before he became quite drunk it would be wiser to lie down on a bed. On inquiry, he found that he was to sleep with young Hegarty, the idea of which so staggered him that he felt soberer at once, and determined to try and hold out.

Suddenly there came a violent knocking at the front door, followed by what sounded like the bang of a rifle-butt on the back door. At once the Hegartys put out the light, and started to hustle Jones up a ladder to a loft above the kitchen.

But by now the poteen had quite got to Jones’s head; and when the police went into the kitchen, they found old Hegarty and his son still struggling to get an I.R.A. officer up the ladder. The Hegartys now let go of Jones, who promptly closed with Blake, and a tremendous struggle started in the kitchen.

In a few minutes Jones was overcome, and lay on the floor with a heavy constable sitting on his chest. Blake then ordered the Hegartys to light the lamp, and afterwards to stand against the wall with their hands over their heads, and the constables to take Jones outside and shoot him. But he had not reckoned on Maria, who burst into the kitchen and with piercing screams endeavoured to throw her arms round Jones’s neck. Maria was a strong girl and desperate, and it took Jones and the two constables all they knew to shake her off and struggle out of the house.

Luckily Maria did not attempt to leave the house, and ten seconds after the back door had closed, six revolver shots rang out in quick succession, followed by the sound of a heavy body falling on wet ground. After telling Maria and her mother to go to their bedroom, Blake took Hegarty and his son into the back-yard, and showed them the body of the unfortunate Volunteer officer thrown by the police on the manure-heap. During the next half-hour he had little difficulty in getting all the information he required about local Volunteers (he made no mention of the arms), and after warning them not to move the corpse, the police left the house.