Then came the Truce. It was an extraordinary event that deserves a whole book to itself, though, so far as I know, no one has ever tried to describe it. It had all been announced and prepared for, but it was quite impossible to believe it would really happen. Then, a little before noon on Monday, July 11, 1921, when I was still a few months short of eighteen, a slow procession of armoured cars, tanks and patrols began to move back on Cork Barrack, and I walked along beside it. There were little crowds in every street, all watchful and silent, since everyone realized that anything might yet happen. Then, as the Angelus rang out from the city churches, the barrack gates were thrown open and tanks, armoured cars, officers and men filed in. Here and there a man would turn and give a derisive hoot at the silent crowd. Then the barrack gates closed, and the crowd began to move away quietly with bewildered looks. Did it really mean that it was all over? That there would be no more five o’clock curfew and that one could walk that night as late as one pleased without being shot? That one could sleep in one’s own bed? That it really represented the end of seven hundred years of military occupation, the triumph of the imagination over material power, the impossible become law?
All that perfect summer young men who had been for years in hiding drove about the country in commandeered cars, drinking, dancing, brandishing their guns. In the evening the local Volunteers, their numbers vastly increased by careful young men who were now beginning to think that after all there might be something in this for them, drilled openly and learned how to use rifles and machine guns.
And then, in the depth of winter, came the Treaty with England, which granted us everything we had ever sought except an independent republican government and control of the loyalist province of Ulster. The withholding of these precipitated a Civil War, which, in the light of what we know now, might have been anticipated by anyone with sense, for it was merely an extension into the fourth dimension of the improvisation that had begun after the crushing of the insurrection in 1916. The Nationalist movement had split up into the Free State Party, who accepted the treaty with England, and the Republicans who opposed it by force of arms, as the Irgun was to do much later in Israel. Ireland had improvised a government, and clearly no government that claimed even a fraction less than the imaginary government had claimed could attract the loyalty of young men and women with imagination. They were like a theatre audience that, having learned to dispense with fortuitous properties, lighting and scenery and begun to appreciate theatre in the raw, were being asked to content themselves with cardboard and canvas. Where there is nothing, there is reality.
But meanwhile the improvisation had cracked: the English could have cracked it much sooner merely by yielding a little to it. When, after election results had shown that a majority of the people wanted the compromise – and when would they not have accepted a compromise? – our side continued to maintain that the only real government was the imaginary one, or the few shadowy figures that remained of it, we were acting on the unimpeachable logic of the imagination, that only what exists in the mind is real. What we ignored was that a whole section of the improvisation had cut itself adrift and become a new and more menacing reality. The explosion of the dialectic, the sudden violent emergence of thesis and antithesis from the old synthesis, had occurred under our very noses and we could not see it or control it. Rory O’Connor and Melowes in seizing the Four Courts were merely echoing Patrick Pearse and the seizure of the Post Office, and Michael Collins, who could so easily have starved them out with a few pickets, imitated the English pattern by blasting the Four Courts with borrowed artillery. And what neither group saw was that every word we said, every act we committed, was a destruction of the improvisation and what we were bringing about was a new Establishment of Church and State in which imagination would play no part, and young men and women would emigrate to the ends of the earth, not because the country was poor, but because it was mediocre.
To say that I took the wrong side would promote me to a degree of intelligence I had not reached. I took the Republican side because it was Corkery’s. Breen was going round in a fury, saying we were all ‘bleddy eejits’, as though we were no better than Catholic priests or German musicians, and O’Faolain shared his views. I still saw life through a veil of literature – the only sort of detachment available to me – though the passion for poetry was merging into a passion for the nineteenth-century novel, and I was tending to see the Bad Girl of the neighbourhood not as ‘one more unfortunate’ but as Madame Bovary or Nastasya Filipovna, and the Western Road – the evening promenade of clerks and shopgirls – as the Nevsky Prospekt.
In such a set-up it was only natural that Hendrick and I should be installed as censors of the local newspaper and, as we had no real news, compelled to fill it with bad patriotic verse by our superiors, who had a passion for writing about the woes of dear old Ireland. It was a great triumph when O’Faolain walked in one night and gave us a good poem, for it seemed as if the right people were coming round. It was also only natural that I, on the basis of an intimate acquaintance with Tolstoy’s Sebastopol, should be cast for the part of war correspondent. It was a shock for us both when one day one of the Dublin publicity people walked into the office and took an agency message we were printing, describing a raid on the house of Mrs Pearse, and re-wrote it under our eyes as: ‘Great indignation has been expressed in Dublin at the raiding of the house of Mrs Pearse, the widowed mother of the martyred Irish leader, P. H. Pearse.’ It was clear to us that in some ways the Dublin group were much cleverer than we.
This was how we came to meet Erskine Childers, one of the great romantic figures of the period – a distinguished British officer with Irish family connexions who had written a remarkably prophetic thriller that anticipated the First World War and, after it ended, returned to Ireland to serve the Irish cause. Our first glimpse of him was disappointing. He came down the stairs of the Victoria Hotel, limping and frowning; a small, slight, grey-haired man in tweeds with a tweed cap pulled over his eyes, wearing a light mackintosh stuffed with papers and carrying another coat over his arm. Apart from his accent, which would have identified him anywhere, there was something peculiarly English about him; something that nowadays reminds me of some old parson or public-school teacher I have known, conscientious to a fault and overburdened with minor cares. His thin, grey face, shrunk almost to its mould of bone, had a coldness as though life had contracted behind it to its narrowest span; the brows were puckered in a triangle of obsessive thought like pain, and the eyes were clear, pale and tragic. ‘All sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’, Corkery quoted after he met him. Later, Childers’s friend, George Russell, asked me if I thought he was taking drugs. I was certain he wasn’t, but I knew what Russell meant, for I have seen a look exactly like that on the faces of drug addicts.
We went down Patrick Street towards our headquarters on the Grand Parade, and halfway there Childers paused and frowned. He had been instructed to register under a false name at the hotel, but had he remembered to do so or given his own name by mistake? I returned to the hotel to check and, sure enough, he had registered as Mr Smith – Mr John Smith, I feel sure. Later, in our headquarters, we showed him the local political paper that O’Faolain was producing at his own expense, and he passed indifferently over my poem and Hendrick’s sketch, and lit with what seemed an inspired lack of taste on O’Faolain’s article, ‘Khaki or Green?’ which, for him, put the whole political situation into a slogan. It was a trick I was to notice in him again and again, and it left me disillusioned. This was a sort of mind I had never met before.
A day or two later Hendrick and I, coming back to work, noticed him drifting aimlessly along King Street, his hands deep in the pockets of his mackintosh. It amused us to watch the way he stopped and started again. Once he stopped to stare in a shop-window that, when we reached it, turned out to be full of women’s underclothes. He had a sort of doddering, drooping absent-mindedness that at times resembled that of a person in a comedy. We had been following him for a few minutes when we noticed that someone else was doing the same. This was a shabbily dressed man who seemed to have little experience of following anybody. When Childers stopped and looked in a shop-window he did so too. When Childers went on he went on, following step by step.
Knowing Cork as we did, we had no difficulty in getting ahead of them both, and as Childers passed the laneway into the English Market, we pulled him in, told him what was happening, and asked for his gun. He was very alarmed at our manner, but with old-fashioned politeness he turned aside, unbuttoned one mackintosh, then another, then a jacket and finally a waistcoat. Just over his heart and fixed to his braces by a safety pin was a tiny delicately made gun such as a middle-aged lady of timid disposition might carry in her handbag.
We waited to let the shadow pick him up again, and then we picked up the shadow and took him up another lane off the South Mall. As a spy he was not much good, but as interrogators we were worse, and we let him go when we had taken his name and address and given him a talking-to. Besides, we didn’t take it seriously. It wasn’t until weeks later we found out that Childers – ‘the damned Englishman’, as Griffith had called him – was the one man the Provisional Government was bent on killing.
When we returned the toy gun to Childers he looked happy for the first time since we had met him. He had not worried himself about being shadowed but was concerned for the loss of his gun and drove the other people in the office distracted inquiring whether Hendrick and I were responsible enough to be entrusted with it. He pinned it back on his braces as if it was a flower he was pinning to his buttonhole and told us in the dry tone that Englishmen reserve for intimate revelations that it was a present from a friend. Someone told me later that the friend was Michael Collins, the enemy Commander-in-Chief. True or not, that was certainly in character.
I accompanied him soon after to General Headquarters in Fermoy. It was a bright summer morning, and I still remember how I first saw the mountains over Mitchelstown in a frame of wayside trees and felt that at last I was going to see something of Ireland. We stood in the barrack square at Fermoy and saw the generals emerge from a staff meeting, some in uniform, others in civilian clothes with bandoleers and belts. One carried a Lewis gun over his shoulder – a general cannot be too careful. Afterwards we had lunch in the Officers’ Mess. Liam Lynch presided in uniform, looking like the superior of an enclosed order in disguise. The meal was a strange mixture of awkwardness and heartiness such as went on in officers’ messes on the enemy side when local tradesmen and clerks sat down to dinner in quarters they had once approached by the servants’ entrance. That night Childers fixed a bedside lamp for himself so that it would not interfere with the pair of us who shared his room, and when I woke during the night he was still reading and trying to smother a persistent cough so as not to wake us. He was reading Twenty Years After. I was reading The Idiot and felt sorry that he did not read more improving books. Though I had cast myself for the part of Tolstoy at Sebastopol, I was going through a phase that favoured Dostoevsky and Whitman.
Next night I found myself in Ashill Towers near Kilmallock, a pseudo-Gothic castle that we had taken over as headquarters for our front line. If only I had realized it, it was here that the genius of improvisation had taken complete charge. In Buttevant and Fermoy we had real military barracks, complete with officers’ messes; we had an armoured car – a most improbable-looking vehicle, like the plywood tank that captured a Chinese town where a friend was living, flying a large streamer that read ‘Particularly Fierce Tank’. We even had a Big Gun that had been made by a Dubliner who had brought it with him to Buttevant along with the nine shells he had made for it and the tenth that was still in process of construction. But the front line was our pride and joy. We had improvised almost everything else but never a front line. The enemy were reported to be on the point of attacking it, and in the library the local officers were hard at work over their maps deciding which bridges to blow up in the track of their advance.
In the long Gothic hall there were fifty or sixty men at either side of the long trestle tables in the candle-light, their rifles slung over their shoulders. The hall seemed to tremble with the flickering of the candles, and tusked and antlered heads peered down from the half-darkness as though even they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Suddenly a young man sprang on a table with a rifle in his hand and sang Canon Sheehan’s romantic version of the old outlaw song of Sean O’Dwyer of the Valley. He had a fine untrained Irish tenor, with the vibrant, almost exasperating emotional quality of the pure head voice.
After Aughrim’s great disaster,
When the foe in sooth was master,
It was you who first plunged in and swam
The Shannon’s boiling flood….
In the early morning, with the news of enemy movements all along the front, I was sent with a char-à-banc to bring reinforcements from Croom. That, too, thrilled me, because I knew that Croom was an old fortress of the O’Donovans from which we had been expelled in the twelfth century by Donal O’Brien. There was a red glow in the sky as I went from house to house in the little town, hammering on the doors with the butt of a carbine which somebody had given me to keep me happy. When I had brought back the reinforcements I was sent to Divisional Headquarters in Buttevant with despatches for the Divisional Commander Liam Deasy, but he disappointed all my expectations by ignoring the despatches, telling me I looked very tired, and putting me to bed in his own room. He was the kindest man I’d met in my short military experience, and to be put to bed by the General was as much as any young Cherubino could ask, but I wasn’t satisfied. It struck me that the General wasn’t taking the despatches seriously enough, and after a couple of sleepless hours, I went out into the barrack square to look for him. I wasn’t the only one who was doing it. There was a column of men lined up there – the angriest-looking men I’d ever seen – and their officers asked me where General Deasy was. I didn’t know, I said; I was just looking for him myself. ‘Well, when you find him, tell him we’re the Limerick column,’ the officer said. ‘We’re after fighting our way down from Patrickswell, and when we got here the Corkmen had meat for their breakfast and we had none. Tell him if the Limerick men don’t get meat there’ll be mutiny.’
I found Deasy on his way from Mass and he took the news of the possible mutiny as calmly as he’d taken the news of the expected assault on the front line. He gave me despatches for Kilmallock, and warned me urgently to check with the officer in charge of Charleville to make sure there were no enemy troops between me and the front. I took this as a rather fussy precaution dictated by the importance of the despatches, but afterwards I wondered if the General had quite as much faith in our front line as everyone else seemed to have.
It was a sunny summer morning, and on my way I picked up a little hunchback wearing a Red Cross armlet who was making his way to the front on foot, apparently on the off-chance that there might be scope there for an enterprising one-man medical service. At the time that struck me as the most natural thing in the world, whereas nowadays I merely wonder what revelation had been given that little hunchback in whatever back lane he came from to send him trudging off by himself on the roads of Ireland, looking for a battlefield where he might come in useful.
At Charleville I checked with the local commandant. He was still in bed but he assured me that there wasn’t an enemy soldier within miles. What he failed to remember was that it was Sunday, and on Sunday the whole Irish race is unanimously moved to go to Mass, so that at that very moment our whole nine-mile front, pickets, machine-gun posts, fortresses and all, had simply melted away, and there wasn’t as much as a fallen tree between me and the enemy. In itself that mightn’t have been too bad because it might also be assumed that there wouldn’t be any enemy pickets either; but a considerable number of the enemy facing us were from the neighbourhood of Charleville, and after his longing for Mass, an Irishman’s strongest characteristic is his longing for home and Mother, and anyone who knew his Ireland would have guessed that on that fine summer morning our whole front was being pierced in a dozen places by nostalgic enemy soldiers, alone or in force, all pining to embrace their mothers and discover if the cow had calved.
Just before the real trouble began I saw the people coming from Mass in a small wayside church. They looked curiously at the car, and I thought how peaceful it all was, the flat, green country and the tall sunshot hedges and the people coming from Mass in their Sunday clothes. And then men in half-uniform emerged from the hedges, levelling their rifles at us and signalling us on. I wasn’t worried; I knew they must be our own men, but my driver hissed ‘Eat them!’, obviously referring to the despatches, and I guessed I must be wrong. He had probably seen despatches eaten in the movies, because even a horse couldn’t have got down Deasy’s despatches in the minute or two that remained to me, so I tore them up and scattered them. In the high wind they blew across the field beyond retrieving. Then we reached a road block manned by an officer and half a dozen men and were stopped. I had left my carbine in Ashill Towers and had nothing but my camera and The Idiot. The camera was taken though the book was returned. The officer was stupid, truculent and argumentative, and my temper was in a shocking state. It had just dawned on me that on my first day in action I had allowed myself to be made prisoner, that a brilliant career as war correspondent had been closed to me, and that the front line might sway to and fro for years in great battles like those of the First World War but that someone else would be its Tolstoy. When he said something nasty I called him and his men a gang of traitors. It was typical of things at the time that I could say it and get away with it. Six months later, it would have been very different. Just then everyone had a slightly bewildered air as though he were wondering how on earth such things could happen to him. After all, it is not every day that the dialectic blows up in your face and you, who have always regarded yourself as the victim, wake up to find yourself a tyrant.
The enemy headquarters was in a farmhouse a few hundred yards down a by-road that ran close to the railway, and as I was the bearer of the despatches and obviously a ring-leader of some sort, I was packed off with a soldier at either side and a third man with a drawn revolver behind. He was still smarting under my abuse and he fired at my heel. The little soldier on my left dropped his rifle, threw up his hands, and fell. When I knelt beside him he was unconscious, and the man with the revolver went into hysterics, rushed to the other side of the road, and clutched his head and wept. The third soldier went to console him, so, as it was obvious that no one else would do anything practical for the unconscious man, I opened his tunic to look for a wound. What I would do with it if I found it was more than I had thought of, but at least I was better qualified as a hospital orderly than my one-man medical service, for he only shouted into the prostrate man’s ear what he thought was an Act of Contrition but was really the Creed. I had my hand on the soldier’s heart when he opened his eyes and said: ‘—ye all!’ It was simple and final. Then he rose with great dignity, dusted himself, buttoned his tunic, shouldered his rifle and resumed his march. Like myself he wasn’t much of a soldier, but he had savoir faire.
I sat on the floor of the farmhouse parlour with several other prisoners – civilian truck drivers whose trucks had been commandeered for the campaign and were now standing outside in the farmyard. The woman of the house brought me dinner, but the look of the fat bacon made me sick. I wasn’t a drinker, but just then I needed a drink badly, and the senior enemy officer, whose name seemed to be Mossie O’Brien, promised to buy me a flask of whiskey at the first pub we passed. He had the same sort of good humour as Deasy, and I liked him as much as I disliked his truculent second-in-command.
At last his column, having collected all the local gossip, prepared to return into exile with their prizes; the engines of the trucks and cars were started, and I was actually being helped into one truck when a couple of shots rang out and we all dashed back to the farmhouse for cover. Our front-line troops had returned from Mass, indignant at what they regarded as a coward’s blow, and the enemy were cut off from their base. At least I fervently hoped they were cut off. I was beginning to have my own doubts about our front line.
Back in the front room the enemy soldiers barricaded the little window with bags of meal and a can of pitch. The first blast of machine-gun fire from our Particularly Fierce Armoured Car knocked the pitch right over my driver’s head. The realization that we had an armoured car at all depressed the defenders greatly. Except that it was top secret and had been withheld even from me, I should have told them that we had a Big Gun and nine shells as well. There were rifles stacked against the wall behind me, and several times I thought of grabbing one and turning it on the garrison – not because I was particularly brave but because I realized that they were even more scared than I was. At the same time, I knew that there was no help to be expected from my fellow prisoners. They were just saying their prayers. All I could do was to spread alarm and consternation before our men got cross and blew up the house. O’Brien came in and muttered to the other officer that a man had been killed upstairs, and I passed it on. I had to yell it at the deaf man who was reclining on my chest, and he shared my views of the gravity of the situation.
‘Will we surrender now, Mossie?’ he asked O’Brien, who was going out.
‘Not till the last shot is fired,’ O’Brien said shortly.
‘What did he say?’ asked the deaf man.
‘Not till the last shot is fired,’ I repeated with regret. I liked O’Brien, and I wished he wouldn’t be quite so soldierly. I was tired of war and wanted to go home. I felt my first expedition into the heart of Ireland had brought me quite enough material to go on with. I knew that in Cork they would now be coming back down the Western Road after a walk along the river, and I longed to be there with Hendrick, telling him the story without waiting to see what might really happen. The deaf man too appeared to have an urgent engagement, because he began to unload his bandoleer into my coat pockets.
And after all the nonsense I had read about the excitement of one’s baptism of fire, I was finding it intolerably dull. It just went on and on. The trucks and cars were still roaring in the farmyard, but one by one, as the petrol gave out or a bullet hit a petrol tank, they fell silent like the instruments at the end of Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ symphony, and at last nothing was to be heard but occasional bursts of fire. It drew on to evening, and with the little window barricaded, we were almost in darkness. The disagreeable officer was firing his revolver dispiritedly out of the window and singing ‘You Called Me Baby Doll a Year Ago’ in a voice of agonizing tunelessness. The deaf man fell asleep on my chest and breathed nice and evenly at me through it all.
Then came a noise that woke even him, and then a silence, and then a hysterical voice upstairs shouting ‘Rifle grenade!’ This was followed immediately by another voice shouting ‘Mossie is kilt!’ and at once everyone began to wail ‘We surrender! We surrender!’ Someone took out a large handkerchief and pushed it through the window on a rifle barrel, but it went unnoticed and renewed fire filled them all with despair. They were arguing about what they should do next when I grabbed the handkerchief myself and ran out. A soldier opened the door and closed it fast behind me. I waved the handkerchief, but though shots continued to go off all round me there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Everything was blended in a rich, moss-green watery light, while from a mile away over the Limerick grasslands came the distracted lowing of cows who had gone unmilked and were sure the end of the world was coming. The first man to climb the fence and approach the house was an old neighbour, Joe Ryan, but the look on his long, pale face was that of a man drunk with noise and tension, and I realized that I was in great danger of being shot myself, through pure excitement. Once more heavy firing began from some distance away, and everyone bolted for cover, convinced that it was all a trap. I had a terrible job persuading both sides of the general good faith, all the time steering round behind me a group of prisoners who were in a highly nervous state and determined on regarding me as an old and intimate friend from whom they could not possibly be separated, and as proof of their affection they loaded me with rifles and bandoleers. Once I did have to intervene when a man with a drawn revolver attacked one of the prisoners whom he had recognized. As an example of the classic peripeteia soldiers after a surrender are remarkable: at one moment lords of the world dispensing life and death, at the next begging for their lives.
At the back of the house O’Brien, who had been shot through the mouth, was coughing up great gouts of blood while an old priest knelt beside him. Two soldiers brought downstairs the body of the young man who had been killed. He had been shot through the nostril, and the dried blood made a mocking third eye across his cheek, so that he might have been winking at us. Someone put a cap across his face; I saw that it was mine but I left it with him. I saw another civilian cap on the ground and I picked it up; caps cost money, and I knew if I came home without one I should hear about it from Father. It was only later that I realized I had picked up the dead boy’s cap, which was drenched with blood. An old man and his daughter emerged from a cupboard under the stairs and asked: ‘Is it all over now, sir?’
Having seen the prisoners safe into Buttevant Barrack, I made my way home to Cork by the first car. I wanted to get my story into print and, besides, I felt I had seen quite enough of the war for the time being. Nowadays I merely wonder at my own behaviour and remember with revulsion that I once wore a dead boy’s bloodstained cap. It was not merely that I couldn’t afford to lose a cap. I fancy the truth is that nothing of it was real to me, and it never once occurred to me that the boy whose cap I was wearing had that day been as living as myself, and perhaps loved his mother as much as I did mine. It was all as if I had read about it in War and Peace.
I doubt if most other people found it very real either. A few days later I accompanied Childers again to the ‘front’, as I was now beginning to think of it. At Buttevant Barrack I met his cousin, David Robinson, who was in charge of the cavalry, such as it was. Robinson was another ‘damned Englishman’, but of the sort I get along with. He was a typical British cavalry officer of the old school with a wide-brimmed hat, a coat that was old but elegant, well-cut riding breeches and top-boots. He had a glass eye, a long, pale, beaky face and the rather languid manner of a hard-boiled, softhearted gambler.
Childers wanted statements from our wounded, so he and I and a third man visited the Military Hospital where, as usual, I disgraced myself, for inside the door with his head in bandages was a young enemy officer and I gave one startled look at him and then wrung his hands and said: ‘Mossie O’Brien!’ I am, as I have said, a natural collaborationist, and O’Brien must have had the same weakness, for when he left hospital it was to join one of our columns. He was captured by his own side and sentenced to death, but escaped from the prison and lived to run a garage in his native town. On the other hand, my driver, for all his old guff about eating the despatches, was reported to have ended up on the other side. That was how things happened. What, after all, do you do when a well-established synthesis blows up on you but wonder whether you are really riding in the right compartment?
Childers also wanted to see the front line for himself. We had to walk along a road and across a railway bridge that was covered by enemy machine guns, and when I saw the officer in charge take cover and run I did the same, but Childers walked coolly across, studying the country and apparently unaware of danger. This, of course, was partly the attitude of the professional soldier who always knows by instinct when and where to take cover, but I felt there was also an element of absent-mindedness about it – the absent-mindedness of the old schoolmaster or parson who is so worried about what to do with Jones Minor’s peculiar habits that he has no time to worry about himself. That night I watched him again in Ashill Towers, where the same country boys whose military genius I no longer had faith in occupied the upholstered chairs and studied their maps. There being no chair for Childers, nor anyone who valued his advice on military matters, he sat on a petrol can by the open door, his cap over his eyes and his mackintosh trailing on the floor, and went on scribbling his endless memoranda, articles and letters, like some old book-keeper who fears the new directors may think him superfluous. A tall, good-looking young American war correspondent who interviewed him on the petrol can congratulated him on Corkery’s poem ‘Old Town of Gaelic Saint’, which Hendrick and I had just published.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Childers with a worried air, ‘but have you seen Mr Brennan’s poems – “Churchill Gave the Orders but England Gave the Guns”?’ He always liked to keep conversation on a serious level.
My last experience of the front was when I was sent back to Buttevant Barrack to collect the Big Gun and the nine shells. The enemy had ensconced themselves in a substantial parsonage and could not be dislodged by rifle- and machine-gun fire. When I reached the barrack, the armourer, who had brought his beloved gun all the way from Dublin with him, was still working on the tenth shell and didn’t want the gun fired till the shell was finished. But my orders were peremptory, and we loaded the little weapon and its shells on the back seat of my car. A mile or two from the parsonage we were intercepted by the officer in charge of the attack, and I was sent back to Buttevant with fresh instructions, so that I never really saw the weapon in action. Next day, however, I heard that after the first shell had been fired the enemy rushed out of the parsonage with their hands in the air but, as in Kilmallock, this gesture had gone unnoticed. When the second shell sailed over their heads they came to the conclusion that they were to be massacred whether they surrendered or not, and took to their heels across the country. But this too went unobserved, and the whole nine shells were fired at the parsonage, without hitting it once.
I am not reporting what I saw, merely what I heard, but I do know that stranger things happened.