Chapter VI: The Raising of the Irish Brigades (2)

An extension of this argument, that Redmond was buying Home Rule with the blood of young Irishmen, raised the question whether Home Rule was worth the price. While the Bill was not yet law, it was a flag, a symbol. Once it became an Act, men's attitude changed; they turned to criticizing what they had got; and one powerful newspaper, bitterly hostile to the Parliamentary party, expended much ingenuity in exaggerating the limitations of what had been gained. While one set of critics endeavoured to show how miserable was the price obtained, another dwelt on the unrighteousness of making such a bargain without Ireland's consent. In Redmond's speech at Kilkenny there was a note of resentment. He refused at any great crisis to consider "what might please the gallery or the crowd, or might spare him the insults of a handful of cornerboys."

But the kernel of all his thought was put into one sentence by him at Belfast. "The proper place to guard Ireland is on the battlefields of France." It was from Belfast after this meeting that the first striking demonstration of response came--organized and inspired by Mr. Devlin. On November 20th nearly a full battalion of recruits, many National Volunteers, entrained for Fermoy; a week later they were followed by another great detachment. The example spread; and when Redmond spoke at Limerick on December 20th, the _Irish Times_ in a friendly leading article admitted that "the National Volunteers were now coming forward in large numbers and the Irish Brigade was going to be a credit to the country." This was a very different note from that which had come from Unionist quarters at earlier stages.

III

So far as recruiting went, Redmond had won. He was sure of making good to England. But in what concerned making good to Ireland, he had no progress to report. He stated that already nearly 16,500 men from the Volunteers had joined the Army, and he could not understand why Government was so chary of giving assistance to train and equip this force. There was no doubt as to the mass of men available. Figures supplied by the police to the Chief Secretary estimated that between September 24th, when the split took place, and October 31st, out of 170,000 Volunteers, only a trifle over 12,000 adhered to Professor MacNeill.

But in Dublin the opponents were nearly 2,000 out of 6,700; and two strong battalions went almost solid against Redmond. These battalions, along with the Citizens' Army, were destined to alter the course of Irish history. It was specially true of them, but true generally of all the minority who left Redmond, that they were kept together by a resolute and determined group who had a clear purpose.

The "Irish Volunteers," as the dissentients called themselves, were made to feel that they were a minority, and an unpopular minority in more than one instance. In Galway, when they turned out to parade the streets, they were driven off with casualties--retaliation for their interference with our meeting in September. In Dundalk there was a somewhat similar occurrence. But they got more than their own back one day in November by a bold _coup_--forerunner of many. Ninety rifles belonging to the National Volunteers were being moved in a cart from one place to another. Half a dozen men armed with revolvers held up the cart and its driver and carried off the rifles. At their Convention, held in the end of October, Professor MacNeill said: "They would go on with the work of organizing, training and equipping a Volunteer force for the service of Ireland in Ireland, and such a force might yet be the means of saving Home Rule from disaster, and of compelling the Home Rule Government to keep faith with Ireland without the exaction of a price in blood."

That forecast has not as yet realized itself; and many of us think that the chief achievement of this section has been to turn to waste a heavy price that was paid in blood by other men for the sake of Ireland. But unquestionably they were, though the minority, far more of a living reality than the mass of the original force--and for a simple reason. Their purpose, whether good or bad, was within their own control. The purpose of the majority was to carry out Redmond's policy--which was to make the Volunteers part of an Irish army of which the striking force was designed to defend Ireland on the battlefields of Flanders. But to carry out that policy the National Volunteers must be accepted as a purely local Irish military organization for home defence--controlled, in the absence of a popularly elected Irish Government, by the elected Irish representatives. The War Office thwarted that policy. Lord Kitchener would not accept it. He continued to be of the opinion that by equipping Redmond's followers he would be arming enemies.

It is worth noting that one of the ablest and most detached students of Irish affairs was wholly on Redmond's side. Lord Dunraven, appealing on behalf of "the new Irish Brigade," pointed out that both sides of Redmond's policy must be accepted. "No scheme which fails to take some account of the National Volunteer Force can do justice to what Ireland can give," he wrote. But was there everywhere a desire to do justice to what Ireland could give--and was willing to give? Redmond was warned in those days by an influential correspondent in England that a deliberate policy was being pursued by the opponents of Home Rule, who undoubtedly had strong backing in the War Office. The National Volunteers were to become the objects of derision and contempt, which would extend to himself. By keeping the Volunteers out of active participation in war service, it could be proved that Redmond did not speak for Ireland or represent Ireland; that the Irish were raising unreal objections so as to keep an excuse for avoiding danger. It was urged on him that he should press for the extension of the Territorial Act to Ireland and endeavour to bring his men in on this footing.

There were two difficulties in the way of this scheme which nevertheless attracted him strongly. The first was that enlistment in the Territorials for home service had been stopped--so that the proposal had little advantage, if any, over enlistment in the Irish brigades. The second was due to the Volunteers themselves, many of whom, though willing to serve in the war, were unwilling to take the oath of allegiance.

There were limits to the length to which Redmond felt himself able to go, and he never dealt with this objection by argument. The example which he set was plain to all. He joined in singing "God save the King," in drinking the King's health, and at Aughavanagh now he flew the Union Jack beside the Green flag. He was willing to take part in any demonstration which implied that Nationalist Ireland under its new legal status accepted its lot in the British Empire fully and without reserve. It was superfluous for him to argue that Nationalists might consistently take the oath of allegiance when Nationalists were pledging their lives in the King's service beside every other kind of citizen in the British Empire. Over and above his own example was the example of his brother and his son. On November 23rd Willie Redmond addressed a great meeting in Cork and told them, "I won't say to you go, but come with me." He was then fifty-three--and for most men it would have been "too late a week." But no man was ever more instinctively a soldier, and to soldiering he had gone by instinct as a boy. He was an officer in the Wexford Militia for a year or two, till politics drove him out of that service and drew him into another. Now he went to the war gravely but joyfully. I think those days did not bring into relief any more picturesque or sympathetic figure.

One thing ought to be said. Mr. Devlin wished to join also, but Redmond held that he could not be spared from Ireland, where his influence was enormous; and he was placed in a somewhat unfair position, even though everyone who knew him knew that his chief attribute was personal courage. But he was indispensable for the work which had to be done, of helping at this strange crisis to keep Ireland peaceful and united at a time when Government was at its lowest ebb of authority.

Trouble threatened. On October 11th, the anniversary of Parnell's death, three bodies of Volunteers turned out in Dublin--the National Volunteers, the Irish Volunteers, and the Citizen Army. A collision occurred which might easily have become serious. This passed off, but early in December the Government suppressed three or four of the openly anti-British papers, which were, of course, still more virulent against Redmond. They reappeared under other names. But a meeting of protest against the suppression was held outside Liberty Hall. Mr. Larkin had, by this time, gone to America. His chief colleague, Mr. James Connolly, who was the brain of the Irish Labour Movement, presided, and at the close declared that the meeting had been held under the protection of an armed company of the Citizen Army posted in the windows and on the roof of Liberty Hall. Had the police or military attempted to disperse the meeting, he said, "those rifles would not have been silent."

Ulster was not the only place where armed men thought themselves entitled to resist coercion.

Dublin was the more dangerous because the war, which created so much employment in Great Britain, brought no new trade to Ireland, outside of Belfast. Agriculture prospered, but the towns knew only a rise of prices. Redmond began with high hopes, which Mr. Lloyd George fostered, of rapidly-developing munition works, which would at the close of hostilities leave the foundation for industrial communities. Here again, however, Redmond's representations were in vain. When the heavy extra tax on beer and spirits was levied by the first supplementary Budget, he opposed it angrily:

"You are doing some shipbuilding at Belfast, you are making a few
explosives at Arklow, you are buying some woollen goods from some
of the smaller manufacturers, but apart from that, the bulk of the
hundreds of millions of borrowed money which you are spending on
the war is being spent in England and in increasing the income of
your country."

This tax on alcohol would curtail the most important urban industry of the South and West of Ireland, and he feared that it was the old story of crushing Ireland's trade under the wheel of British interests.

Here again Redmond could only plead with the Irish Government that they, in their turn, should plead with the Imperial authorities. He should have been able to act in his own right as the head of an Irish Ministry, knowing the importance of providing employment at such a time. He saw the need and how to meet it; but he had none of the resources of power. As compared with the other men who occupied, in the public eye, a rank equivalent to his--with General Botha, for instance--he was like a commander of those Russian armies which had to take the field against Germans with sticks and pikes.

Yet power he had--power over the heart and mind of Ireland--the power which was given him by the response to his appeal. From January onwards the Sixteenth Division grew steadily and strongly. Recruiting began to get on a better basis. The appointment of Sir Hedley Le Bas in charge of this propaganda brought about a healthy change in methods. Appeals were used devised for Ireland, and not, as heretofore, simple replicas of the English article. Heart-breaking instances of stupidity were still of daily occurrence, but imagination and insight began to have some play; and there was no longer the complete separation which had existed between the effort of Redmond and his colleagues and the effort of men like Lord Meath. In January Willie Redmond was posted to his battalion, the 6th Royal Irish, at Fermoy, where the 47th Brigade had its headquarters. In his case, as in my own, there had been much avoidable and most undesirable delay; but his presence with the Division was worth an immense deal. There was delay also about his younger namesake, John Redmond's son--who was for a long time refused a commission in the Division in whose formation his father had played so great a part.

Naturally, trained speakers who had joined the Division were utilized for recruiting purposes. Willie Redmond did comparatively little of this work. It is no light job to take over command of a company, if you mean really to command it; and with him, from the moment he joined everything came second to his military duty. But private soldiers have a less exacting time, and there was scarcely one week of my three months in the 7th Leinsters in which I did not spend the Saturday and Sunday on this business--generally in company with the most brilliant speaker, taking all in all, that I have ever heard. Kettle, then a lieutenant in the battalion, was wit, essayist, poet and orator: whether he was most a wit or most an orator might be argued for a night without conclusion; but as talker or as speaker he had few equals. He was the son of a veteran Nationalist, who had taken a lead in Parnell's day; but the farmer's son had become the most characteristic product of Ireland's capital, which, rich or poor, squalid or splendid, is a metropolis--a centre of many interests, a forcing-house of many ideas. Nothing in Ireland is less English than Dublin, and its tone differs from that of England in having active sympathy with the continental mind.

Kettle was always to some extent in revolt against the theories of the Gaelic League, which he thought tended to make Ireland insular morally as well as materially. He was a good European because he was a good Irishman; and because he was both, he was, though largely educated in Germany, a fierce partisan of France.

More than all this, he had seen with his own eyes the actual martyrdom of Belgium. Sent out by Redmond to purchase rifles, he was in the country when Antwerp was occupied, and he wrote with passion of what he heard, of what he saw. Louvain to him was more than a mere name. All the Catholic in him, and all the Irish Catholic, for Ireland's association with Louvain was long and intimate, rose up in fury; he went through Ireland carrying the fiery cross.

Everywhere we went we had friendly and even enthusiastic audiences; the only place where I met any suggestion of hostility was at Killarney, and there it took the form of avoiding our meeting. We were cheered and encouraged--but we did not get many recruits, so to say, on the nail. Yet they came, generally dribbling in afterwards. From one small meeting in county Waterford we came away badly disappointed, having thought an effect was made, yet we did not take a single man. I heard later that within the next fortnight thirty men from that parish had come in by ones and twos to sign on--but at a town several miles away. Local pressure, personal not political, was against us, especially that of the mothers; and there was a shyness about taking this plunge into the unknown.

One exception stands out, in my mind, unlike the general run of these gatherings. It was the first field day of our brigade, when, dressed in the khaki that had at last been served out, we mustered on the race-course at Fermoy, five thousand strong; and I went from the review to the train for Waterford. There was no mistaking the temper of Redmond's constituency; we got men there in hundreds, including a score or so of cadets--young men of education--for our special company of the Leinsters, which was filling up fast.

At that meeting we had one force with us which was not often active on our side. The Bishop of Waterford was strong for the war; the leading parish priest of the town took the chair and spoke straight and plain, while one of the Regulars, a Carmelite friar, made a speech which was among the most eloquent that I have ever listened to.

At the beginning of April I was gazetted to a lieutenancy in the 6th Connaught Rangers, and began to know the Division from another aspect. Broadly speaking, the men with whom I had been sharing a hut were Nationalist by opinion and by tradition--though by no means all Catholics. There were Unionists, but they were few. In the society which I now joined--a joint mess of the Royal Irish and the Rangers--matters were different.

The personnel of the 6th Royal Irish was strongly characteristic of the old Army. The commanding officer, Curzon, was of Irish descent, but of little Irish association; his second in command was an Irish Protestant gentleman of a pleasant ordinary type. The senior company commander was an Englishman. As an offset, Willie Redmond had one company, and another was commanded by an ex-guardsman, who had been a chief personage in the Derry Volunteers, and brought so many of them with him that General Parsons gave him a captaincy straight off.

In my own battalion, no Catholic had then the rank of captain. The colonel and the adjutant belonged to well-known families in the North of Ireland, deeply involved in Covenanting politics. My own company commander was a very gallant little Dublin barrister, who, before the war, had exerted on English platforms against Home Rule the gift of racy eloquence which he now devoted to recruiting. Not half a dozen of the subalterns would have described themselves as Nationalists.

It is easy to see how all this could be represented, and was represented, to the outside public of Ireland. From the inside, one thing was clear. In our battalion every man desired the success of the Division, and more particularly of the Connaught Rangers, absolutely with a whole heart. Anything said or done that could have offended the men--practically all Catholic and Nationalist--would have drawn the most condign chastisement from our commanding officer. I never heard of any man or officer in the battalion who would have desired to change its colonel; we were fortunate, and we knew it. There was very little political discussion, and what there was turned chiefly on the question how far Redmond might be held to speak for Ireland. So far as Redmond himself was concerned, I think there were few, if any, who did not count it an honour to meet him--and some who had never been won to him before were won to him for his brother's sake.

Looking back on it all, it is clear to me that a change wrought itself in that society. I do not know one survivor of those men who does not desire that accomplishment should be given to the desire of those whom they led. In not a few cases one might put the change higher; some opinions as to what was good for Ireland were profoundly affected.

Yet this also is true. The atmosphere of the mess was one in which Willie Redmond found himself shy and a stranger. He had lived all his life in an intimate circle of Nationalist belief. Knowing the other side in the House of Commons, where many of his oldest friends and the men he liked best (Colonel Lockwood comes most readily to my mind) were political opponents, he had nevertheless always lived with people in agreement with his views; and you could not better describe the atmosphere of our mess than by saying that it was a society in which every one liked and respected Willie Redmond, but one in which he never really was himself. He was only himself with the men.

In short, so far as the officers were concerned, our Division was not a counterpart to the Ulster Division; it was not Irish in the sense that the other was Ulster. No attempt was made to make it so, and General Parsons would have quite definitely rejected any such ideal--though less fiercely than he would have repudiated the idea of handicapping a man for his opinions or his creed. Yet many persons without design, and some with a purpose, spread broadcast the belief that Catholics and Nationalists as such were relegated to a position of inferiority in the command of this Catholic and Nationalist Division.

The worst of our difficulties lay in the long inherited suspicions of the Irish mind. At a recruiting meeting one would argue in appealing to Nationalists that the Home Rule Act was a covenant on which we were in honour bound to act, and that every man who risked his life on the faith of that covenant set a seal upon it which would never be disregarded. The listeners would applaud, but after the meeting one and another would come up privately and say: "Are you sure now they aren't fooling us again?" The Sinn Féin propaganda, always shrewdly conducted, did not fail to emphasize the pronouncement of the Tory Press that there should be no Home Rule because Ireland had failed to come forward; or to point the moral of Mr. Bonar Law's excursion to Belfast, with its violent asseveration that Ulster should be backed without limit in opposition to control by an Irish Parliament. Ireland, always suspect, has learnt to be profoundly suspicious; and suspicion is the form of prophecy which has most tendency to fulfil itself.

In one part of the Irish race, however, this cold paralysis of distrust had no operation. The Irish in Great Britain, always outdoing all others in the keenness of their Nationalism, were nearer the main current of the war, and were more in touch with the truth about English feeling. They had a double impulse, as Redmond had; they saw how to serve their own cause in serving Europe's freedom; and their response was magnificent. Mr. T.P. O'Connor probably raised more recruits by his personal appeal than any other man in England.

A great part of Redmond's correspondence in these months came from Irishmen in England who were joining as Irishmen, and who had great difficulty in making their way to our Division. Many thousands had already enlisted elsewhere; hundreds, at least, tried to join the Sixteenth Division, and failed to get there. But there was one instance to which attention should be directed. In Newcastle-on-Tyne a movement was set on foot to raise Tyneside battalions, including one of Irish. Mr. O'Connor went down, and the upshot was that four Irish battalions were raised. They were in existence by January 1, 1915, when General Parsons was already writing that unless Irishmen could be found to fill up the Division, we must submit to the disgrace of having it made up by English recruits. The obvious answer was to annex the Tyneside Irish Brigade. Redmond, moreover, held that to bring over this brigade to train in Ireland, and to incorporate it bodily in the Sixteenth Division, would please the Tyneside men--for a tremendous welcome would have greeted them in their own country--and would have an excellent effect on Irish opinion generally. But the proposal was rigorously opposed by the War Office. It was argued that these men had enlisted technically as Northumberland Fusiliers and Northumberland Fusiliers they must remain. In reality, as far as one can judge, the War Office were penny wise and pound foolish. "We have got these men," they said, "and we have a promise from Redmond to fill a Division. Why relieve him of one-third of his task?"

Redmond knew, and we all knew, that the essential was to get our Division complete and into the field at the earliest possible moment. He had confidence that once they got to work they would make a name for themselves, which would be the best attraction for recruits. Let it be remembered that at this moment popular expectation put the end of the war about July. When I joined the Rangers in April 1915, our mess was full of young officers threatening to throw up their commissions and enlist in some battalion which would give them the chance of seeing a fight. We could not expect to move to France before August, and by that time all that we could hope would be to form part of the army of occupation. Rumour was rife, too, that the Division would be broken up and utilized for draft-finding, that it would never see France as a unit. All this talk came back to Redmond and increased his anxiety to make the work complete.

He held, and I think rightly, that the whole machinery of recruiting worked against us; that every officer had instructions to send no man to the Sixteenth Division who could be got into a draft-finding reserve battalion. Knowing what we know, I cannot blame them; but the game was not fairly played. A man would come in and say he wanted to join the Irish Brigade. "Which regiment?" Often he might not realize that a brigade was made up of regiments, but if he knew and answered, for instance, "The Dublins," he was more likely than not to be shipped off to the Curragh, where the reserve of the regular battalions was kept, instead of to Buttevant, where our Dublins were in training.

Still, with all our troubles, things were marching ahead in that April of 1915; recruits were coming in to the tune of 1,500 a week. Then came a political crisis and the formation of a Coalition Government. Redmond was asked to take a post in it. The letter in which the invitation was conveyed made it clear that the post could not be an Irish office.

Redmond refused. He said to me afterwards that under no conditions did he think he could have accepted. But he added, "If I had been Asquith and had wished to make it as difficult as possible to refuse, I should have offered a seat in the Cabinet without portfolio and without salary."

He was well aware how many and how unscrupulous were his enemies in Ireland; he was not prepared to give them the opportunity of saying that he had got his price for the blood of young Irishmen and the betrayal of his principles. Even apart from the question of salary, the tradition against acceptance of office under Government till Ireland's claim was satisfied would have been very hard to break. Yet Redmond saw fully how disastrous would be the effect on Irish opinion if he were not in the Government and Sir Edward Carson was.

Knowing Ireland as he did, he knew that the acceptance of Sir Edward Carson as a colleague would be taken in Ireland to imply that the Government had abandoned its support of Home Rule. Ireland would assume that the Ulster leader would not come in except on his own terms. Redmond made the strongest representations that he could to the Prime Minister to exclude both Irish parties to the unresolved dispute. But Sir Edward Carson in those days was making himself very disagreeable in the House of Commons and Mr. Asquith, as usual, followed the line of least resistance.

The effect of the Coalition as formed was seen when recruiting in Ireland dropped from 6,000 in April-May to 3,000 in May-June. It stayed at the lower figure for several months, till it was raised again by efforts for which Redmond was chiefly responsible. I do not know whether Sir Edward Carson's presence in the Attorney-General's office, or his absence from the Opposition benches in debates, was worth ten thousand men; but that is a small measure of what was lost in Ireland by his inclusion.

IV

The formation of the Coalition Government marks the first stage in the history of Redmond's defeat and the victory of Sir Edward Carson and Sinn Féin.

Of what he felt upon this matter, Redmond at the time said not a word in public. Six months later, on November 2, 1915, when a debate on the naval and military situation was opened, he broke silence--and his first words were an explanation of his silence. He had not intervened, he said, in any debate on the war since its inception. "We thought a loyal and as far as possible silent support to the Government of the day was the best service we could render." This silence had been maintained "even after the formation of the Coalition"--when the Irish view had been roughly set aside, and when the personal tie to the Liberal Government with which he had been so long allied had been profoundly modified. He claimed the credit of this loyalty not merely for himself but for the whole of his country. "Since the war commenced the voice of party controversy has disappeared in Ireland."

This was pushing generosity almost to a stretch of imagination, for the voice of party controversy had not been absent from the Belfast Press, nor had it spared him. But he was speaking then, and he desired that the House should feel that he spoke, as Ireland's spokesman; he claimed credit for North and South alike in the absence of all labour troubles in war supply. "The spectacle of industrial unrest in Great Britain, the determined and unceasing attacks in certain sections of the Press upon individual members of the Government and in a special way upon the Prime Minister, have aroused the greatest concern and the deepest indignation in Ireland," he said. "Mr. Asquith stands to-day, as before the war, high in the confidence of the Irish people." The "persistent pessimism" had effected nothing except to help in some measure "that little fringe which exists in Ireland as in England, of men who would if they could interfere with the success of recruiting."

No doubt there was an element of policy, of a fencer's skill, in all this. Sir Edward Carson had not maintained silence and certainly had not spared the Prime Minister. But in essence Redmond was relying on the plain truth. He had pledged support and he gave it to the utmost of his power, even at his peril. Mr. Birrell in the posthumous "Appreciation" which has been already quoted has this passage:

"Although it was not always easy to do business with him, being very justly suspicious of English politicians, he could be trusted more implicitly than almost every other politician I have ever come in contact with. He was slow to pass his word, but when he had done so, you knew he would keep it to the very letter, and what was almost as important, his silence and discretion could be relied upon with certainty. He was constitutionally incapable of giving anybody away who had trusted him."

Nothing but considerations of loyalty had kept him publicly silent in the months of this year when so much was done, and so much left undone, against his desire and his judgment. In June, the Sixteenth Division was within 1,000 of completion. The shortage existed in one brigade--the 49th--which had been formed of battalions having their recruiting areas in Ulster--two of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, one of the Inniskillings and one of the Royal Irish Rifles. The conception had undoubtedly been to provide for the Nationalists of Ulster. But, as it proved, these men vastly preferred to enlist in units which were not associated with the avowedly Unionist Division, all of whose battalions belonged to one or other of these three regiments; and the 49th Brigade was not nearly up to strength. The Tenth Division was now on the point of readiness for the field; but when the final weeding out of unfit or half trained men was completed its ranks were 1,200 short. The War Office decided to draw, not on both the other Irish Divisions, but on the Sixteenth only, and only upon the deficient brigade. When the offer of immediate service was made, every man in its four battalions volunteered, and the Tenth Division was completed; but the Sixteenth was thrown back, and the discouraging rumour that it was to be only used as a reserve gained a great impetus. Redmond was very angry. He wrote to Mr. Tennant demanding that at least the Division's deficiency should at once be made up, by giving to us the full product of one or two weeks' recruiting in Ireland. Nothing of the kind was done to meet his request.

It was, however, some compensation to think that at least one of our purely Irish formations was going to take the field; and we hoped that its fortunes might remedy a complaint which began to be loudly made--that credit was withheld from the achievements of Irish troops.

The main source of this grievance was the publication of Admiral de Robeck's despatch concerning the first landing at Gallipoli. In the original document, a schedule was given showing the detail of troops told off to each of the separate landings; and the narrative, in which a sailor spoke with frank enthusiasm of the desperate valour shown by soldiers, was written with constant reference to the detail given. As some evil chance willed, the narrative mentioned by name several of the regiments engaged; but when it came to describe the forlorn hope at "V" Beach, it dealt fully with the special difficulties, and said in brief but emphatic phrase, "Here the troops wrought miracles." The War Office, in editing the despatch for publication, suppressed the schedule, as likely to give information to the enemy, so that in this case it did not appear to whom the praise applied.

Certain things are unbelievable. No officer and no man that ever lived could from a partisan feeling against Ireland have sought to rob regiments who had done and suffered such things as the Dublins and Munsters did and suffered at "V" Beach of whatever credit could be given to them. Yet in such times as we were living in, the unbelievable is readily believed, and men saw malice in the suppression of what could not long be secret: Ireland had too many dead that day. What made the suggestion more incredible only gave a poignancy to resentment, for Admiral de Robeck was an Irishman, with his home some few miles from the regimental depot of the Dublins.

Two things, however, should be said. If only in fairness to Admiral de Robeck, the explanation should instantly have been given: it was never given in full until he came before the Dardanelles Commission, many months later, and it has not been officially published to this hour. And further, whoever edited the despatch was presumably a soldier, and knew how jealous soldiers are, and how jealous their friends are for them, of every word that goes to the recognition of such service. The effect of omitting the schedule ought to have been foreseen.

Even before the middle of August, when angry letters over this despatch were appearing in the Irish Press, other news began to come to Ireland, ill calculated to help recruiting. The Tenth Division had come into action, but under the unluckiest conditions. When the great attempt was made to cut across the peninsula by a renewed push from Anzac and by a new landing at Suvla Bay, the Irish were among the reinforcements told off for that surprise. But from lack of room on the island bases it was considered impossible to keep them together as a division, and one brigade, the 29th, lay so far off that it could not be brought into the concerted movement on Suvla. It was therefore sent separately to Anzac, and joined in with the Australians. Broken up by regiments and not operating as a unit, it furnished useful support; but no credit for what the men did could go to Ireland. The other two brigades, the 30th and 31st, were left under the command of their divisional general and were to attack on the left of the bay. But owing to some defect in exploration of the coast-line, the movement was not so carried out; six battalions out of the eight were landed on the south of the bay and were attached to the right-hand force. Thus, in the actual operations Sir Bryan Mahon had under his command only two battalions of his own men. The remaining six operated under the command of the divisional general of the Eleventh Division, who delegated the conduct of the actual attack to one of his brigadiers. It is sufficient to say that immediately after the action both these officers were relieved of their commands. The same fate befell the corps commander under whose directions this wing of the concerted movement was placed.

In face of these facts it would be absurd to deny that the troops were badly handled. They suffered terribly from thirst, and the suffering was in large measure preventible. The attack was a failure. All the success achieved was the capture of Chocolate Hill, and the Irish claim that success. It is disputed by other regiments. This much is certain: the Irish were part of the troops who carried the hill, and at nightfall, when the rest were withdrawn to the beach, the Irish were left holding it.

But they had paid dearly, and in the days which followed many more were sacrificed in the hopeless effort to retrieve what had been lost when the surprise attack failed. The loss fell specially on a picked battalion, the 7th Dublins, which had grown up about a footballers' company, the very flower of young Irish manhood. Grief and indignation were universal when tales of what had happened began to come through.

But of all this Redmond said no word in public. He threatened disclosure in debate at one period; yet on a strong representation from Mr. Tennant--in whose friendliness, as in the Prime Minister's, he had confidence--he refrained. To this abstention he added the most practical proof of good will. Lord Wimborne, now Lord-Lieutenant, seriously concerned at the continued drop in recruiting, which had not shown any sign of recovery since the Coalition Government was formed, came to him with the proposal for a conference on the subject. In pursuance of this suggestion Redmond went to London, where an interview took place between him and Lord Kitchener, Mr. Birrell and Mr. Tennant assisting. Redmond put in a memorandum stating his complaints, and thrashed out the subject to satisfactory conclusions on all points that directly affected recruiting. The conference ultimately met at the Viceregal Lodge on October 15th. It included the Primate of All Ireland, Lord Londonderry, Lord Meath, Lord Powerscourt, Sir Nugent Everard, the O'Conor Don and Colonel Sharman Crawford, the Lord Mayors of Dublin, Belfast and Cork, and Redmond. The military were represented by Major-General Friend, commanding the troops in Ireland, with whom Redmond always had the most cordial relations.

Only those who understand something of Irish tradition will realize how great a departure from established usage it was for Parnell's lieutenant and successor to take part formally in a meeting at the Viceregal Lodge--or indeed to cross its threshold for any purpose. But Redmond always had the logic of his convictions. As part of a compact, he was helping to the best of his power the Government which must carry on till Home Rule could come into operation; and here as elsewhere he was ready to mark his conviction that the enactment of Home Rule had made possible a complete change in his attitude.

Among his papers is a very full note of what passed on this occasion. It is confidential, but one may note the extreme friendliness of attitude as between Redmond and the Ulster representatives, and also the fact that the operative suggestions agreed on were proposed first by Redmond himself. They were the result of his interview with Lord Kitchener. Recruiting in Ireland should no longer be left to voluntary effort, but a Department should be formed corresponding to that over which Lord Derby had been appointed to preside in Great Britain; and the Lord-Lieutenant himself should accept the position of its official head, and should appoint or nominate some man of known business capacity to preside over the detail of organization. Redmond pressed also that the country should be told definitely what Lord Wimborne had told the conference, that the need was for a total of about 1,100 recruits per week.

He insisted also very strongly on the publication of a letter which Lord Kitchener at his instance had written to the conference. Its last paragraph read:

"The Irish are entitled to their full share of the compliments paid to the rest of the United Kingdom for their hitherto magnificent response to the appeal for men: but if that response is to reap its due and only reward in victory, the supply must be continued."

Over 81,000 recruits had been raised in Ireland since the war started--a period of eighty-two weeks. Viewed in comparison with Lord Kitchener's original anticipations, the result might well be called "magnificent." But it was necessary to maintain the same weekly average, and for four months the figure had been much below this. The result of the new campaign was to raise nearly 7,500 men in seven weeks.

In the campaign thus launched, as Redmond so keenly desired, under the joint auspices of Ulstermen, Southern Unionists and Nationalists, one circumstance attracted attention. It was proposed to hold a great meeting at Newry, the frontier town where Ulster marches with the South--a centre in which recruiting had been singularly keen and successful. The scheme was to unite on one platform the Lord-Lieutenant, Redmond and Sir Edward Carson. Sir Edward Carson, however, "did not think the proposal would serve any useful purpose," and the meeting was held without him, in December 1915.

By this time the Sixteenth Division was under orders for France. We had been since September in training at Blackdown, near Aldershot; and here Redmond was one of several distinguished visitors who came to see us and address the troops. He came down also unofficially more than once, for his brother had a pleasant house among the pine-trees--where he guarded, or was guarded by, the brigade's mascot, the largest of three enormous wolfhounds which, through John Redmond, were presented to the Irish Division.

Towards the end of the year new rumours were afloat. The 49th Brigade had never been made up to strength, and there were stories that a non-Irish brigade was to be linked up with us. Letters from two commanding officers of the 49th Brigade illustrate the extent to which Redmond had come by all ranks to be regarded as our tutelary genius; to him they appealed for redress, fearing that they would be turned into a reserve brigade. The matter was settled at last to his content and theirs by a decision that the two brigades which were ready should go out in advance, to be followed by the 49th; and we entrained accordingly on December 17th.

Sir Lawrence Parsons wrote to Mr. Birrell: "As the last train-load moved out of Farnborough station the senior Railway Staff Officer came up to me and said, 'Well, General, that is the soberest, quietest, most amenable and best disciplined Division that has left Aldershot, and I have seen them all go.'" The compliment was well paid to General Parsons, and it may have been some consolation for a sore heart: that keen spirit had to be content to be left behind. Major-General W.B. Hickie, C.B., who had greatly distinguished himself in France, now took over command. It would be disingenuous to say that John Redmond was not content with this change; but his brother was deeply impressed by the hardship inflicted on a gallant soldier.

The Ulster Division had preceded us by three months. All three Irish Divisions were now in the field, and reserve brigades were established to feed them. Redmond could feel that in great measure his work was done, and that he could await the issue in confidence.

He wrote at this time, in a preface contributed to Mr. MacDonagh's book _The Irish at the Front_, a passage of unusual emotion which tells what he thought and felt upon this matter.

"It is these soldiers of ours, with their astonishing courage and
their beautiful faith, with their natural military genius, carrying
with them their green flags and their Irish war-pipes, advancing to
the charge, their fearless officers at their head, and followed by
their beloved chaplains as great-hearted as themselves--bringing
with them a quality all their own to the sordid modern
battlefield--it is these soldiers of ours to whose keeping the
Cause of Ireland has passed. It was never in holier, worthier
keeping than with these boys offering up their supreme sacrifice of
life with a smile on their lips because it was given for Ireland."

He wrote this when fresh from a sight of troops in the field. This visit took place in November 1915, and he was full of the experience when he came down to say good-bye before we went out. Nothing in all his life had approached it in interest, he said to me. The diary of his tour is prefixed to Mr. S.P. Ker's book, _What the Irish Regiments Have Done_--but it conveys little, except this dominant impression: "From the Irish Commander-in-Chief himself right down through the Army one meets Irishmen wherever one goes." On that journey he got the same welcome from Ulstermen as from his own nearest countrymen in the Royal Irish Regiment.

V

One thing at least Redmond gained, I think, from his visit to the front--the sense that with the British Army in the field he was in a friendly country. He never had that sense with regard to the War Office. Running all through this critical year 1915 is the history of one long failure--his attempt to secure the creation of a Home Defence force in Ireland. Given that, he would be confident of possessing the foundation for the structure of an Irish Army--an army which would be regarded as Ireland's own. Without it, the whole fabric of his efforts must be insecure. He desired to build, as in England they built, upon the voluntary effort of a people in whom entire confidence was placed. In the War Office undoubtedly men's minds were set upon finding a regular supply of Irish troops by quite other methods--by the application of compulsion.

Redmond saw to the full the danger of attempting compulsion with an unwilling people; it was a peril which he sought to keep off, and while he lived did keep off, by securing a steady flow of recruits, by gaining a reasonable definition of Ireland's quota, and by exerting that personal authority which the recognition of his efforts conferred upon him. I do not think he was without hope of a moment when Ireland might come, as Great Britain had come by the end of this year, to recognize that the voluntary system levied an unfair toll on the willing, and that the community itself should accept the general necessity of binding its own members. But before this could be even dreamed of as practicable, the whole force of Volunteers, North and South, must feel that they were trusted and recognized, a part in the general work.

The practical organization of the great body at his disposal was under discussion between him and Colonel Moore from February 1915 onwards; and the idea was mooted that by introducing the territorial system Ulster Volunteers and National Volunteers might be drawn into the same corps. This, however, was for the future; the immediate need was to extend the arming and training under their own organization. Redmond learnt at once that Lord Kitchener was against this; that he pointed to the existence of another armed force in the North of Ireland and argued that to create a second must mean civil war; that he believed revolutionary forces to exist in Ireland which Redmond could not control and perhaps did not even suspect. Those who then thought with Lord Kitchener can say now that events have justified his view. They omit to consider how far those events proceeded from Lord Kitchener's refusal to accept Redmond's judgment.

Of the danger Redmond was fully aware. "I understand your position to be," Mr. T.P. O'Connor wrote to him in January 1915, "that unless your plan as to the Irish Volunteers is adopted we are face to face with a most critical and dangerous situation in Ireland." Just as fully was he convinced of the way to meet it. In February, replying indignantly to Sir Reginald Brade, who had complained that Irish recruiting was "distinctly languid," he enumerated the points at which the War Office had failed to act on his own advice, and urged once more, in the first instance, his original policy of employing both Ulster and Nationalist Volunteers for Home Defence. "If the two bodies of volunteers were trusted with the defence of the country under proper military drill and discipline, the result would unquestionably be that a large number of them would volunteer for the front. Recruiting can best be promoted by creating an atmosphere in which the patriotism of the younger men of the country can be evoked, and we have done a good deal already in this direction."

On April 4th a display was made of the force available. A review was held in the Phoenix Park of 25,000 men--splendid material, but half of them with neither arms nor uniform. The Unionist Press was friendly in its comments upon the statement which Redmond supplied after the parade, claiming that these men should be utilized for Home Defence. That day was Easter Sunday of 1915. No one guessed then what the next Easter was going to bring about.

On April 19th I find him writing officially to Mr. Birrell, seeking the Chief Secretary's influence with the War Office, and claiming, what was the truth, that the Irish Command shared his view. But at the moment recruiting was increasing weekly and the War Office were in no mood to make further concessions than those by which the improvement had been brought about. Then came the Coalition, and the consequent reduction of recruiting from close on 7,000 to 3,000 a month; and in July the Adjutant-General, Sir Henry Sclater, of his own motion approached Redmond. He suggested a meeting between Redmond and the War Office, with Sir Matthew Nathan and General Parsons in attendance. Redmond agreed to the proposal, but formulated his views in a lengthy memorandum. The first three points dealt with matters directly concerning the Sixteenth Division, but in the fourth, weighty emphasis was laid on the suggestion of recruiting Volunteers for Home Defence. Sir Henry Sclater's reply omitted completely all reference to this last--an omission on which Redmond commented sharply. He elicited the official answer that by urging men to join on a special enlistment for home service the numbers who would join for general service would be reduced. This was diametrically opposite to Redmond's view, and he said so, and urged again that the Irish Command was of his opinion.

The proposed conference resolved itself--to Redmond's indignation--into a discussion of Redmond's memorandum between the Adjutant-General and Sir Lawrence Parsons. Only in September, when at Lord Wimborne's instance he interviewed Lord Kitchener, did he have the opportunity of raising the matter by direct speech. Lord Kitchener then declared himself willing to admit that on the question whether enlistment for Home Defence would promote or retard recruiting, Redmond's judgment was probably more valuable than his own, and he promised to review the question of Home Defence again in the light of it. But of this promise nothing came.

Meantime Redmond was being warned that the Volunteer organization as it stood had exhausted its usefulness; its enthusiasm was gone--a natural result of having no purpose. A new opening seemed to be created by the Bill which Lord Lincolnshire introduced to recognize a Volunteer Force in Great Britain which should perform military duties under the War Office control. Redmond hoped to see this carried with an extension of it to Ireland, and this was the practical proposal with which he concluded his speech when, on November 2nd, for the first time in that year, he raised in debate the questions to which so much of his time and thought had been given.

How was the Irish recruiting problem to be dealt with? He declared himself absolutely against compulsion, to impose which would be "a folly and a crime" unless the country was "practically unanimous in favour of it." The voluntary system had never had fair play--at all events in Ireland.