OFlaherty V.C. | Page 4

require for their spirited
execution more devilment than prudence.
Unfortunately, Irish recruiting was badly bungled in 1915. The Irish
were for the most part Roman Catholics and loyal Irishmen, which
means that from the English point of view they were heretics and rebels.
But they were willing enough to go soldiering on the side of France and
see the world outside Ireland, which is a dull place to live in. It was
quite easy to enlist them by approaching them from their own point of
view. But the War Office insisted on approaching them from the point
of view of Dublin Castle. They were discouraged and repulsed by
refusals to give commissions to Roman Catholic officers, or to allow
distinct Irish units to be formed. To attract them, the walls were
covered with placards headed REMEMBER BELGIUM. The folly of
asking an Irishman to remember anything when you want him to fight
for England was apparent to everyone outside the Castle: FORGET
AND FORGIVE would have been more to the point. Remembering
Belgium and its broken treaty led Irishmen to remember Limerick and
its broken treaty; and the recruiting ended in a rebellion, in suppressing
which the British artillery quite unnecessarily reduced the centre of
Dublin to ruins, and the British commanders killed their leading
prisoners of war in cold blood morning after morning with an effect of
long-drawn-out ferocity. Really it was only the usual childish petulance
in which John Bull does things in a week that disgrace him for a
century, though he soon recovers his good humor, and cannot
understand why the survivors of his wrath do not feel as jolly with him
as he does with them. On the smouldering ruins of Dublin the appeals
to remember Louvain were presently supplemented by a fresh appeal.
IRISHMEN, DO YOU WISH TO HAVE THE HORRORS OF WAR
BROUGHT TO YOUR OWN HEARTHS AND HOMES? Dublin
laughed sourly.
As for me I addressed myself quite simply to the business of obtaining
recruits. I knew by personal experience and observation what anyone
might have inferred from the records of Irish emigration, that all an

Irishman's hopes and ambitions turn on his opportunities of getting out
of Ireland. Stimulate his loyalty, and he will stay in Ireland and die for
her; for, incomprehensible as it seems to an Englishman, Irish
patriotism does not take the form of devotion to England and England's
king. Appeal to his discontent, his deadly boredom, his thwarted
curiosity and desire for change and adventure, and, to escape from
Ireland, he will go abroad to risk his life for France, for the Papal States,
for secession in America, and even, if no better may be, for England.
Knowing that the ignorance and insularity of the Irishman is a danger
to himself and to his neighbors, I had no scruple in making that appeal
when there was something for him to fight which the whole world had
to fight unless it meant to come under the jack boot of the German
version of Dublin Castle.
There was another consideration, unmentionable by the recruiting
sergeants and war orators, which must nevertheless have helped them
powerfully in procuring soldiers by voluntary enlistment. The happy
home of the idealist may become common under millennial conditions.
It is not common at present. No one will ever know how many men
joined the army in 1914 and 1915 to escape from tyrants and
taskmasters, termagants and shrews, none of whom are any the less
irksome when they happen by ill-luck to be also our fathers, our
mothers, our wives and our children. Even at their amiablest, a holiday
from them may be a tempting change for all parties. That is why I did
not endow O'Flaherty V.C. with an ideal Irish colleen for his
sweetheart, and gave him for his mother a Volumnia of the potato patch
rather than a affectionate parent from whom he could not so easily have
torn himself away.
I need hardly say that a play thus carefully adapted to its purpose was
voted utterly inadmissible; and in due course the British Government,
frightened out of its wits for the moment by the rout of the Fifth Army,
ordained Irish Conscription, and then did not dare to go through with it.
I still think my own line was the more businesslike. But during the war
everyone except the soldiers at the front imagined that nothing but an
extreme assertion of our most passionate prejudices, without the
smallest regard to their effect on others, could win the war. Finally the
British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British
blockhead did not lose it. I suppose the enemy was no wiser. War is not

a sharpener of wits; and I am afraid I gave great offence by keeping my