An occasional gaunt building, such as the skeleton of the Customs House or the General Post Office, was all the wear and tear the city showed, though observant people could find bullet holes in a good many windows, some of them small and clean as if an augur had bored them, others brutally done, so that the cracks had run all about the pane. Sometimes a great plate-glass window would be annihilated, sometimes the fragments of some bomb leaping from the pavement would tear a score of holes in a door and stay embedded there; but next day the glazier would be along with his putty and the decorator with his paint brush, and there would be nothing to see. It was different in the country. One came upon trees felled across the road, or lying prone, leaving just enough space for the cart of the marketing peasant. One came upon walls tumbled to the ground, and a pyramid of broken masonry lying in wait for the hurrying police tender. Round abrupt corners one stepped into trenches dug across the road to receive the front wheels of some military lorry shaking upon its way. Military and police presently took with them little bridges to engineer the lorries across the trenches, and so with a bare halt went throbbing on their way; but the graves set in the road for leviathan fare stayed there unattended, yawning for the poor peasant and his cart. Nobody filled these gaps, perhaps from patriotism, perhaps because such busybody act might call down the vengeance of the Republican Army hanging somewhere in the hills, or equally probably because the tired peasant, having negotiated the yawn with his own wit, left other people to be as wise as he, and went on home, looking neither right nor left, in case he saw more than was wise. But summer had come quite indifferent to these things; and by wood and hedge and stream it had arrived a-blooming; it had gone rolling up and down the hills, and into the shining sky. Those who knew the way about the slopes of these hills could spy outposts of the Republican Army, men moving about the hills with telescopes, sometimes the flutter of a signalling flag. What a draught for bold youth this mountain air! The veriest bent-backed clerk, taken out here from his city office, would begin to straighten and stamp in the high romantic manner; how then some fiery country boy led to these high places and told Ireland’s fatal story? High up there, each man his individual eagle, staring down with unfilmed eye upon the faint white roads netting the fair country, they could mark the hurrying police tenders and exult at their freedom. These hills held caves where men retreated in extremity after the police had raided the farmhouses that usually gave them shelter.