Morning brought news which evening elaborated; evening’s news had staled at breakfast time. Post-haste the rumours came. Negotiations! Truce! As if a magician’s wand had waved them forth, the Sinn Fein leaders became flesh and blood, emerged into the daylight. A pause in the hunt! An armistice signed! The phantom army have taken their fingers from the triggers of their guns; the police have switched off the engines of their motors! It was said men with beards like goats and with the talons of wild beasts descended from the hills; the patriots who had gone to bed with the owls and the rabbits returned like demigods home. Oh, disillusioned Ulster, whose comrade, whose bigger brother, whose ally of so many oaths has at this most exalted season of the year, under your very nose, at your very front door, eaten his words, plucked the scornful phrase off his tongue, called traitor friend, called assassin comrade, taken his hand out of yours and thrust it into the palm of your enemy! Oh, drummers, roll your drums; oh, fifemen, shrill your fifes: not all your notes, not all your drumming will bring back your belief in Britain. But before you condemn too bitterly, search the hearts of those who have done this. Pity, then, may take anger’s place. The story has ended as most human stories end. High speech has worn itself out in Wind, enemy has met enemy on a common level, each giving something to the other, each receiving something from the other, as all men must who rub shoulders on this planet. If in man’s sight this pact has brought humiliation on Loyalist and Republican alike, it may not be so in the sight of Heaven. Man’s memory is short, he remembers the ends of things; but the gods, to whom the past is the present, and yesterday is to-day, recall the days of difficulty, the hours of labour and the moments of sacrifice, and do not look to the result so much as to the making of the result. On the twelfth of the month a brazen sun climbed up into the sky, and after an early breakfast we came out of our doors garbed for the fray. All the world was there, and half the world was wearing orange sashes, and as a man was of low or high degree in his own Orange lodge, so was his sash pricked over with fewer or with more silver badges. The men came forth in dark suits newly lifted from chests of drawers, with sombre bowlers on their heads; the women, following a happier tradition, wore frocks that vied with the coloured sashes, but iron rule demanded gloved hands.