For with greater fury than before, the Crossley tenders, choked with
police, raced up and down the streets; searching, searching, searching
for those butchers, those bakers, those candlestick makers who laid
aside their aprons now and then when the hour was propitious and
grasped a pistol in their hands; those candlestick makers, those
bakers, those butchers who never seemed to leave their counters and
untie their aprons from their middles. By day, by night; in storm, in
calm, the flying wheels splashed through the mire. Knock, knock, knock.
“Open! The military!” Knock, knock knock. “In the King’s name!” Up
rattle windows. Out poke heads. “Open, open, or we break in the door.”
The butcher’s wife, the baker’s mother, the candlestick maker’s aunt
open the door as slowly as they dare, and the stream of police sweep
in like a tide--down into the cellar, out into the garden, up into the
attic, through the skylight, everywhere in an instant that the hunted
man may not escape; peering into grates for ashes of burned papers,
pulling out mantleshelves for hidden arms, examining picture frames for
secret documents; and when all is done clattering down from attic and
up from basement, pouring down the steps and climbing into the tender,
and then at breakneck speed to the next house on the list. Bang, bang,
bang! “Open! The military!”
In the week that followed the murders of the officers, the British
Government made the supreme effort of this tremendous police
hunt--operations in Ireland never assumed the proportions of a war--and
in three or four days the prisons were filled. The British Government
was altering its tactics, and finding a solution for dealing with
this will-o’-the-wisp enemy by arresting all suspects, in preparation
for lodging them in one or other of the internment camps under
construction. In Dublin the arrests of that week numbered hundreds, and
among the prisoners was Arthur Griffith, the father of Sinn Fein.
The funeral of the officers passed along the Liffey, and all the world
and his wife went down to the quays to see. Shops were shut, sometimes
after a little persuasion by mourning Black-and-Tans, and the streets
were left empty. The crowd was reverent; and cases of lack of feeling
were rectified by Black-and-Tans posted in lorries at points of
vantage. Hats that did not come off as the gun carriages went by were
helped off, and three young men who were disrespectful were thrown into
the Liffey.
A Mr. Goodbody, of Cork, who was jammed against me, said to a friend,
“Michael Collins himself is in the crowd. He do be a profitable man
to look at. Indade, and he would have made a good king in a sporty
country. But he is headstrong, headstrong.”
Said an old woman, striking me in the stomach with her elbow, to a
friend, “Och, ’tis a beautiful sight this, and sure it’s a pity they
had to kill those beautiful young men.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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