I cannot recall whether we had said “good evening”--we had said no more than that--when furiously, wildly on the silence, a volley of shots burst out near Stephen’s Green, abruptly as light flashing out of darkness. The shooting continued for several seconds, seconds which any one unused to shooting would have reckoned as minutes, and then wore out in the customary fashion, odd shots coming from a greater and greater distance, as if a running fight was moving away from us. Mrs. Fitzgerald threw up her head, not in fear, hardly with a startled movement; but as though hearing the battle afar off, the thunders of the captains and the shouting. I forget what we said at the end of the shooting, remarks were fatuous in the circumstances; but in those moments I had seen more clearly than ever before the stupendous waste of energy caused by man not having learned to work in harmony with man. If ever there had been an attempt to reach the truth of the Irish story, that effort had long ago been expended. Nobody wanted the truth now, neither Loyalist nor Republican, and it was difficult to remain in Ireland and be a bystander. It was necessary to take up the cudgels for one side or the other, and to lie for the side you chose. That honest men were to be found holding to either opinion, and that rogues were to be found holding to either opinion was as absolutely a fact as that there had just been firing going on; but neither man, woman, nor child desired such an unpalatable truth. It suited the Republicans to label all members of the Crown Forces as jailbirds and assassins, to state this for propaganda purposes at the tops of their voices, to bludgeon themselves into believing it to be the case. It suited the Loyalists to call the Irish Volunteers a murder gang, though the long resistance of the Republican army, and the numbers enlisted in the ranks had long confounded this statement. It suited Loyalists to hypnotise themselves into this belief, otherwise they might have stopped short with their mouths open in the middle of a shout, and demanded of one another was there not some justice in the Republican cause. Faugh! a man grows cynical if he contemplates too long this state of things, and asks himself what is any controversy other than a handful of thinking men leading a mob against a second handful of thinking men leading a mob, and the mob some blundering animal which can be made wild or tame as it is stroked or beaten. Never is it fed with the truth. Yet fundamentally all men are the same. Those Black-and-Tans, those Auxiliary Police who had been shopping in Grafton Street at Christmas, went shopping in armoured lorries, and when the lorry stopped at the shop door, and the shoppers went inside, guards with rifles were posted in the street. Such trouble and risks did these people take that their wives, their children, and their friends should be remembered at this time.