Our motor car was the only vehicle that entered or left Dublin without being searched during those five days. The same bluff as had carried Sean Hogan and myself out of a similar difficulty near Limerick a year before now proved successful at Whitehall, within a few hundred yards of the house where, seven months later, I was to have my biggest fight for life—at Drumcondra. CHAPTER XVIII. THE BARRACK ATTACKS Our new plan for more active operations against the British was, in short, to attack them in their strongholds—the police barracks throughout the country. The peelers were now far too cautious to patrol the roads. They seldom if ever ventured any distance from their barracks. We could not meet them in the open. But if the mountain would not come to Mohammed, there was only the other thing to be done. We had got to go to the police and attack them on their own grounds. At this time, in the spring of 1920, they were rapidly evacuating all outlying barracks in small places where there was a danger that the garrison could be cut off or surprised. They were concentrating on the larger barracks where the garrisons were strengthened and the buildings strongly fortified with steel shutters and barbed wire entanglements. It was at this time that the I.R.A. carried out its most intensive simultaneous series of operations. In one night no less than about a thousand vacated police barracks were burned to the ground—the operations extending to every county in Ireland. In this way we prevented any possibility that those barracks would ever again be occupied by the enemy. A thousand links of the British military chain had been severed. At this time the peelers had abandoned all pretence of being a police force. They were openly and avowedly a military force not attempting to suppress crime but holding the country by brute force for England. When the R.I.C. uniforms disappeared from a village our I.R.A. police promptly took over the duties that they should have discharged, and right well they did it. The robber and the housebreaker soon learned to have for the I.R.A. a wholesome respect he never had for the R.I.C.