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Gallagher - ‘Gally’ to his wife Louie - is reading Harry Johnston’s Colonisation of Africa during the hunger strike: ‘[...] my hands were most [unsteady?] with forebodings and the words would not stay in their lines’ (p.14).
‘Read Harry Johnston until the light died out of the cell ... Felt an unspeakable pity for these rude peoples who come so suddenly under an Empire’s harrow ... The cruelty of all empires! The dead they leave by the wayside ... the numbed hearts ... the desolate un-understanding homes ... huts of grass with no light in them save the whites of eyes waiting for the next blow ... barbarous, never-ending injustice against which even anger is pitiable ... All empires are the same ... ruthless ... efficient ... completely soulless ... incapable of understanding. One wants to cry. / But, brothers of Africa, we whom you know not of are making one empire weaker.’ [25]
If one could feel that somewhere in these dark, twilit forests there was even one village where the white man would never come, and where the hushed peace would never be broken and the little daily round go on of rude and gentle savage life, so much more gentle than the coming of the pioneers of civilisation, with their slave-gangs and their treacheries and their trail of corpses and forced labour in mines where black men cough and die and are so easily replaced ... I don’t know .. God seems very patient with the pioneers of civilisation. (7 April 1920; pp.25-26.)
‘But there must come a time when thousands of arrests with all that they mean, desolate homes, the breaking of the thrilling [54] friendships of young men, lost positions, poverty, anxiety, hardships, loneliness - there must come a time when these things will tell upon the faith of the people and many will sigh for relief ... for any relief ... Yet history argues against that ... dead against it. In the bitterest periods of oppression Ireland lived more really, more ideally than in any of the periods of peace. ...
Nations are so like men ... In poverty and desolation they remain faithful to their souls, who would lose them in luxury. It was only in peace-times that we become corrupt and forgot or, worse, forwent our independence. [...] Again, this draws men’s minds back to the origin of things ... A hundred men [55] are going to prove that an Irish Republic exists, exists visibly, actively; that the independence of Ireland was declared and is as much a fact as the independence of Belgium was in 1914. ... When the replacement of Macready by Greenwood, of French by Macready, foreshadows “negotiations”, it is well that the national belief in the existence of the Irish Republic should be announced to England and the world, aye, and to our own people, by a hundred dead bodies. ... Compromise will be impossible over our dead bodies. ...’ (pp.54-55.)
‘If we fail, the nation fails ... If we succeed, Ireland becomes more than every “the young girl with the walk of a queen.” ... Ireland? What is Ireland? ... Land? ... No. People? ... No. ... Something else. ... I am not ready to die for earth or for a people ... a people which is not very different from any other people ... Ireland is something else. ... Ireland is the dead and the things that the dead would have done ... Ireland is the living and the things the living would die for ... Ireland is the Spirit. ... it is [56] the tradition of the laughing courage of men upon whose heads the pitch-cap has been placed by fiends ... It is the tradition of the undefeated ... of indomitable failure ... of love for an ideal as strong as the love of the Apostles for Christ as he quivered upon the Cross ... The crucifixion of Ireland is interminable and so her apostles are innumerable ... Ireland is justice and truth .. That Ireland with the Christ-like spirit which God breathes into subject peoples ... that Ireland I am willing to die for; I wish, I long to die for [...] the weaker we become, the stronger we prove ourselves to be ...’ (p.57.)
On Philip, the O/C who calls the hunger strike: ‘No humour in his face ... Almost no light in it. ... Hard thin lips, hard piercing eyes, good features with no softness anywhere in them ... We had not met before, but his face had his history upon it. He is the type of the men who count the cost very little. ... There would probably be light in his face in battle, especially if her were cornered and one bad aim meant death to him ... I can see him laughing then ... He laughed seldom an d as he looked, hardly. ... His type is the Irish militarist ... When I met him I realised I would never be a real soldier ... In these days I shall try to do what a soldier does ... I shall advise all young men in Ireland to do as soldiers do. [88] ... But I shall advise none to become soldiers. ... Ireland needs men like Philip; but it is Ireland’s tragedy to need them. ... Men without softness anywhere in their faces are found in subject peoples, creating revolution. But in empires they are found - creating Amritsars [i.e., the massacre perpetrated by Gen. Dyer who ‘murdered hundreds of men that he might not be laughed at’: p.80.] (pp.88-89.)
The work includes a singular colloquy with Death (pp.92-97); also poetry and some self-criticism of same (pp.100-01, &c.); reveals a moment of humiliation in the class-room as a boy: ‘the day when I said “compromiss” instead of compromise still burns in me.’ The teacher is a Mrs. French (p.102.)
That is what we are dying for .. A hundred of us, a mere handful of men, being used as the proof that the things of the spirit are greater than the things of the flesh; and that the flesh must be offered up in defence of the spirit ... It is well that this thing has come now. A people is most moved by the [111] power of sacrifice that the soul creates in the body. ... When we are dead we shall be an inspiration to the people. Men will live better cause we have died - not many men: some in this city, some in that; a greater number in the villages and towns because there the spirit is not trampled out by the brute thing called progress ... Pearse made many understand and love the Spirit of God and Its attributes of justice and liberty ... love them with a zeal almost wanton ... Men who died in loneliness and darkness for that which is half-human, half-divine, a nation’s tradition, these men light strange fires in the hearts of men and teach them the greatness of love and gentleness and the simple non-submission to evil ... this hunger-strike did not begin in a desire to teach this or any other thing. It began in the wilful intention to fight and defeat a tyranny which touched ourselves personally and the nation for which we care greatly ... It had personal gains in it also. ... For me there was a personal gain hidden in among the things which prompted me to strike .... But, liberty and justice, the fight for these overshadowed the sordid things. .. That is true ... It requires something greater than self to make a man willing [112] to give up his life .. Death is the proof a sceptical world demands of a man’s love for justice, of the superiority of justice over life. ... The world does not understand the greatness of liberty until death is found in defending it ... Many said they would believe in Casement if he were hanged ... Ugh! ... Sincere people who when Casement was hanged took inspiration from him ... / Not though our choosing, our names have become with our people a synonym for their tradition, the tradition of tireless revolt against tyranny .. Not this name or that but “The Mountjoy Hunger-strikers” [... / B]y killing us they are creating a hundred thousand of us. ’ (p.111-12.)
The history of an empire is such a cowardly thing when it is understood [113] ... Subject peoples have few historians until they are free; that is strange too. ... It means that until a people is freed the class which has the leisure and the means which writing history implies is foreign to its own people; that the historical class is ashamed of its own people until by recognised freedom it becomes respectable .. And, yet, it is not so strange; for the learned are usually the sons of the well-to-do - in subject peoples at least - and the well-to-do are themselves the sons of Mammon - not all, but many. And it is Mammon which enslaves and oppresses weak nations. It is really the historians’ own fathers who are being written of by them; and it becomes akin to parricide for the historians of a subject people to champion its strivings for freedom. ... Perhaps that is also why a people battling against imperial encroachment is led by men of great character and great ability; but not often of great culture ... Here, too, may be the reason why a people when it becomes free becomes materialistic; when freedom is won the class which reverences respectability has no longer reason to malign its nation so it leads it; lead it to the worship of Mammon, the only deity that the respectable class has every really understood ... This was never so clear to [114] me as now when those who are doing battle for us outside are the waitresses and quay-workers; while many who are called cultured and learned are cursing the closed doors of a favourite club .... (pp.114-15.)
‘I have my own internal revolutions, a kind of personal Mexico.’ (p.117.)
‘Ireland needs a revolution. Easter Week has to be repeated that the people may realise their subjection; for, once they realise it, it is over, they will end it .. That is in my mind every time I look [117] into Philip’s face .. That cleansing revolution may be at hand if we have courage. (pp.118-19.)
‘They say Mr Bonar Law says we must die. ... Very well, Mr Law .. You must keep your Empire; but we must keep our faith. And our faith will outlast your Empire. [...] numbers are nothing and men are nothing ... You are dealing with an old nation’s tradition, its memory, its destiny, its faith ... You are dealing with the boyhood of the world: a young Ireland, a young India, a young Egypt, and perhaps even, Mr Law, a young England. We are merely a manifestation of an ancient nation’s immortality and a young nation’s hatred of injustice and [122] oppression. ... What can you do against elemental things? .... Kill? [...] It is a glad day for us, Mr Law, that you make us died; and a proud day for our people.’ (pp.122-23.)
At a hunger-strikers’ concert a young Republican prisoner sings Padraic Colum’s ballad “She moved through the Fair”:
‘My young love said to me:
My mother won’t mind
And my father won’t slight you
For your lack of kind:
And she laid her hand on me -
And this did she say:
It will not be long, love, till our wedding day.
She went away from me,
And she moved through the fair;
And fondly I watched her
Move here and there.
And then she went homeward
with one star awake
As the swan in the evening moves over the lake.
The people are saying
That no two hearts were we,
But that one had a sorrow
That never was said:
And she smiled as she passed me
With her goods and her gear,
And that was the last that I saw of my dear.’
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Gallagher writes, ‘Of all the weird airs! One of the Antrim ballads, I think’, and remarks after the singing is over: ‘Dead silence .. He stopped, and not one man clapped or cheered. .. Just dead silence. It sounded awful. Nobody has any hope ... That ends the concert.’ (pp.144-45.) |