Tales of the R.I.C.

In many parts of the west of Ireland one finds small mountain farms of from five to twenty acres, generally consisting of twenty-five per cent rock, twenty-five per cent heather, and the remainder of indifferent grass-land. On such a farm a peasant will rear a large family, and how it is done is one of the mysteries of Ireland; but done it is, and often.

Patsey Mulligan was one of a family of ten, brought up on one of these farms until he was seventeen, when his father told him that it was time he thought of keeping himself, and, incidentally, of earning some money for his mother. Patsey quite agreed with his father, but soon found that it was much easier to talk of getting work in such a poor district as Cloonalla than to get it.

In the end Patsey made up his mind that the only thing to do was to go to England in search of work, and one cold winter’s morning he set off from his home, in company with three other lads from the same townland, to walk the fifteen miles across the mountains and bogs to the nearest railway station at Ballybor. Arriving in England, they made their way to a town in Yorkshire, where one of them had a brother working in a coal-mine, and within three days of leaving his home in Ireland Patsey found himself a Yorkshire miner.

Hardly had he settled down to his work in the coal-mine when the war broke out, followed by a rush of young miners to enlist, amongst others Patsey Mulligan; and before he realised what he was doing, he was a full private in a famous Yorkshire regiment. Patsey had, however, enlisted in the name of Murphy, hoping to keep his people in ignorance of the fact, knowing it would break his mother’s heart if she knew he was fighting.

Patsey thoroughly enjoyed the training, and within seven months of enlisting embarked for France; and after a few weeks’ pleasant life in billets, gradually moved north until finally the battalion took over trenches in the famous salient of Ypres—a great contrast to Patsey’s home in the west of Ireland.

There happened to be in the battalion a young Irish subaltern by name Anthony Blake, and when Blake told his Company Sergeant-Major to find him a servant—an Irishman if possible—Patsey at once volunteered for the job, and between the two young Irishmen there soon sprang up a friendship through the common bond of danger and discomfort.

After some time Patsey learnt through one of the boys with whom he had first crossed to England that his mother was dangerously ill, and that she had repeatedly written to Patsey to come home and see her before she died, but had naturally received no answer. In his trouble he appealed to Blake, and that night found him waiting at Popperinghe Station for the leave train with a return-warrant to Ballybor in his pocket.

On his arrival at Ballybor he set out on his long fifteen-mile tramp to his home at Cloonalla, and late on a summer’s evening the family of Mulligan were startled by a British soldier in full marching order walking into their home.

Before his mother died she made Patsey promise that he would not go back to France, and that he would stay at home and help his father to mind the other children. It is hard for a son to refuse his dying mother, and doubly so for an Irish boy.

When his mother’s funeral was over, Patsey buried his uniform and equipment in a bog-hole at night; but his rifle he hid in the thatch of an outhouse, and it was given out in the neighbourhood that he had been discharged from the Army as medically unfit.

After the usual time Patsey was posted as a deserter in his battalion; Blake found a new servant and forgot all about his late one, while Patsey settled down to work with his father, and the memory of Blake and the British Army faded from his mind.

Though wounded three times, Blake was one of the lucky men to return home to Ireland at the end of the war, and at once set about looking for a job. The son of a country doctor in the south of Ireland, at the outbreak of war he had just left school, and had not had time to settle on a career.

But if in England it was hard for ex-officers to get employment, in Ireland it was doubly so; and Blake soon found that it was next to impossible for a man who had worn the King’s uniform to get any work or appointment. The power of Sinn Fein was beginning to be felt in the land, and though many people would have gladly employed men returned from the front, they dared not.

At last, when he had quite given up hope, he received by post an offer to join the newly-formed Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and, gladly jumping at such an offer, was soon in training at the depot in Dublin. After a tour of duty in the south, the authorities offered him a cadetship in the R.I.C., and in the course of two months Blake found himself the District Inspector at Ballybor.

At this time the R.I.C., after about as bad a hammering as any force ever received, were beginning to get their tails up again; and whereas previously no policeman dared show his face outside his barracks after dark, they were now occasionally sending out strong patrols at night-time, to the great concern of the local Sinn Feiners, who for a considerable time had had things all their own way in the south and west.

The police district of Ballybor is, like many others in the west of Ireland, large, consisting chiefly of mountains, bogs, lakes, and a few small scattered villages, some of them hidden away in the mountains—an ideal district in peace time for a D.I. who is fond of shooting and fishing, but in war time a hard district to control with the small force of police at a D.I.’s disposal.

Previous to Blake’s arrival all the barracks in the district had been vacated with the exception of Ballybor and “Grouse Lodge,” a small barrack at the foot of the mountains in the Cloonalla district; and as each barrack was vacated, it was blown up or burnt by the local Volunteers.

In all former rebellions in Ireland the Government have found that to get information it was only necessary to pay money. Sometimes it did not cost much, other times they had to pay generously, but always money produced information; and at the beginning of the Sinn Fein trouble the Government naturally assumed that money would produce the informers as before. But this time they were wrong, and it was only—when the Government were at their wits’ end—by a lucky chance of finding important papers on a man, who was shot at night during a military raid on a Dublin hotel, that at last they received the information which enabled them to grapple successfully with Sinn Fein.

There is no doubt that the originators of Sinn Fein had read their country’s history carefully, and were determined that this time there should be no informers; and to this end they organised a “Reign of Terror” throughout Ireland such as few countries have ever seen at any time in history. Their chief obstacle was the R.I.C., and once this force was reduced to a state of inactivity—they thought they had broken it for good and all—their task appeared comparatively easy. Every man, woman, and child in the south and west of Ireland knew that if they gave any information to the police they would be shot, and shot they were.

When Blake took over his duties at Ballybor, he found that the police had no source of information whatsoever, with the result that each attack on a barrack and every ambush of a patrol came as a surprise to them. So great was the “Reign of Terror” in the Ballybor district that no person dare speak to a policeman, and the shopkeepers were afraid to serve one, even with the necessities of life.

Blake quickly realised that if he was ever to get the upper hand in his district, he must discover some source of getting information, and find it quickly, before the whole population were driven to join forces against him.

One of Sinn Fein’s principles has been that the fewer who know the fewer can tell, and, as a rule, there has only been one man in a district—usually the local captain of the Volunteers—who has information of coming events; and Blake knew that his only chance of reliable news lay with this man, and with him alone.

About the only information which his men could give him of his area was that a young man, who lived in the townland of Cloonalla, named Patsey Mulligan, was the captain of the local Volunteers, and that his house was close to the barracks at Grouse Lodge; so he determined to go out to Grouse Lodge Barracks and stay there until he had either come to terms with Patsey Mulligan, or saw that it was hopeless.

On a fine winter’s morning Blake set out from the barracks at Ballybor in the Crossley tender with an escort of six police, the most he dared take with him for fear of weakening the Ballybor garrison. It was market-day in the little town, and all along the road to Grouse Lodge they met the country people coming in—some in horse-carts, others in ass-carts, and the poorer ones on foot—but not one of them would speak to or even look at the police, the people on foot even getting off the road into the fields directly they caught sight of the police-car approaching.

On learning from one of the constables that Mulligan’s house was not on the main road to Grouse Lodge Barracks, but on a byroad, Blake ordered the driver to go by this road, and when he came to Mulligan’s house to stop the car and pretend that something required adjusting in his engine. After a time the driver stopped outside an ordinary thatched cottage on the side of the road, and, as Blake had expected, the inhabitants came to the door to see who it was.

The first to appear was a young man, and as the constable whispered to Blake that he was Patsey Mulligan, Blake nearly shouted for joy, for he saw that the man was none other than “Murphy,” his former servant in France, and a deserter from his Majesty’s Army in the field!

At once, before Patsey could get a good look at him and possibly recognise him, Blake ordered the driver to go on to the barracks as fast as the bad road would allow them.

The question now was how to get hold of Mulligan alone, and this was settled by the information which a constable at Grouse Lodge was able to give. It appeared that this plucky constable had for some time past been in the habit of slipping out of the barracks by the back entrance at night in plain clothes and returning before daybreak. He had discovered that Mulligan was in the habit of meeting a girl nearly every night at a certain lonely spot about a mile from his house; and from overhearing their conversation, had found out that Patsey wanted to marry this girl, but that she had refused to marry him until he had enough money to take her out of the country and to buy a small farm in America.

On questioning this constable, Blake was able to get a detailed account of Mulligan’s movements since the time of his desertion. It appeared that for a considerable time after he came back he hardly left his home at all, contenting himself by working on his father’s farm, and it was not until the Sinn Fein Volunteers were started in the district and Mulligan was elected captain that he appeared in public.