“May I read you a poem I’ve just written?”
I have turned my face
To this road before me
To the deed that I see
And the death I shall die. .
“Even the Daughters of Erin are arming themselves!” Thom McDonagh chimes in. “Arms, discipline and tactics, they say, should be the one thought, the one work, the one play of Irish men and women.”
Never before has a revolution been led by poets, marvels Neil’s inner voice. All the brightest and most brilliant men — yes, and women, too.
His cousin Thom had taken him to Monto and now he has brought him to Sinn Féin. Thom wants to make a man of him, and Neil is gratefuclass="underline" occasionally he even feels his blood stir with something akin to genuine indignation.
Thom has been drilling, Neil has not. Thom has been marching up and down, running, hiding, taking rifles apart and putting them back together, aiming, doing target practice. . Neil has been reading for his final examinations.
“Sinn Féin!” Thom shouts, leaping to his feet along with the others (and this Gaelic expression will be translated as a subtitle: Ourselves alone!).
“Well, perhaps not quite entirely alone?” Neil whispers. “It does seem we’ve been seeking and receiving a fair amount of help from the Germans.”
“Hasn’t politics always been the art of intelligent compromise?”
“I s’pose so.”
“No struggle is pure, Neil. The Germans have the same enemy as we do, and they’ve promised to argue for Irish independence at the peace conference after the war, if there is a war, and there will be a war. They have arms and ammunition and we do not, so we need and shall take their help. We shall do what must be done in order to win, conquer, establish and impose ourselves.”
Neil’s right foot bounces impatiently on his left knee. Again we hear his thoughts in voice-over. .
I know as much, sweet cousin, about our people’s moral strength as about their military weakness, and have no difficulty grasping that it is in Ireland’s interest, if there is a war, and there will be a war, to aid and abet the German military in every way, generously sharing our coastline and coastal waters with German submarines and accepting German weapons in return. . But none of this dying stuff, Pearse. Nor shall I follow in the diverging footsteps of poor Willie Yeats, torn between political activism and the inane theosophical ramblings of Madame Blavatsky! Yeats will get lost and I shall go on, for I have a job to do on this earth.
The bard now aspires, as he avows, to be Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish. As for me, my soul is at white heat. I shall write of the fine determination in these meetings, the men and women in revolt from the mud and blood of their childhood, with official British history pounded into their brains at school but body memories of revolting injustice at the hands of the British occupier. Peasants dispossessed by the thousands, their land reclaimed, their villages burned, their cottages toppled with battering rams, their children screaming in the cold and rain — yes, Irish children trembling and dizzy at school, trying to think and to study on an empty stomach. I shall describe how today’s young heroines and heroes of Erin scramble to find meaning in old tales, in the claim to roots, grunting as they snuffle like pigs in Celtic drivel, shoving their snouts into the soil of Ireland, seeking to unearth true meaning, old meaning, deep dark smelly truffle meaning. As if the Celts had not themselves invaded this island! They were invaders as much as the Brits were, merely a few centuries earlier! Our culture is not in the past; it is in the future! Our heroes are not the puffed-up Cúchulainns of yesteryore, but the amazing men and women who, hic et nunc, devote their lives to shaking off the shackles of the shite-eating Brits.
“Yes, we are prepared to die,” thunders Pearse, “but for our country, not for another! If war breaks out, my friends, you can be sure that the British will use us again as they have used us always. They’ll turn us into cannon fodder, as they did in the Boer War fifteen years ago.”
“I was there!” pipes up a haggard, gravelly-voiced man whose hair is streaked with gray. “Saw it with my own eyes, I did! Spent ten years o’ my life fighting the Brits in South Africa. Raised the Irish Transvaal Brigade against them! Became a Boer citizen, I did!”
“That’s MacBride,” Thom murmurs.
Neil takes a closer look at the orator. Bad posture, bad complexion, red wine in his veins, Major John MacBride is an unpleasant man, whose bushy mustache no doubt conceals a weakness of the upper lip.
“There were five hundred of us battling the Brits down there, and who did we end up shooting, I ask you?” MacBride shouts. “Our own Irish brothers, our flesh and blood, the Dublin Fusiliers and the Inniskillings! It broke my heart, boys. The British prance about on tiptoe like sissy ballerinas, protected behind a great thick wall of Irish flesh. They wait till we’ve been mowed down, then take credit for the victory.”
“He loves to tell the story,” Thom whispers. “In Paris, he told it so often that he grew addicted to red wine.”
Neil nods. John MacBride is a national hero, but he is also Willie Yeats’s worst enemy, for it was he, a Catholic, a commoner, an adventurer, whom Maud Gonne, the great love and light of the poet’s life, ultimately chose to marry. In 1903 Willie had been traumatized by Maud’s telegram informing him of her plan to convert to Catholicism and become MacBride’s bride. He’d written her letter after letter begging her not to make so grotesque an error. . but to no avail. And oh, how it had tortured him to think of the two of them together. Maud, like himself, a person of upper-class Protestant and thus innately superior background, a higher type of person, in touch with life’s most subtle, mystical, poetic, ecstatic, esoteric secrets — Willie’s own brilliant, precious, unspeakably beautiful Maud — in bed, naked, her skin against the skin of this silly, noisy warrior, this callow, superficial, bragging, filthy, lower-class Catholic. . No, the image was revolting, intolerable!
Like everyone else, Neil had followed the complex history of the love triangle in the newspapers. True to Yeats’s predictions, within a year after the irons of holiness had been clamped round their bodies and wedlocked, John MacBride had disappointed his wife — and Maud, shortly after giving birth to the son they named Seagan (Gaelic for Seán), had sued him for divorce.
Oh, but it was ill thought of in Ireland, both to divorce and to cast aspersions upon Irish military heroes, especially if one happened to be a British-born Protestant female. Perhaps Mrs. Mac-Bride was not, as she claimed to be, a Volunteer committed to Irish freedom, but rather a filthy spy paid by the British to infiltrate the Volunteers! Meanwhile, poor Willie Yeats had continued to moon, sigh, long, pine and yearn for her, occasionally attempting to win her over by striking the stance of political commitment, but consistently reverting to his mistrust of the masses, the lower classes, the Catholics. .
My dear is angry that of late
I cry all base blood down
As though she had not taught me hate
By kisses to a clown.
And so it was that as dramatic hours ticked by and her country suffered — that is to say, the country that, though born in England and raised primarily in France by French governesses after her mother died when she was five, Maud felt to be hers, given that her British soldier of a father, after having deserted the army and taken up the struggle of the Irish nation against his own and taught her to fight for justice always, had died in turn when she was eighteen and madly in love with him, thus making his political combat her raison d’être once and for all — as general strikes followed lockouts, which gave rise to demonstrations, riots, shootings and imprisonments, as Home Rule was denounced by Ulster as a thin disguise for Rome Rule and defeated and the tension rose. . poor, gorgeous, frustrated, flaming-tongued, red-haired Mrs. MacBride was reduced to following Irish news from abroad, writing articles and raising money in Paris for the cause of Irish independence but no longer actually daring to set foot in Ireland for fear that, were she to leave France, she’d lose legal custody of young Seagan. .