of these battalions (the 10th Dublins), and
asked them how they did their scouting work during the conflict. "We
needed no scouts," was the answer; "the old women told us everything."
The first volley which met a company of this battalion killed an
officer; he was so strongly Nationalist in his sympathy as to be almost
a Sinn Feiner. Others had been active leaders in the Howth gun-running.
It was not merely a case of Irishmen firing on their fellow-countrymen:
it was one section of the original Volunteers firing on another.

Yet from the moment when English troops came on the scene, another
strain of feeling began to make itself felt. A lady ordered tea to be
made for one of the incoming regiments, halted outside her house on the
line of march. The refreshment was long in coming, and she went down to
see why. She found her cook up in arms: "Is it me boil the kettle for
Englishmen coming in to shoot down Irishmen?" Yet that was still the
voice of a minority. When I came home from France a few weeks later, a
shrewd and prosperous Nationalist man of business said to me with fury:
"The fools! It was the first rebellion that ever had the country
against it, and they turned the people round in a week."

Nothing could have prevented the halo of martyrdom from attaching itself
to those who died by the law for the sake of Irish freedom: the
tradition was too deeply ingrained in Ireland's history. Yet Redmond did
not go beyond the measure of average Irish opinion when he accepted the
first three executions as just. People at least knew who these men were,
and their signatures to the proclamation of an Irish Republic proved
their leadership. They were given the death of rebels in arms, to which
no dishonour attaches. But a fatal mistake was made in suppressing all
report of the proceedings of the court-martial on them, and this mistake
was to be repeated indefinitely. Ireland was made to feel that this
whole affair was taken completely out of the hands of Irishmen--that no
attempt even was made to enlist Irish opinion on the side of law by a
statement of the evidence on which law acted. Day by day there was a new
bald announcement that such and such men had been shot; and these were
men whose names Ireland at large had never heard of.

Then on top of all came the appalling admission that an officer
suffering from insanity had taken out three prisoners and caused them to
be shot without trial on his own responsibility, none of th