Tipperary (53 page)

“Sir, they're here, they're here!” she cried and burst into tears. “Eddie's home, and Mr. Harney's with him, sir, they're
here.
”

It became my turn to run—and I found Harney in the Ballroom, looking all around him.

I said, as though to a stranger, “May I help you, sir?”

He laughed and spun around.

“The minute I turn my back,” he said, “everything falls apart.”

We did not embrace, we did not shake hands; that was not our way. The tears in our eyes did not fall; as they evaporated, I began to show him what had been damaged. He shook his head over and over.

“I don't understand it,” he said. “I simply don't understand it. But—it hasn't happened since?”

His question contained more than a little severity; I had calculated accurately by writing to him.

As we walked, we talked; he told me about the camp. It had contained Germans captured in the war, and when he'd heard that he and the other Irish republicans were being sent there, he'd felt great relief; he'd known then that they would have prisoner-of-war status.

I asked, “Did you travel alone today?”

“No. We came in at Cork, and now I have to go on home.”

As he spoke, two other men appeared, and he added, “These were my traveling companions.”

One, I deduced, must be the brother of Helen—he had the same barrel shape, round head, and pug nose; the other was our erstwhile visitor and my courtroom interrogator, Mr. Noonan, who, as he walked toward us, was deep in laughing conversation with April—which was how my fortunes grew mixed that day and afterward.

Old IRA men in Tipperary often stated, “Frongoch freed us.” The saying had a double edge. First you were expected to understand that they had been released from the camp. But what they really meant was that Frongoch bred the guerrillas who took up where Easter Week left off. More than seventeen hundred men were sent there. Most had some connection to the idea of armed rebellion—and those who didn't soon caught on.

Inside the camp—later nicknamed “Sinn Fein's University”—they created a regime. The teachers among them set up classes, with much history and politics. Their intense worship already had a zealous Catholic base. They spent hours every day exercising; they drilled like soldiers on a barracks square.

Most crucially, they heard military theory. They acknowledged the central fact that had been driven home during Easter Week: they had no chance whatsoever against a standing army of the size and firepower available to Britain. But they did have assets that might prove invincible. They had a countryside in which thousands of men could hide, and an indigenous population now sympathetic enough to hide them.

So, in Frongoch, they agreed upon a style of warfare that we Irish subsequently claimed to have invented—the rural guerrilla. With variations, they drew up a strategy that would be called “Flying Columns.” Small active units—perhaps no more than a dozen men in any one of them— would be drawn from as many parishes and villages across the country as they could muster. With basic arms, such as rifles, handguns, and, where it could be managed, a machine gun, they would attack local garrisons and ambush military transports.

This strategy became famous as a means of empowering the powerless. Some historians claim that Chairman Mao emulated it, as well as the Vietcong. Many agree that it defined the French Resistance, a claim supported by the fact that the word “maquis,” which the French called themselves, means scrub or scrubland—from which the
maquisards
materialized to attack German convoys.

Among the Irish, its chief proponent became the revolution's—and the country's—greatest hero of all time. He taught his guerrilla tactics in Frongoch, when he came out he began to organize it, and later he led it. His name was Michael Collins—and he was the next visitor to Tipperary Castle. Later that week, he came looking for Harney. Incidentally, Charles never describes whether Dermot Noonan stayed on, whether he ate a meal at the castle, or when he left.

I walked with Harney to the main gate; he took my bicycle and would “report back for duty,” he told me, “next Monday, the first of January. It's a new week, a new year, and a new era.” I watched until he rode out of sight; few pleasures in life have been greater than seeing Harney safe and well after all he had been through. He did not look thinner or plumper, he did not require a haircut or a shave—he looked exactly the same.

When I asked if the incarceration had affected him, he said, “There were people who made it good.” One of those people arrived at the castle on Friday the 29th of December.

I did not know who he was—but I knew from the moment I saw him that he was remarkable. He alighted from a motor-car which stopped halfway up the avenue, at a place where it is wide enough for a large, wheeled vehicle to turn around. Wearing a gray homburg hat and a gabardine coat, he walked quickly. Work at the castle had eased down a little; I had given many of our workers some days of holiday, on account of inclement weather and so that they might enjoy Christmas—and thus I alone saw him arrive; I stood in the now splendid main doorway.

He walked straight to me and held out his hand.

“Mr. O'Brien”—a statement, not a question.

I said, “Yes,” and he said, “My name is Mick Collins and I'm looking for Joe Harney.”

“He went to see his family in Urlingford. He'll be back here on Monday.”

Collins looked past me and all around. “So this is the castle?”

“You know about it?”

“Joe talked about it all the time. I teased him about it—keeping alive the imperial past.”

He laughed, and I said, “Is that what you believe?”

“May I see the place?”

He stood about five feet ten inches, a very handsome fellow, quick of speech, a Cork accent. As we walked, he looked at the rooms minutely— and I surveyed him.

Back in the hallway, he asked, “Is the woman who owns it here?”

I shook my head. April had gone to visit my mother; they had become friends, and tried to meet frequently.

“Well,” he said, looking around. “I have two thoughts, and they're both right. On the one hand, this place was built on the backs of abused tenants, whose unjust rents paid for it. On the other hand, it might be owned by foreigners, but we're the ones who built it. Irish skill, labor, and genius built this place.” He pointed to the stucco fruit clusters on the injured cornices. “See them? I bet they're Stapletons. Not an Italian name, nor a French one, but Stapleton. An Irishman.”

I said, “I'm very aware of all that—it's one of the things I like about my job.”

“Well, it'll all be yours one day.”

I shook my head. “No. Not at all.”

Long ago, I had begun refusing that hope, stamping down that aspiration.

“Joe Harney says you're going to marry this woman here. He says it's like watching two stars spinning around each other.”

I said, firmly, “Mr. Collins, that will not occur.”

He walked away from me and came back again.

“Come here to me,” he said.

To my astonishment, he grabbed my forearms and began to wrestle with me. Such strength! He was laughing, and I got over my surprise, went along with it, and laughed also; we wrestled and tugged, hauled and heaved all around the castle hall, that big echoing place and not a soul to see us. Finally, I gripped his hands behind him in a way that he could not break and I heard myself say like a schoolboy, “Give in.”

“Never!”

“Give in.”

“No.”

“Give in,” I said, “or it's the floor for you.”

He laughed, his arms sagged, I let go, he turned around, and we shook hands.

“Mr. O'Brien, can you fire a gun?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You can guess.”

I shook my head. “No. Nor will I.”

Michael Collins said, “I must go; I have a man waiting for me.”

“But you haven't had a drink or a bite to eat!”

He said, “There'll be other times.”

And there were other times, many other times, and I relished them all, no matter what difficulty accompanied them, and in common with the rest of the country I wept on the day he died. He was twenty-six years and two months old the day I first met him; I shall always be glad of that moment, overjoyed that I subsequently saw him so often, and deeply sad that I shall never meet him again.

Michael Collins became a walking legend, a living myth. If he had actually met all the people who said they knew him, he would never have got anything done; he'd have been shaking hands all day, every day. But my own father did meet him; he knew him through a cousin married to one of Collins's cousins.

My father didn't like Collins. He said that Collins “scared” him—although he did acknowledge the legendary coolness of nerve, said to be Collins's chief feature. And when I was a boy, my father told me a story of his own days as a young railway clerk in Dublin, where he worked for some months of 1920.

One summer night, in Sackville (now O'Connell) Street, he ran into a military cordon. He had to wait behind the barricade, as did everybody else. As he stood there, my father saw a man nearby, holding a bicycle. My father told a story well.

“The man saw me, strolled over, rolling the bike, and he said to me, ‘You're John Joe Nugent’ and immediately put a finger to his own lips, indicating of course that I shouldn't reply, ‘And you're Michael Collins'—which is what I might have done, except that I wouldn't, because he was the most wanted man in Ireland; there was a reward of ten thousand on his head, and big ‘Wanted’ posters of him everywhere, on every wall in the city.

“Before I could say to him, ‘What are you doing here—are you out of your mind and all these soldiers everywhere?’ he says to me, ‘Would you ever hold this bike for me for a few minutes?’ and he handed the handlebars to me. I grabbed them and he walked off toward the buildings where all the soldiers were going in and out like bees in a hive.

“The next minute I saw him, on the steps of the Gresham Hotel, and he was talking to the officer in charge of the military action. They were laughing like old pals, and it was the first time I found out that sweat can flow down from under your arms—it was like two little cool rivers down my sides. And then I saw Collins strolling back toward me, the hat on his head, the gabardine coat on a summer's night.

“He took the bike back from me. ‘Thanks, John Joe,’ he says, and I says to him, ‘In the name of God, are you out of your head? What were you up to?’ And he says to me, ‘I had to find out what the soldiers were doing.’ And he winked at me, and he leaned forward, and he whispered, ‘And d'you know what they're doing? They're searching the Gresham Hotel for me.’ And off he goes. That was Michael Collins for you. Cool as a lake.”

Collins turned Ireland—or, rather, the British authority in Ireland— inside out. After the internment in Wales, he developed in practice what he had taught there in theory. He built guerrilla squadrons all across the country—each county had its Flying Columns. And he assembled other hit squads that devastated British intelligence and killed their agents. He saw Ireland's nosiness and gossip as guerrilla assets—with the right contacts, he could uncover any plan. And in propaganda terms he capitalized upon every British atrocity and reprisal; his supporters reported and published them.