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“Lloyd George has promised to settle the Home Rule question after—”

“Shite! And maybe I'm the only one what sees it, but I've done with fighting for yer fookin lords in Parliament and the dukes on their country estates. Ye know what my crime was? I tried to rescue men from death, damnation and destruction.”

“Your Victoria Cross. You dragged how many wounded back to the British lines on that first day?”

“Bollocks to that! I tried to rescue them by telling them the fookin truth.”

He's aware of his hand shaking, cigarette ash trembling off into the air. The fookin medal. Christ, he can't even remember getting back to his trenches, never mind the story that they tell of him going back and forth and back and forth all night, bringing in the wounded and the dead, and sometimes just the bits. How many, Christ, how many of them? They say he was only gone for minutes at a time, that he went straight for the bodies like a homing pigeon, like he knew where every single one of them was laying in the dirt, each fookin one of them.

“Bollocks to that,” he says. “I tried to rescue them three days before, and I couldn't. I fookin couldn't. I tried to give them…the fookin truth of it. So, ye ask me why I'm bitter and twisted in the heart, and suffering so from grief, and fookin pitiful to look at. I tell ye, it's yer fookin dukes and lords are all to blame, without an ounce of fookin pity in their hearts. This fookin…torture is their fookin shame.”

The doctor pushes his glasses up his nose, closes the manila folder.

“A man,” he says, “would have to have a heart of stone or iron not to have…sympathy with your suffering. I'm…I'm not going to tell you that I…understand what you've gone through. I've seen enough at Inchgillan to know that soothing platitudes help little, if at all.”

He takes a draw of his cigarette.

“But I want to help you, Seamus. Believe me, I want to help.”

And Seamus wonders how this fooker thinks 150 fookin volts of electricity applied directly to his tongue is supposed to help.

“I want to help you fight this illness.”

THE SECOND CITY OF THE EMPIRE

“I want to help you fight these fookers,” he had said, after one of the Sunday afternoon economics classes, after the other workers had left, fired up with all these new ideas and words like
proletariat
and
imperialism.
Maclean had looked at Seamus with a little curiosity, but for all that Seamus stumbled as he talked, sure and the fellow didn't seem at all condescending, not at all yer intellectual with his learning all from books and out to tell the poor uneducated masses what they need. No, he'd just taken off his spectacles and waited patiently for Seamus to finish, and then nodded.

Sure and Seamus didn't even know he was going to do it until he found his gob opening and the words pouring out, not even when his feet just stood there as the rest of them all filed out and Maclean gathered up his notes to put them in his leather satchel. It's not that he made the decision then and there; more that he just knew that, with this word here, this action there, he'd already made the decision long ago, without ever even knowing it.

“No human being on the face of the earth,” says Maclean—schoolteacher revolutionary, standing up there in the dock of Edinburgh High Court—“no government is going to take away from me my right to speak, my right to protest against wrong. I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.”

Five years he got for that, for sedition. Released after eight months of protest marches, week after week.

And Seamus listens to the welder telling the story now to his mates as they all sit in the Sarry Heid, drinking their 70/s and their stouts, the story of this pacifist who's led rent strikes amongst munitions workers and the lassies of the Neilston Mills, and how him and the rest of the CWC packed the hall to drown Lloyd George out with the
Red Flag,
when he came up to “sort out” the wild men of the Clyde.

Muir and Shinwell, Kirkwood and Gallacher. Maxton, Stewart, Johnston, Wheatley. Shop stewards. MPs. Schoolteachers. Preachers. They're all names spoken of with respect by these men. But John Maclean, now he's a fookin legend.

The police bear down on them like a fookin cavalry charge with their stupid wee bits of wood swinging down upon their heads, and there's one of them up there on the steps of the City Chambers with the paper in his hand; sure and the Riot Act it is then, to be read to them. Well, Seamus thinks, we'll give ye a fookin riot. And around him is the chaos of the charging horses and the workers breaking but not running, just turning—the battle-hardened veterans that so many of them are—turning to the iron railings and to the bottles from the truck with its tarpaulin pulled clear and twenty or thirty of them swarming over it, and turning back, armed now, to stand their ground and fight. Sure and they call Glasgow the Second City of the Empire. Well, maybe this is where the Empire starts to fall.

It's George Square, Glasgow, 31st of January 1919. They'll call it Bloody Friday in the history books that are left unwritten.

“I want to help you fight these fookers,” Seamus had said, after his fourth week at Maclean's class listening to the man lay out the principles of socialism in terms that even Seamus understands, after his second week of standing quiet at the back of the Committee meetings up on Bath Street as Maclean and Gallacher and the rest of them discuss the coming strike, after God knows how many fookin months of being just another paddy working on the ships with all the other immigrants, keeping his head down and his nose clean, and going back to his fookin hovel of a room and board in Dennistoun by the long, long tram ride. After Inchgillan, he'd thought for a while that he could just…walk away from it all. Leave Ireland and all it means to him behind. Leave the War and the madness born of it behind. But he can't. So he ends up staying back after the class this night, and taking Maclean aside, feeling the fire in him rising as he tells of what he's seen, what he's done, what he's tried to do and failed. He wants to help. What can he do to help?

FRIDAY, BLOODY FRIDAY

So Seamus Finnan stands there in George Square, the City Chambers' grand facade behind him, Gallacher on one side, Kirkwood on the other. Like stone lions, so they are, the two of them, solid and powerful, and Seamus there between them, standing tall as the fookin face of war that every man among them knows—the Irish who've come over like himself looking for work on the Red Clyde only to live in poverty and squalor in the East End of the city; and the native Scots, so many of them veterans of the bloody Great War, all come home to hardship. Sure and they should be enemies, by rights, the Scotsmen and the Irish immigrants stealing their jobs. But no. They stand together, striking for a forty-hour week so they can
all
have work, these sixty thousand men of steel and fire and electric power, builders of ships who hammer rivets or wield arc-welding torches, electric workers and the men of molten iron and black carbon, forgers of steel, the very substance of the world that they
will
build. And the red flag flies over them all on this day. On this day the revolution starts. He raises up his voice.

“And so they say,
d'ye not think,
they say,
ye've gone too far
? Well, true, I say. I tried to show the boys that were to die that there was another way. I gave them hope, blind hope as medicine, and me and the boys, well, we sat down and prayed that bloody morning on the 1st of July. Would that be what ye're meaning by
too far
? says I. That I tried to calm their fookin terror with yer fookin lies?”

“O, but it's more than that. I gave them their orders, didn't I? I fookin tells them
Charge!
and they all go. I give them
Fire!
and, brothers, ye should've seen the fookin show. Fire? I'll give ye fookin fire!”

And he looks over the heads of all the crowd, out at the mounted police with their fookin batons out, cramming the side streets all around the square, to right and left—North and South Frederick Street, Hanover Street and Queen Street, all named after fookin kings and queens, the lords and dukes who sent them off to die as if the fookin German villains of the war—as if the Windsors weren't the Kaiser's fookin inbred fookin cousins. And the horses turn and snort so nervous for the charge, breath steaming in the winter air, as his own breath steams with Seamus's own horsepower. Now's the day and now's the hour.

“The fire of fookin truth, I'll give yez, aye, the fire that fookin burns in your own hearts, that's in your blood and mine, that welds the ships on which their Empire's built, that warms their mansions with electric light while we live with our muck and gas and fookin shite.”

“What are the charges these lords raise against us now? Against the Irishmen in camps all over England, Wales and even here in Scotland?”

Cries of
shame! shame!

“What are the charges that they raise against yer very own John Maclean? What are they so afraid of that they spout this endless shite about the German Plot, or Bolsheviks, or all that fookin rot, and throw us into jail with no term placed on our internment? No, no sentences, no limits, when it comes to the defense of the fookin realm. But when it's suitable for them, then they just
might
set this one brother or that other of us free, like they did me. What is it has them running scared in Whitehall and Buck House, feared of the fire in our blood, the fire in our hands, the fire in our eyes?”

He takes a breath to raise his voice still higher.

“Sedition!”

The sixty thousand roar, voices like fists punching the air. He holds his hands up, palms face forward, stills them.

“What good is it? they says to me. Can ye not see that the war is more important than a handful of Fenian lives? Can ye not see that ye don't stand a fookin chance? Do ye not see that this is—and here's the words that fookin bastard used—in the fookin trenches of the fookin Somme, no less—do you not see that this is
a grave mistake
? A grave mistake.”

But let's forget that for a moment,
says Mad Jack Carter to him on that day three years ago—by Christ, it feels like thirty.
I'm quite sure that you find it all as…disagreeable as I do. We all make mistakes, old chap. The demon drink does funny things
to people, Sergeant, makes them say things they don't mean at all.
And what he wasn't saying was still there, a hidden message under his cool words. The army might well easily just overlook this one…mistake. Why, I could let you walk out of that door, if you were willing to cooperate.

He should've strangled the fooker then and there, sure.

THE HAMMERS OF THE RED CLYDE

“A grave mistake,” says Seamus. “O, but it's easy to point out another's grave mistake when yer not the one what's down there in the thick of all the graves,
all
the mistakes. One big mistake, the gravest of them all. I'll tell ye what the fookin grave mistake is—fookin theirs! In thinking that we'll stand for what they've done to us, what they're doing to us now, and what they'll always do to us, brothers, if they think that they can get away with it. In sending a generation off to die on foreign fields for empty words. In giving them nothing,
nothing,
to come back to but the fookin filth and degradation. That was their fookin grave mistake.”

The crowd is wild with the fury of injustice. And justice sits mounted on horses in the side streets all around them, with its batons out and waiting for the word, it seems, to charge.

“O, yes. Sure and I made a grave mistake. I knew what I was doing, and I made my choice, I'll not deny. I did pick up their fookin gun again—oh, not for them, but for the lads about to die.”

Christ, but he never thought that he'd be punished for that lie, for going back to them all and laughing with them, smiling, praying, sharing cigarettes in silence on that morning as they waited for the dawn, and Seamus sitting there feeling empty and alone, as desolate as if he had already clambered over rocks through Fritz's fire to win some dreary hill only to turn around, barbed wire in his skin—ah Christ, not now—and see them all—not now—behind him and below him—Jesus—scattered—

“Why?” he shouts, voice hoarse. “For freedom for small nations? Or for England, Mammon and his lords?”

He lets the roar rise high and waits for it to die a little.

“Because sure and isn't that what it all comes down to? The hammers of Hephaestos building the machines that Mammon runs his Empire with, this brutish Empire ruled by a hundred or so dukes, by faceless lords and ministers.”

He takes a softer tone, the voice of reason.

“But brothers, comrades, let us, as they like to say, come back to earth.”

He points up to his right, into North Frederick Street, and the massed ranks of men in uniforms the color of night, as if to point to the futility of the situation.

“Please,” Seamus says, the slightest hint of mockery in his tone. “Let's
settle down.
Let's talk about the here and now. The past is, so they say, another country. That was yesterday, and we should think about today.”

“But let's not simply weep over our present woes. No. Let us sympathize with
all
now suffering under imperialist yokes, in Scotland. Or in Ireland. Or in England. Or around the world, this life destroyed today, another brother on another day. Here's what I say when they say it's sedition and that we don't stand a chance: I say, they don't know what we're made of, brothers, men of steel and men of fire. I say the hammers of the Red Clyde ring out loud and clear the end of their Empire!”

But he can hear the clattering sound of horses' hooves on cobbles as the police charge and, batons flailing, turn a passionate but peaceful protest to a bloody riot, Friday, January the 31st, 1919, in George Square, in the Second City of the Empire.