The Shears of Destiny: A Memory of Erskine Childers

I SAILED with him on the Asgarde in the Baltic the year before the war. A skipper more considerate of his crew of amateurs, who when they came on board hardly knew a sheet from a sail, it would be impossible to conceive. Whenever there was arduous or dangerous work to be done he did it; partly because he was leader, partly because he was the only competent member of the crew, and most because he loved danger and hardship for their own sakes. Indeed he was by temperament one of that great company of gentlemen-adventurers which our country — for he was English on his father’s side — has given perhaps in fuller measure than any other to the roll of history.

The winds were contrary. We beat all down the Baltic, and south of Christianso ran into a gale. Some tackle broke away at the masthead and had to be lashed down. Childers, already gray, lame, and the eldest of us by some years, went aloft to do it. A little figure in a fisherman’s jersey, with hunched shoulders and straining arms, the wind tearing through his thick hair, his face desperately set, he tugged, heaved, fought with hands and feet and teeth, to master the baffling elements and achieve his end. That is how I saw him then: that is how I shall always see him now — a tussling wisp of humanity high overhead, and swirling with the slow swirl of the mast against a tumult of tempestuous sky.

At that time he had recently resigned his clerkship in the House of Commons, and a third of his income with it, to devote his life to obtaining liberty for Ireland. He had just written The Framework of Home Rule, believed in the Dominion status, and was standing as a Liberal candidate for Parliament. Next year he abandoned his candidature, in the main I think because of his disappointment at the surrender of Mr. Asquith’s Government to the Carson conspiracy.

Just forty-eight hours before Austria declared war on Serbia, Childers ran the little Asgarde, his wife as always at the helm, one perfect Sunday morning of late July, 1914, into Howth harbor. She carried a cargo of arms with which the Irish of the South, having lost faith in the power and will of the British Government to protect them, were determined to defend themselves against the Red Army of Ulster.

Six months later, in the dark of the year, Childers was leading the famous bombing attack from the sea on Cuxhaven, which was one of the most romantic episodes of the early stages of the war.

By 1916 he had come to the reluctant conclusion — wrongly as I believe — that Great Britain was not sincere in her protestations that she was fighting for the liberty of the little nations. He retired, in so far as he was able to do so with honor, from active coöperation in a cause in which he no longer believed, and devoted himself thereafter to working for the independence of the little nation for which he had lived and was to die.

In June 1919, he wrote to me with reference to the Carson Rebellion of 1912-1914: —

Of course it was completely successful and has dominated all British policy since and led to Sinn Fein and the Irish Rebellion, while incidentally you may see in it the worst features of the Peace Treaty and the scrapping of the Fourteen Points and a genuine League of Nations. It completely identified Great Britain with Prussiauism.

In the same month he wrote: ‘Ulster is the key to the world.’

That year he moved finally from the little flat in Embankment Gardens, Chelsea, where in the days before the war you met not only men such as Sir Horace Plunkett, who were like himself devoting their lives to Ireland, but most of the advanced Liberal world of London. Thereafter he established his home in Dublin.

Once in 1920 I wrote and asked him whether he could give me definite evidence of the part played by Sir Henry Wilson, then Director of Military Operations, in fomenting the mutiny in the British army which was one of the provocative causes of the war. He replied that he could not. ‘We have always believed . . .’he wrote. ‘But this is not evidence,’ he was careful to remind me. And all through the time of torment that ensued, the characteristic that struck me most in him was his scrupulous fairness to opponents. Would that we on our side could show as fair a record!

How he lived through the so-called Reprisals Campaign I never understood. That campaign to-day has no apologists, original though it was in English history, as being a method of silencing political opponents by means hitherto somewhat alien to our tradition. And he was now admittedly the most formidable opponent of our rule.

When the Campaign had failed and the Government had suffered in consequence a sudden and beautiful conversion to more Christian methods, I wrote to him at once to point out that the British volte-face had completely changed the situation; that our Government had gone as far and given as much as could fairly be expected; that it would now for the first time have the country and the Empire solid behind it; and I implored him to come in and help.

It was too late. He replied at once in a long letter which I turned up afresh yesterday when I heard that the end had come. He was charming as always, reasonable as always, and — utterly irreconcilable. ‘No one dies for Home Rule in any country,’ he wrote. ‘The thing McSwineys and commoner men in millions die for — freedom — is not a thing that can be disguised under phrases or whittled away by limitation. Everybody knows what it is and this (that is, the British terms) is not it. . .’

That was, politically speaking, the parting of our ways. I never heard from him again, and knew from that hour that whoever else might come out alive from the Ordeal by Civil War to which he and those who thought like him were subjecting Ireland it would not be Childers.

When the news came that he had been captured, it was clear to most that only one end was possible. No Government that proposed to govern could have wavered: for, if mistakes in judgment which mean ruin to a country are ignored, what may not the consequences to the innocent involve? We here in England know only too well.

I loved Childers; but had I been President of the Free State I should have signed his death warrant as surely if not as gladly as on the eve of the war I should have signed away the lives of those greater rebels and lesser men who preceded him down the path of disruption and anarchy.

In the last few years, since he became a legendary figure, I have sometimes been amazed, and more often amused, at the misunderstanding of the man — whether based on malice or sheer ignorance it was difficult to say — evinced by our public and our press.

Erskine Childers was in fact an inspired fanatic: a Christian ghazi, drunk not with bang but with the idea of Independence, and charging magnificently down the bleak hillside to certain death on the bayonets of the massed opinion of his own country and of ours. When a prominent member of our recent Government, to his eternal shame, described Childers after his capture, as he lay in jail awaiting trial for his life, as a ‘ murderous renegade ’; when our English papers wrote of him during the height of the trouble as ‘a sinister figure’ and stressed, as they loved to do, his intellectual qualities, they gave a childishly false impression of the simplest and most sincere of men. His intellect was the least of him, and its limitations his ultimate undoing. He was first, foremost, and all the time, a mystic, though probably an unconscious one, who would, I think, in the days when I knew him best have defined himself as an agnostic. Nobody could be with him and not feel his spiritual apartness. He lived in a cloud of dreams and ideals, remote from the world. His feet were not on earth, but his head was certainly in Heaven. He was one of those practical mystics of whom Lord Rosebery wrote many years ago that they were the most formidable of men. Had his mind been as good as his heart was big he would have been one of the great world-forces of our times. But the eye of his intellect was obscured and growing, so it seemed to me, always obscurer. You can see it in that noble and pathetic apology he wrote when lying under sentence of death. The good democrat had become merged in the dogmatic pedagogue. At the last it was no longer the will of the Irish people that he sought, but what he believed was good for the Irish people. In this his final phase his judgment proved as faulty as his purpose remained pure and his courage high. Some will-o’-the-wisp seemed to possess his brain and lead him ever forward over bogey-haunted quagmires to his inevitable doom.

To English men and women, who believe that they owe it to Erskine Childers that their dearest were foully done to death; to Irish patriots who conceived of him as the alien author of the ruin of their country, it may be hard to understand what is in fact the case: he was the knightliest of men — one of those

There was never any man of whom Sir Ector’s lament over another knight who also greatly lived, greatly failed, greatly died, could have been more appropriately penned.

Single of purpose, valiant beyond belief, chivalrous to a fault, he was one of the pure in heart. Therefore of a certainty he now sees God.

The Ireland of the moment may not mourn him: the Ireland of to-morrow will hold his memory forever green.

To-day I read that he shook hands with the firing party that was to send him on his way. How like the man! — and with what a noble gesture he leaves the world!

God rest the tired and battle-worn spirit of one of the most gallant gentlemen that ever Ireland has given to our earth.