Army Without Banners; Adventures of an Irish Volunteer
by
[Houghton Mifflin, $3.50]
‘WHO is she,’ quoth Solomon, ‘that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?’ During the years from 1916 to 1921 the British in Ireland might have observed with truth how much more terrible is an army without banners. For it was the sinister anonymity of the Irish Republican Army which was its greatest strength. An army which moved by night, which swooped down from the mountains suddenly and without warning, which buried its dead secretly and licked its wounds in hiding, — an army which moved underground and had a thousand delicate wires of communication impossible to detect, — a silent army inspired by centuries of hate.
One day in March, 1918, Ernie O Malley, a first-year medical student at National University, left his father’s house in Dublin to join the I. R. A. He was not quite eighteen, but for some time past he had been an active volunteer, working in college by day and drilling by night. Now, for various reasons, he found it necessary to get away from his comfortable middle-class environment. His father’s sympathies were more or less with the British, his elder brother Frank was a captain in the British Army, and Ernie was tired of hearing ‘his comrades being laughed at and their motives questioned.’ He reported to H. Q. for active service and was immediately sent to the midlands as an organizer. For the next few years he was ‘on the run,’ an Irish volunteer on active service with a price on his head, sometimes without a roof to shelter him, often cold and hungry. It was a life of rigid asceticism. The volunteers neither smoked nor drank, nor indulged in love affairs, the last two pastimes being considered dangerously conducive to military indiscretion. It was no joke wearing of the green, for the penalty, if captured, was certain death.
O Malley soon became one of the most valuable volunteers in the secret army. His youthfulness, his red hair and lanky form, his extraordinary fearlessness, made him famous not only in the army but among the country people who gave him shelter. His more notorious exploits soon brought him to the notice of the British authorities, who began searching with particular attention for a red-headed volunteer called O Malley. He was eventually captured while organizing a brigade in Kilkenny; luckily he was there under an assumed name and nobody spotted his real identity. He was brought to Dublin, questioned, tortured by Black and Tans, and was finally thrown into Kilmainham gaol. His own mother would n’t have recognized him by the time the Tans had finished with him; his eyesight was permanently injured by the treatment he received at the Castle. (This incident was omitted in the English edition.) Later he made a sensational escape from Kilmainham and immediately rejoined his old brigade in Tipperary. He was there preparing an offensive when word came through of the truce. The Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations had begun. ‘And so ended for us what we called the Scrap, the people later on, the Trouble, and others fond of labels, the Revolution.’
This all happened seventeen years ago, and much water has flowed under O’Connell Bridge since those stormy days. Many and various have been the books about the Anglo-Irish war, but none of them has the same authenticity, the utterly genuine quality of Army Without Banners. O Malley is a soldier, a revolutionary, and a poet consumed with love of his own country. His book is unsentimental, at times brutal, and always unaffected. There are beautiful descriptions of the country and tender unforgettable pictures of the people who sheltered him during his wanderings. This was the Irish Volunteer.
MARY MANNING