Tipperary (57 page)

Immediately we knew who had done it—but we resolved not to raise it with her.

Again, we have the selective “historian.” April obviously contributed to the hide for the men on the run because Dermot Noonan—and his men—would be using it. And that's how Michael Collins knew that April would agree to the scheme. Charles must have known that, in the eyes of Collins and Harney, Noonan had the status of Dan Breen. Noonan led IRA units, and he planned attacks and raids. In 1919, as with Breen and Collins, he became one of Ireland's most wanted men.

The poster issued by the army at the time carried a physical description of Noonan. More flattering than Breen's—whom the army writer described as looking “like a blacksmith coming home from work”— Noonan's called him “a clever fellow; carries himself like Napoleon, cocky as a sparrow, and speaks like an educated man, therefore doesn't sound at all Irish. Dresses like a gentleman.”

They printed a grainy old photograph. With his thick black hair flopping down either side of a middle parting, he looked like a young professor.

Noonan's mind had a razor's edge—quick, legal, and witty. In conversation or argument he matched and then outclassed most people. He won most of his cases, often quoting from ancient laws in their original Latin. Although some thought him cunning—Bernard O'Brien called him “too clever by three-quarters”—his passion for his country and its cause could not be doubted.

When leading his guerrillas, he recited verse inspirationally: “There they laid to rest / The seven Kings of Tara,” he would intone and then say—either intimately or passionately, depending on the size of the group he was addressing—“We are the descendants of those seven kings. When Saint Patrick came to Ireland, every family was a kingship. That was taken from us—and we must take it back.”

For all his shortness (five feet six), women flocked to him. He had given himself a past with some mystery. When he was a student in Spain, it was said, a wealthy duenna had killed herself for love of him. And although we have no proof of it, it seems highly likely that he had approached April Somerville about using the castle as a hiding place for his men.

Michael Collins himself inspected the castle's underground refuge. He came in one night by means of the hidden door in the sunken fence. When he stepped from the passageway into the darkest of the cellar rooms, Harney and Charles waited to greet him.

According to one reminiscence that Harney gave, Collins asked, “Has Dermot seen this?”

Harney replied, “Not yet”—and Charles turned away.

“I could see,” said Harney, “that he hated the idea of Noonan hiding here. And I knew that although Charles had not declared himself to April, he viewed Noonan as his rival for her. And there's no doubt that Noonan saw Charles as his main obstacle to winning April. Did Noonan have a vested interest in winning April? Of course he did. If he won her—well, he'd be the master of Tipperary Castle, wouldn't he?”

Once again we hear not a word of this from Charles. But, as seen through his “historian's” eye, we do get a rivetingly clear picture of a local guerrilla unit at work.

In truth, I had not prepared myself for the complications inevitable to the business of sheltering fugitives. “On the run” became a famous and controversial condition in Ireland from early in 1919 to July 1921. Many young men all over the island lived on the run from the authorities, and I will take a moment here to discuss them.

As I believe I have made clear, violence will never be a part of my life. I will never use it to make statements on behalf of my country or myself; killing and maiming my fellow-man seems futile and wrong. It may be said in this matter that I am splitting a hair—did I not do all but collaborate with the men on Northumberland Road and in Boland's Mill? And I will answer that I was attempting to save my friend's life by involving myself in his—and my country's—passion. Curiously, Harney did not seem caught up in violence; so matter-of-factly and yet proudly did he approach the task in hand that he seemed no more and no less than a committed man undertaking a solid day's work. Harney, in those circumstances, had a simplicity of purpose to him, a straightforwardness that brooked no discussion, let alone argument.

Now, in the men of the Flying Columns, I was to find identical simplicity. They did not call themselves “revolutionaries” or “freedom fighters”—nothing like that; they said that they were soldiers, hoping to rid their country of a power that should not be ruling them, a foreign power that had no historical or geographical right to be there. That was their position, nothing more but certainly nothing less.

Who were these men? As they would not wish their names known, or indeed any record effected of their identities, I shall speak of them in careful generality, and seek to give an overall impression of the unified nature of their company. And then I shall attempt to say even more about them by the simple expedient of describing in detail an action they undertook. I learned the account of it from them, in many hours of questioning and conversation; it is the story of an action taken not far from the demesne boundaries of the castle by a dozen of these youngsters one moonlit night. Which is what they were mainly, youngsters—no wonder they were referred to as “the boys.”

First, who were they? A young, Irish rural Everyman, fresh-faced and awkward, that's who they were; some of them seemed barely to have commenced shaving. Most had the compelled shyness of the Irish country lad; if asked a question their cheeks reddened, and they looked to the floor and mumbled—until a friend spoke up, sometimes with a joshing word. Then they felt free to talk. Their coloring came from Ireland's national rainbow: many had freckles and red hair, some were blond, others dark as Spaniards; yet others had complexions of sunburn no matter what the time of the year.

They wore boots—some had no hose, some wore homespun stockings—and jackets of tweed, with dungarees beneath. None had been schooled beyond fourteen years; a few had not even made it that far before quitting to work for some farmer somewhere; and the few wages they took home at the end of a week eased the family burden. One or two had the softer hands and faces of clerks, working in government positions at the post office or some other such institution; their clothes had something of the town in them.

A fixedness of purpose united these young men. I saw them in our “underground,” often weary after an incident or on fire with apprehension before going out that night on active duty. Every man carried a gun; none allowed it to leave his personal vicinity. Some had learned the capacity to relax; others were strung as a coiled spring; still others responded to the “life or death: you choose” circumstances of their lives by sleeping during all the time that they spent in the castle bolt-hole. As to food—most ate ravenously, a few not at all, unable to guarantee that they would not soon afterward vomit it all up again.

I see them now, in the gloom of the maps and candles—I see them lying about like figures in a painting or a blurred photograph. They look warily at the artist or the lens, and yet they have a firmness of gaze. Some wear tweed caps, sometimes with the peak turned backward. They seem both innocent and experienced, both eager and worldly-wise. Their faces have open expressions, as though they wish to be seen as staunch.

A few smoked cigarettes or pipes, though we discouraged that when it was reported from the fields that some puzzling aroma of tobacco could be discerned above the ground between the ha-ha and the castle's stable-yard—in other words, on a line directly above the hiding-place. It took Harney to point out that there must be ventilation shafts everywhere—otherwise they should all have suffocated. Sure enough, we found the ventilations on the blueprint—tiny marks, almost indiscernible, as if meant only for the man who made the drawing.

Once or twice in the early days of the cellar's operations, I happened to be there when men came back from an “action,” as they called it. They seemed extraordinarily heated and, walking among them, doling out mugs of hot tea and bacon sandwiches, I was the one who pointed out to them their good fortune to bear no wounds. That changed somewhat the night of the Tankardstown Ambush, as it came to be called. Here is the account that I pieced together from all the reports I was given by the men who took part. It has the value, I believe, of typifying an IRA Flying Column's action in the Irish War of Independence.

All the towns of Ireland had garrisons from which British troops patrolled the countryside. After the IRA guerrilla campaign began, the army undertook search-and-arrest missions to “capture the gunmen,” as the official brief said. On any given day, truckloads of soldiers left these barracks and ranged through the surrounding parishes, stopping and interrogating people, sometimes making arrests, sometimes attacking a village in reprisal for some lethal action that had lately taken place.

In truth the soldiers had a rough time of it; they sat hunched in trucks, riding along narrow, bumpy roads lined with hedges, from behind any one of which might come a deadly fusillade at any given moment, fired by an enemy they could not see. To add to their misery, the open trucks had to be covered with chicken wire; this had the dual purpose of allowing soldiers to poke out gun-barrels and return fire (or open fire, as they did—and often—on innocent passers-by) and at the same time protect them from any bombs thrown, which would merely bounce on the chicken wire and roll away.

The soldiers, with a few exceptions, seemed no older than the IRA boys. They often came to the castle, and I was astonished by them; many were no more than loutish English, Scots, and Welsh who'd thought they were being sent to fight the war in France, and who did not know how to adjust to Ireland. One or two officers seemed to have a sense of decency—and then they divulged to me that the men under their command (as the entire country now suspected) had one thing in common.

Owing to the war, and the consequent shortage of military personnel, the British Government had opened the jails. Provided he would put on a uniform and go to Ireland and fight the IRA, every rapist and robber, every murderer, thug, and villain in an English prison would be freed. They gave them uniforms of khaki trousers and surplus police tunics, which were black—and they became known as the Black and Tans, or “Tans” for short. Officially they had the name of “Auxiliaries,” and troops of them augmented depleted regiments, such as the Northamptonshires, who occupied part of Tipperary.

It became known through a local girl working as a cook in the Cashel barracks (Collins's tentacles ran everywhere) that trucks full of soldiers would travel at a particular time one night from Cashel to Kilshane. Harney laid his plans. One of his men, the son of a nearby farmer, had the ability to ride his bicycle very fast, whereas the poor condition of the roads forced army lorries to go slowly. Harney delegated his “scout” to wait in Cashel until he saw the trucks leaving the town.

Earlier in the day, at a declivity, a dozen members of the Flying Column chose their positions behind the low wall that bordered the road. They elected to remain on one side only, because a hundred yards or so behind them, the fields became dense with trees and scrubland. Across from them, they had parked and propped a farm cart that they proposed to draw across the road on a rope when the trucks came within earshot— and after the scout had bicycled through. He had been briefed to raise his cap according to the number of trucks.