At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [169]
“And now I have a uniform?”
“What sort of an officer would you present without a uniform? Really, you have the most modern ideas. You will find it in your dressing-room. In the pocket there is a membership card, which you might sign. The dues have been paid. Your commission will arrive by the post.”
“Might I just ask what it is I am a captain of?”
“Why, the Irish Volunteers.”
And that was how it came to be, on St. Patrick’s day morning, in the spring of 1916, MacMurrough walked his aunt through Dublin, in the three-starred tunic of a Volunteer captain. Of course, he was quite well aware the men had not elected him, no more than he had volunteered. But there was something pathetic about those men that Sunday morning. The awe in their faces when he aimed the rifle, the fragile way they touched it when given it to hold; he saw their shuffling looks when they took up their pikes afterwards to go home in the dark. A rifle—a thing that to any English countryman was familiar as vermin. It was not militarism and it was not nationalism: he did not know what it was, and he was sure he surprised his aunt even: but soon MacMurrough was training every weekend to Ferns, and looking forward to his visits.
He had little hope of any real musketry: ammunition was too precious. But he thought he might accustom the men to the handling of a weapon. Gradually, his OTC training was recalled, the pokey-drills and evolutions he had learnt as a boy. He had the men sight and fire, sight and fire, a spent cartridge-case in the bolt to guard the hammer, until they got some notion of a rifle’s weight and balance. He taught its cleaning and oiling, gave lectures on deliquescent substances. He held little sergeant-major competitions in stripping and reassembling the action. Prizes he awarded of smiles and encouragement. That these serious-faced laborers and sons of small farmers, who God knows had toiled all day and all week, should give up their Sundays to him increased, according to their willingness to give, the value of what knowledge he could return. But he was not deceived. If patriotism had brought these men together, he doubted but it would leak under an enemy’s fire: when they saw it was not their flag the enemy fired at, but their person. What is that thing which makes men go forward when every reason shrills their retreat? Not courage, but a kind of love, a bonding of disparate souls to the one company. He could not impart this. He had never felt it himself. I am not a trooper, he told himself. I am a sniper in the tree, a lone wolf.
But it was good to feel a rifle in his hands again, a good old Smellie too. He asked his aunt did she expect to procure many more.
“Perhaps not the same. Would that matter?”
“I don’t know. I should think anything was better than pikes.”
“But you will be able to teach them?”
They were in the garden room in Ballygihen at the time. MacMurrough stood by the open doors, smoking and gazing at the lawns. He said, “I don’t know if I shall be here.”
“Where should you be?”
“You surely know I cannot delay in Ireland much longer. There is military compulsion now.”
“Not in Ireland there isn’t. They would not dare introduce conscription into Ireland.”
“I am normally resident in England. Therefore I am liable.”
“I see. I had not thought.”
“Aunt Eva, I do not intend to sit in Ballygihen waiting for the knock. And I will not have my conduct raked over by some jumped-up tribunal.”
“No, that would not do.”
“I have an appointment at Easter. After that, I shall cross to England and enlist at the first kiosk I find.”
“You have an appointment at Easter?”
“That is what I said.”
“And then you will cross to England?”
“Do not ask me to join an Irish regiment. I shall go some place where I know nothing and nobody knows anything of me.”
“But not till Easter?”
“Aunt Eva, what does it matter about Easter?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. This martial spirit, it is all so sudden.”
“You hardly supposed I lacked conduct?”
“I should as well suppose you were a Smith or a Brown. But you will stay till Easter.