To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [182]
The COs in prison were getting more restive. In May 1918, following Stephen Hobhouse's example, some COs jailed in Liverpool announced that they would break all prison rules they considered "inhuman and immoral," including the rule of silence. For ten days the prison resounded with talk, laughter, and singing. Then the warders cracked down, moving the men they thought to be ringleaders to other prisons. Some COs went on hunger strikes, only to find themselves force-fed like the suffragettes. Many drew encouragement from knowing that they were not the only political prisoners in Britain. When Fenner Brockway was being punished for the Liverpool protest, he was placed in solitary on reduced rations. One day an older convict, a trusty who did odd jobs around the cellblock, slipped a note into his cell: "Dear Brockway—Just heard you are here. What can we do for you?...We are Irishmen and can do anything you want—except get you out. Have your reply ready for 'Trusty' when he calls to-morrow. Cheerio!"
Among these Irish prisoners was Eamon De Valera, who, a decade and a half later, would become his country's prime minister. With their help, Brockway smuggled a letter to his wife, and then got his hands on what he craved most: newspapers, including the Labour Leader, whose editor he had once been. He retrieved these by lowering a thread from his cell window to which his unseen Irish friends attached the precious cargo. In a corner of his cell out of sight of the spy hole, which now and then clicked open, Brockway devoured the papers. "Only those who have been cut off from family, friends and the world can understand what this meant to me."
Brockway's fellow prisoners were not the only Irish patriots in jail, for Ireland was in turmoil. The execution of the Easter Rising leaders two years earlier had inflamed long-simmering nationalist feeling, and the planned draft of Irishmen seemed like the final blow. Why be compelled to join a war supposedly fought for Belgium's national integrity when exactly that was denied to Ireland? The island's Catholic bishops, never known for their radicalism, issued a ringing manifesto against conscription; Irish trade unions called a 24-hour general strike, and everywhere (except in the Protestant north) factories, newspaper presses, trains, trolleys, and horse cabs came to a halt. Even the pubs closed.
With British troops on the Continent reeling, this new rebellion in Ireland posed a crisis. To contain it, the British cabinet felt it needed an experienced military man with a firm hand. On May 4, 1918, Milner, on behalf of Lloyd George, offered the position of Viceroy of Ireland to John French.
Five days later, the diminutive, bowlegged field marshal took the mail ship across the Irish Sea. Regarding his position as a war posting, he brought with him neither his wife nor Winifred Bennett (although she would later visit many times). Within days of being sworn in at Dublin Castle, he ordered the arrest of an array of independence leaders. Long convinced that his own Irish ancestry gave him special insight, he saw himself as more Irish than the nationalists, regarding them as "people steeped to the neck in the violent forms of crime and infamy and with the smallest possible proportion of Irish blood in their veins." Once this was widely understood, he believed, "The Irish would cast them out like the swine they are."
The Irish, he told Lloyd George, were "like nothing so much as a lot of frightened children who dread being thrashed." With proper discipline all would be well. Basil Thomson made his intelligence network indispensable to the new viceroy, and French was confident he could soon restore order.
The same month French set off for Ireland, Emmeline Pankhurst embarked on a speaking tour of the United States,