The tiny village of Annagh lies on the eastern slope of the Slievenamoe Mountains, about fifteen miles due east of Ballybor, and consists of one dirty street with, roughly, forty-nine miserable tumble-down hovels and one grand slated two-storied house, as usual the shop and abode of the village gombeen man, who also kept the Post Office—not because he was the most honest man in the village, but because there was nobody else able to do so.
A good many years ago, on a bitter winter’s night, a tinker, answering to the name of Bernie M’Andrew, drove his ass-cart into the village of Annagh, and called at the only shop to know if there were any kettles or cans to be mended. The night was so cold and wet that the old shopkeeper, in the kindness of his heart, bade the shivering tinker put up his ass and spend the night. The tinker stayed and never left.
M’Andrew’s stock-in-trade, when he arrived at Annagh on that winter’s night, consisted of half a barrel of salt herrings, a kettle, the usual tinker’s soldering outfit, a policeman’s 224discarded tunic, and the rags he stood up in. Within a year M’Andrew had buried the old shopkeeper, who had lived alone for years and was beloved by all, and reigned in his place.
Being an ambitious tinker, M’Andrew started a gombeen business with the old man’s savings, which he found by chance in the secret drawer of an old desk, and in a very short time became the best hated and most feared man in the district.
At first M’Andrew supported Sinn Fein enthusiastically, but when he saw law and order beginning to disappear, being now a man of property, he became alarmed, and tried to run with the hare and the hounds.
M’Andrew’s great opponent was the young parish priest, Father John, who, after serving as a chaplain with the British Army in France with great distinction—he had been decorated for bravery in the field by both the British and the French—returned to Ireland, having seen enough bloodshed for his lifetime.
Father John was a grand man both physically and morally and in the right sense of the words, and if only the majority of young Irish priests were up to the standard of Father John there would be little trouble in Ireland to-day.
When he became the parish priest of Annagh, Father John saw at once that M’Andrew was fast reducing the great majority of his parishioners, who were poor men with poorer mountain land, to a state of slavery, and realised that it only wanted two bad years in succession to put the whole parish under the gombeen man’s thumb.
225At first he tried to keep the farmers away from M’Andrew’s shop; but this they resented, as it entailed a journey of many miles to the nearest town, and then they had to pay nearly as much as to M’Andrew. Next he denounced M’Andrew and his evil practices from the altar, warning the people of the consequences; but in spite of all the priest could do or say the gombeen man flourished.
From the very first Father John opposed the Sinn Fein movement both by word and deed, and when the first Sinn Fein organisers appeared in his parish he quickly hunted them away; but before he knew what was happening practically every young man in the parish had been enrolled, whether he liked it or not, as a soldier in the I.R.A. M’Andrew was quick to seize his chance of revenge, telling the people that the priest was a secret agent of the British Government—hadn’t he served in the British Army and taken the pay of the British Government, an enemy of the people?—and that he was doing his best to stand between them and liberty. In a week Father John was practically an outlaw in his own parish, and M’Andrew became the popular hero.
Though he still officiated in the chapel, Sinn Fein saw to it that he was paid no dues. For nearly two years this state of affairs continued, and it would have been impossible for the priest to live if the older and more sober members of his flock had not come to his house secretly in the dead of night and paid him their dues.
One day, when feeling ran very high, Father 226John opened his daily paper to see his own death reported, and a long obituary notice, probably the handiwork of M’Andrew.
It was a situation common in Ireland—the peasants blind to the virtues of their truest friend, and making a popular idol of their worst enemy: it is a sad thing that many Irishmen will always insist in believing what they wish to believe.
Father John was by nature a kindly and genial man, a lover of sport, of a good horse, and of the society of men, and those two years must have been a perfect hell on earth for him. Not that any one was ever openly rude to him; they just sent him to Coventry and kept him there, hoping to break his heart, and that by refusing to pay him any dues they would gradually freeze him out, and in his place would come one of those fire-eating young priests who would lead them to victory and freedom.
The summer of 1920 was wet and cold, with frosty nights during every month except July. Now, if your potatoes grow in boggy land, and there comes heavy rain followed by a night’s frost, not once but several times, you will have no potatoes, and probably very little crop of any kind. And if your living depends on the potato crop, you stand a good chance of starving, unless the gombeen man will come to your assistance.
By November the whole parish of Annagh practically belonged to M’Andrew, who held a mortgage on nearly every acre of tenanted land, and proceeded to bully the people to his heart’s content.
227On a Sunday morning in December, at about 10 o’clock, the hour when the village usually began to come to life, the inhabitants were startled by the screams of a woman, and when they rushed to their doors saw M’Andrew’s servant running out of the village towards Father John’s house. M’Andrew had been murdered during the night without a sound, and the servant had no idea of what had happened until she went to his room to see why he had not got up. All M’Andrew’s books had been burnt, and afterwards the murderers must have cursed the day they did not set a light to the house as well.
On the next day the village woke up to find a company of Auxiliaries billeted in M’Andrew’s house and the yard full of their cars—a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire.
For some time past the police had known that men on the run were hiding in the mountains near Annagh; but though the area came within Blake’s district, it was impossible to keep any control over it, owing to the fact that the Owenmore river and the Slievenamoe Mountains lay between it and Ballybor.
The Auxiliaries spent the day fortifying M’Andrew’s house, and that night started operations, and the inhabitants soon realised that the British Empire was not yet an “also ran.”
Just as it was getting dark the Auxiliaries in Crossleys would suddenly burst out of M’Andrew’s yard, travel perhaps five or ten miles at racing speed, and then surround and round up a village or district, so that the 228numerous gunmen who had come from the south for a rest cure found it impossible to get any sleep at all.
The local Volunteers at once sent an S.O.S. to Dublin, and received the comforting answer that a flying column would arrive shortly in the district and deal effectively with the Auxiliaries. In the meanwhile they were to harass the enemy by every means in their power and carry on a warfare of attrition—in other words, if they found one or two Cadets alone—if unarmed so much the better—they were to murder them.
At first the local Volunteers were very much afraid of the Auxiliaries, Sinn Fein propaganda having taught them to expect nothing but murder, rape, and looting from the “scum of English prisons and asylums”; but after a few days had passed and nothing dreadful happened to man or woman, they took heart once more and started their usual warfare.
The Auxiliaries were commanded by a Major Jones, and on the Sunday following their arrival in Annagh Jones left alone in a Ford at an early hour to see Blake in Ballybor. The road crosses the mountains through a narrow pass, and near the top of the pass there is a small chapel, a school, a pub, and a few scattered cottages.
On his return Jones passed this chapel as the people were coming out from Mass, blew his horn, and slowed up. After passing through the crowd he noticed a group of youths standing on the right side of the road, and opened his throttle wide, thereby probably saving his life.
229When the car was within ten yards of the group every man drew a pistol, and it seemed to Jones as though he was flying through a shower of bullets. However, though the car was riddled, and had any one been sitting in the other three seats they would all have been killed, Jones found himself uninjured, and the old “tin Lizzie,” responding well to the throttle, flew down the hill at twice the pace Henry Ford ever meant her to travel at.
That evening Father John called on Jones and apologised for the outrage, and Jones at once fell under the charm of the priest. Probably his astonishment at Father John’s visit had something to do with it, but in the days to come, when Father John supported his words by deeds, Jones learnt that his first impression had been a correct one.
Returning in the early hours of the morning from a raiding expedition to the south of Annagh, the Auxiliaries were sur............