Читать книгу Ireland in Travail онлайн

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This strange situation of an immensely powerful man fighting the shadow of a man continued. Justice was ready with the prison and the hangman; but there was no murderer for the scaffold. But the secret service was bringing in all the time little bits of information—that Paddy Murphy was responsible for this, that Denny Burke had done that. It was useless to arrest Paddy or Denny as there was no concrete proof, for no witness would come forward because of intimidation or out of sympathy, and until the courts martial sat, should a man be brought to trial, no civil jury would convict for like reasons.

The police were scattered through the countryside in isolated barracks. In course of time these barracks were roughly fortified with barbed wire and sandbags. In the undisturbed districts as often as not the police found themselves cut off from social amenities through the villagers regarding them with suspicion and fearing to hold communication with them lest they fell under suspicion of being sympathisers and informers. The police waited month after month, never venturing far from barracks, in a state of siege by an invisible enemy.