Читать книгу Ireland in Travail онлайн

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The phantom enemy continued to fail to materialise; but little by little Government agents, swimming up and down in the sea of Sinn Fein, found out who were the responsible Republican leaders in their districts, captured documents gave further evidence, and the police came to know in time whether the butcher standing politely behind his counter was always a butcher; whether the baker gave up kneading bread on occasion and produced a gun from under the floor, and so on. They came to know whether the grocer held meetings at the back of his shop after the shutters were up.

Then one day some constable—in most cases a marked man who had been shifted from another part of the country—strolling through the village to buy a stick of tobacco, would get fired on by half a dozen men round a corner. The chances were the assassins belonged to another district, as it was a policy to send volunteers to work in a district where they were not known. The men who fired the shots were gone when the police arrived to their murdered comrade; but the butcher, the baker, and the grocer were behind their counters like worthy tradesmen. These very men, guiltless of this crime, had possibly done similar work in another neighbourhood; it was known they were members of the detested phantom army. The police, filled with hate, fear, and worn out with weeks of vigil, turned upon these people and their shops for their just revenge.