Erskine Childers

“ Will anyone be found to say that an island with a fertile soil, several nourishing industries, and a clever population of four and a half millions, is to be regarded, whatever its past history, as incapable of supporting a Government of its own out of its own resources? Let nobody be tempted by the fallacy that, given time, Ireland will regain financial stability under the fiscal Union, and at a later stage, perhaps, be more fitted to bear the burden of fiscal independence. ”

“ No one would dream of repeatedly impressing upon Infantry, for example, as though it were a principle they might otherwise overlook, that their primary aim must be the absolute and complete overthrow of the hostile Infantry. But the advocate of the arme blanche is always on the horns of a dilemma. He dare not admit that the rifle in the hands of Cavalry is as formidable a weapon as in the hands of Infantry, if not a far more formidable weapon. He therefore instinctively tends to picture steel-armed Cavalry as perpetually pitted against steel-armed Cavalry. ”

“ Wanted, a North Wind Nothing disturbed my rest that night, so adaptable is youth and so masterful is nature. At times I was remotely aware of a threshing of rain and a humming of wind, with a nervous kicking of the little hull, and at one moment I dreamt I saw an apparition by candle-light of Davies, clad in pyjamas and huge top-boots, grasping a misty lantern of gigantic proportions. But the apparition mounted the ladder and disappeared, and I passed to other dreams. ”

“ A line of veldt-fire is sure to be glowing in the distance, looking like the lights of a sea-side town as seen from the sea. The only sound is of mules shuffling and jingling round the waggons.
The "cook-house" is still the source of rumours, which are wonderfully varied. There is much vague talk now of General Clements and a brigade being connected somehow with our operations. But we know as little of the game we are playing as pawns on the chessboard. Our tea is strong, milkless, and sugarless, but I always go to sleep the instant I lie down, even if I am restless with the cold later. ”

“ From the capture of Bloemfontein onwards, the nomenclature of mounted troops in South Africa, except as a clue to their race, origin, and professional or unprofessional character, ceases to possess practical significance. There emerges a single military type—the mounted rifleman—the man, that is, who can ride and shoot. Whether in reconnaissance, tactics, or strategy, in defence or offence, in any combination from a patrol to a commando, squadron, brigade, or division, or as a single scout; be he Boer or Briton, the better he can ride, and the better he can shoot, the better soldier he is. ”

“ Nobody knows what Ireland really is, and of what she is capable. Nobody can know until she has responsibility for her own fate.
Local government, where popular opinion is nominally free, suffers from the absence of free central government. Is it not on the face of it preposterous to give complete powers of local taxation and administration to a country while withholding from it, as unsafe and improper, central co-ordinating control? For any country but Ireland—at any rate, in the British self-governing Colonies and the United States—such a policy would be regarded as crazy. ”

“ Without any disrespect to General von Bernhardi, who writes, not for Englishmen, but, as a German reformer, for what he regards as an exceptionally backward Cavalry, I wish to show, not only that we have nothing to learn even from him in the matter of Cavalry combat, but that, if we only have the pluck and independence to break off the demoralizing habit of imitating foreign models, and to build on our own war experience and our own racial aptitudes, we have the power of creating a Cavalry incomparably superior in quality to any Continental Cavalry. ”

“ The firearm, which, remember, should be a better weapon, if anything, than the Infantry rifle, is given many offensive as well as defensive rôles. Pursuits, for example, must not be “frontal,” because “Cavalry can easily be held up by any rear-guard position in which a few intact troops remain.” But who, we wonder, are these “intact troops”? Why not Cavalry, or mounted riflemen, as in South Africa? Is not rear-guard work a conventional and normal function of Cavalry itself? And if it is a case of Cavalry versus Cavalry, why not shock, at the compulsion of one side or the other? ”

“ My impressions of the next ten days are of grooming, feeding, and exercising in the cool twilight of dawn, sweltering dusty drills, often in sand-storms, under a blazing mid-day sun, of "fatigues" of all sorts, when we harnessed ourselves in teams to things, or made and un-made mountains of ammunition boxes—a constant round of sultry work, tempered by cool bathes on white sand, grapes from peripatetic baskets, and brief intervals of languid leisure, with al fresco meals of bully-beef and dry bread outside our tents. ”

“ This train of argument, so far from being confined to Ireland, is as old as the human race itself. Of all human passions, that for political domination is the last to yield to reason. Men are naturally inclined to attribute admitted social evils to every cause—religion, climate, race, congenital defects of character, the inscrutable decrees of Divine Providence—rather than to the form of political institutions; in other words, to the organic structure of the community, and to rest the security of an Empire on any other foundation than that of the liberty of its component parts. ”

“ We had a tussle with the tide at first, but once over the watershed the channel improved, and the haze lightened gradually. A lighthouse appeared among the sand-dunes on the island shore, and before darkness fell we dimly saw the spires and roofs of a town, and two long black piers stretching out southwards. We were scarcely a mile away when we lost our wind altogether, and had to anchor. Determined to reach our destination that night we waited till the ebb stream made, and then towed the yacht with the dinghy. In the course of this a fog dropped on us suddenly, just as it had yesterday. ”

“ Bitter satire as it is on the official system of training, any impartial reader must end by sympathizing, not with the satirist, but with the officials satirized. They at any rate try to be logical. Their concessions to fire are the thinnest pretence; their belief in shock undisguised and sincere. Whatever follies and errors this belief involves them in, they pursue their course with unflinching consistency, sublimely careless of science and modern war conditions. ”

“ Is saddle-fire an accomplishment our Cavalry cannot acquire—an accomplishment which at this very moment we inculcate for “picked men and scouts” of the Mounted Infantry, a force with not a quarter of the mounted training that the Cavalry receive? For professional troops it cannot be more difficult to acquire than skill with the steel weapon on horseback. That is an art which, as everybody knows, demands long and continuous drill and practice. ”

“ Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, was now supreme in the Government, and henceforth represents incarnate the forces which provoked the Rebellion and founded upon it the Union. He had bided his time for a decade, watching the trend of events, foreseeing their outcome, and smiling sardonically at the ineffectual writhings of the men of compromise. He stands out like a block of black granite over against the slender figure of Wolfe Tone, who was his anti-type in ideas and aims, his inferior in intellect, his superior in morals, but no more than his rival in sincerity, clarity, and consistency of ideas. ”

“ All at once I heard a sound outside, a splashing footstep as of a man stepping in a puddle. I was wide awake in an instant, but never thought of shouting “Is that you, Davies?” for I knew in a flash that it was not he. It was the slip of a stealthy man. Presently I heard another footstep—the pad of a boot on the sand—this time close to my ear, just outside the hull; then some more, fainter and farther aft. I gently rose and peered aft through the skylight. A glimmer of light, reflected from below, was wavering over the mizzen-mast and bumpkin ”

“ Heaven knows we lost guns and men and transport enough in South Africa without any mounted charging. The very object of a missile weapon is to overcome distance in a way that the lance and sword cannot overcome it. For all we know, even the mounted rifle charge may wholly disappear as science improves the firearm. But that improved firearm will itself rule combat, and banish into still remoter realms of memory the reign of the lance and sword. ”

“ It is the same soldierly spirit that enables the Infantry soldier to stand the strain of lying out in the open, possibly for hours, under a burning sun or in drenching rain, unable to move hand or foot without being shot at, a strain to which the order to charge the enemy’s position comes as a distinct and welcome relief. And it is the same soldierly spirit which sustains the Cavalry soldier when employed on the important and hazardous duties of scouting and reconnoitring, in the carrying out of which he so often finds himself alone or with quite a small party. ”

“ Ireland, like the Canada of 1838, is a land of bewildering paradox. There is a similarly unwholesome arrest of free political life, the same unnatural division of parties, the same suppression of moderate opinion, and the same inevitable maintenance of a Home Rule agitation, harmful in itself, because it retards the country and accentuates for the time being the very divisions it seeks to cure, but absolutely necessary for the final salvation of Ireland. Durham, in the case of Canada, saw the truth, and swept into the limbo of discredited bogies the old figments of the coercionists. ”