I was in a
gaol, which one I did not know. Cold thick shadows and ugly walls; my
boots crashed off the flags. A clerk in uniform asked questions; an
officer stood by and looked at me. He spoke in a cold, thinly
contemptuous voice. I disliked
him thoroughly. “Come to attention when the officer speaks to you,” said
the clerk. I did not move my feet or hands. “Am I to be treated as a
soldier?” I asked. There was no reply. A soldier walked in front of me ,
a Webley in his hand, down a gloomy-looking passage. He opened the iron
door of a cell, the door clanged.
The gas came through a weak
jet which spluttered and gasped, lighting up slightly, now dimming the
outlines of the bare walls; shadows jumped up, fell and climbed again. I
sat on a few dirty, brown army blankets in a corner. I felt a sense of
desolation sitting there all alone. The hard voice of the soldier who
had brought me through the tall narrow passage up the clanging stairway
kept coming back. “There’s your blankets.” The word “blankets” rolled in
again and again as if it had untold significance. He had not answered
my “Good-night.”
I was part of an automaton which spoke a
regulation voice and was dehumanized. It could not attempt to assimilate
so it would destroy. Outside we laughed at the British, here it was
different. I felt them now as a machine; their officers could be
replaced by others, a spare part efficient for a specific function would
always be found. We ourselves had to depend, not on organized strength
so much as on personality, understanding and intimate or intuitive
knowledge.
There was always something ponderous about the British
in the outward effect of their organized efficiency, parade solemnity
and purpose. They were important; they took themselves seriously. The
inherited class hatred of their officer type, which helped to maintain
the isolation of a caste system , filtered through to the ranks of the
army. Behind the mask of assurance and arrogance was another appearance;
it could be seen in the uncertainty and insecurity that a movement of
the people produced. Facing men of their own stamp and mentality the
mask was a skin and did not change much; facing a people whom they had
exploited, walked on, or laughed at, the skin became a mask. I had seen
it lift. Under it was what we feel when we view aspects of our own
futility in a clearly dispassionate way, aspects hidden by the outward
mask which others think to be wholly strength, poise or arrogance. Fear
of the unknown quantity, a spirit, uneasiness at a strength which they
could not paperise in an organized roster way or hit at with organized
force, and the repercussions from their own propaganda which, to show
their achievements, had given us a stature in terms of their own. Their
unreal summing-up of the situation cancered them and traditional
bureaucracy infected them with traditional fears.
- Ernie O’Malley, “On Another Man’s Wound” , January 1921, Dublin
