reading

This edition is dedicated to Emmett Ernie O’Malley Boyle

THE
SINGING
FLAME

ERNIE O’MALLEY

MERCIER PRESS

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Blackrock, Cork, Ireland

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First published in hardback in 1978 by Anvil Books Limited

Paperback edition first published in 1978

This edition 2012

ISBN: 978 1 85635 885 9
ePub ISBN: 978 1 78117 082 3
Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 083 0

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PREFACE

THIS NEW EDITION of The Singing Flame published by Mercier Press is one of a series of three volumes written by my father, Ernie O’Malley. The others are Raids and Rallies (2011) and On Another Man’s Wound (forthcoming). In this edition I have taken the text as published in 1978 and integrated some minor elements that had not been included in that edition. The changes add back the names of individuals who were previously omitted, as well as relevant dates and locations, so that a new generation of Irish readers can better appreciate the chronology and sites involved. This memoir was written as an integral part of On Another Man’s Wound – with consecutive numbered chapters – but, on the advice of friends, it was not published back in 1936 as there would have been more contentious issues involving the Civil War than the War of Independence or Tan war. Even when this second volume was published posthumously in 1978, many of O’Malley’s comrades were still alive.

The first edition of this book could not have been published without the assistance of Frances-Mary Blake of London and Dan Nolan of Anvil Books then in Tralee and Dublin. With Dan’s knowledge of the period and Frances-Mary’s diligence in research, the latter was able to collate my father’s original handwritten and typed manuscripts for publication. Their 1977–78 correspondence is significantly longer than the book itself, but by reviewing it carefully I have been able to determine what changes were made at the time to the original manuscripts. In this regard I must thank Seamus Helferty at UCD Archives and Marion Casey at New York University for providing access to the Ernie O’Malley Papers located there.

Many of the documents referred to in this edition were previously published in ‘No Surrender Here’: The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley (The Lilliput Press, 2007). I hope that this new edition provides additional background information that will help the reader better understand what was happening in Ireland and to Ernie O’Malley during those tumultuous years from 1921 to 1924. As this volume opens, he has just turned twenty-four years of age and is a Commandant-General in the Irish Republican Army in charge of over 13,000 IRA Volunteers in the Second Southern Division area of Mid- and South Tipperary, East Limerick and Kilkenny.

I wish to thank Mary Feehan of Mercier Press for her enthusiastic support for this new edition as well as the generous efforts of Tim Horgan and John O’Callaghan.

Cormac K. H. O’Malley, 2012

ABBREVIATIONS

ACS	Assistant Chief of Staff
CID	Criminal Investigation Department, Free State
CS	Chief of Staff
GPO	General Post Office, Dublin
IRA	Irish Republican Army
IRB	Irish Republican Brotherhood
MD	Minister for Defence
MP	Member of Parliament
OC	Officer Commanding
RIC	Royal Irish Constabulary
TD	Teachta Dála

An outline of reasons for the use of certain capital letters may be useful. Please note that when East Limerick, for instance, is capitalised, this refers to the East Limerick Brigade (IRA) and not to the geographical location, which would be given as east Limerick. The same applies for South Dublin, North Tipperary and the other brigades and areas.

When specified, the higher military ranks and formations are given capital letters, such as the Brigadier, the Divisional Adjutant, the First Southern Division, the Northern and Eastern Command, but battalions, companies, sections and garrisons, together with their officers, have not usually been capitalised.

A distinction has been made between Headquarters and headquarters, between Staff and staff. While headquarters refers to any localised site, Headquarters always means the GHQ centre of operations. Thus, whereas there is a garrison staff, or staff officers, meaning officers in general attached to those positions, the term Headquarters Staff, or Staff, is used only for the top-ranking members of GHQ.

INTRODUCTION

ERNEST BERNARD O’MALLEY was born in his parents’ house on the main street of Castlebar, Co. Mayo, on 26 May 1897. He was the second child and second son of Luke and Marion (née Kearney) Malley. Two daughters and seven more sons were to complete the family. About 1906 they moved to Dublin, where his father became a civil servant and where Ernie attended the O’Connell School and did well enough to win a scholarship to University College Dublin in the autumn of 1915, for the study of medicine.

The early days of his childhood and youth are described in his first book, On Another Man’s Wound, leading up to Easter Week 1916, when he became caught up in the cause of Irish nationalism for the first time. The book then recounts in detail his life during the hectic, dangerous years when some of the Irish people took up once again the struggle for national independence from Britain, ‘a dream that was dreamed in the heart and that only the heart can hold’, but all these hundreds of years never abandoned and so never wholly lost. He joined the Irish Volunteers in late 1916 in Dublin, but by 1918 he could no longer live at home; his parents were by their background and political outlook hostile to the spirit of the Rising. At the same time he quit the university and his medical studies and became a full-time organiser for the Volunteers, and subsequently the Irish Republican Army in 1919. From 1918–21, as a staff captain attached to General Headquarters, he was active in organising battalion and brigade units in some fourteen counties, from Donegal to Limerick, Tipperary to Tyrone, reporting directly to Michael Collins, Director of Intelligence, or to Richard Mulcahy, the Chief of Staff. O’Malley travelled a great deal under difficult conditions during those years.

In November 1920 he was captured while preparing for an attack on the British Auxiliaries in Inistioge, Co. Kilkenny. His true identity was not learned by the British as he gave the name of Bernard Stewart and their special interrogations failed to make him give the truth. At Inistioge, and later in Dublin Castle, he was beaten and ill-treated, and then imprisoned in Kilmainham gaol, from where he escaped in February 1921. He returned to take command of the newly formed Second Southern Division, one of the first two divisions set up by GHQ and second in importance only to the First Southern. From March until the calling of the Truce in July that year, he was Officer Commanding five brigades, a leader who was determined to carry on the war until complete independence was won, or until Ireland was wholly crushed by the might of empire. The man who wrote On Another Man’s Wound would seek no less.

On Another Man’s Wound, its title taken from an old Ulster proverb, ‘It is easy to sleep on another man’s wound’, was, however, only half the story. The Singing Flame relates what happened next to him and his country, and it is right that it should be told in full, for it is a logical continuation of his part in On Another Man’s Wound: one man’s path through wars foreign and domestic for his country, for his Republic.

In the first book the only hint of a sequel comes towards the end, when he is met by Mrs Mary Tobin of Tincurry, Co. Tipperary, and warned of the dream she had had about him: ‘In her dream a house I was in had been surrounded and it wasn’t Tincurry. As I came out to fight in the open, I had been wounded many times, and had managed to get in again … But the dream was not to come true for another year and a half.’ In context this must be a mysterious reference to the future, for that book ends two months later and its general readers would hardly be aware of such subsequent events. But here in this new book that blood-soaked dream is enacted out.

When in August 1936 On Another Man’s Wound was published by Rich & Cowan (of London), it was recognised at once as a classic work on the Irish troubles, and despite the semi-reluctant praise from some old newspaper adversaries who objected to ‘disrespectful’ remarks about a bishop and some ‘crude realism’, it has retained its reputation. In Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, Richard M. Kain believed it to be the ‘outstanding literary achievement of the Anglo-Irish War, by a field officer, Ernie O’Malley’. More recently, in the most comprehensive work on the history of Irish nationalism over the centuries (by an Englishman), whilst one might quarrel with interpretations, the verdict on O’Malley’s book is specially favourable: ‘A work of literature, as well as historical interest.’ (Robert Kee in The Green Flag: bibliography section.) Yet doubtless Ernie O’Malley always realised that the remaining unpublished part of his history could bring out much more divided opinion, dealing as it did with the explosive events of the Treaty, the Four Courts and the Civil War, all today still largely unrecorded but unforgotten, whereas his first book had shown a united people in common purpose against a common enemy. It had told Ireland’s troubles through his own role in the action, until the end of the War of Independence, or the Anglo-Irish war, or, in Republican phraseology, the Tan war.

This second part of what was originally planned to make a single volume may not be properly understood without reference to the first; it results immediately from those confused days when O’Malley and his divisional staff could not comprehend their GHQ’s Truce with the British. It is not self-contained, nor intended to be; yet it is not simply a continuation, because the whole scene of action is as it were re-dealt. The British faces fade and are replaced by Irish counterparts. To have read ‘part one’ would deepen knowledge of O’Malley’s character and his early courage and determination, that persistent allegiance to ‘the Republic’, thereby making his coming course of action seem all the more inevitable. One would also be aware of the relationships already established with men like Collins, Mulcahy, O’Duffy and de Valera.

Seán O’Faolain, who concluded his long and appreciative review of On Another Man’s Wound with: ‘No critic but must say of it that it has added another name to the permanent list of Irish men of letters’, did, however, criticise some excessive writing which he found in the book concerning the countryside and its flora, which he feared might have been ‘compounded in the study’. Others will find the obviously genuine and slowly taken pleasure in nature as highlighting the tale of violence.

The Singing Flame has little time for what O’Faolain called that ‘immense sense of nature’; it is a barer and bleaker picture, since it is harder to exaggerate the beauties of a prison cell, and there Ernie was made to turn more inwardly on himself.

In another long and perceptive review of On Another Man’s Wound, Padraic Fallon especially praised the later passages and, in particular, singled out the two or three prison chapters: ‘The man who was taken prisoner seems to have rounded out his personal identity by a change of name. “Bernard Stewart” is somehow more human than the many aliased O’Malley.’ He was being more personal than allowed before because he was a captive. In contrast, more than one-third of The Singing Flame is about captivity, and while enduring pain and imprisonment under his own name, O’Malley from his bed remembers much that is not cloaked with dispassion. He had been a lonely man wandering. Now he is more reflective than in the previous book, during the long period of inaction. The ‘we’ of On Another Man’s Wound becomes ‘I’ more often in The Singing Flame. He reveals more of himself. It is often more intimate – appropriately so since so much of it takes place in a cell or in a camp.

It is also intended that it should correct certain errors and misapprehensions that have appeared in the two general histories of Ireland’s Civil War that have been published up to 1978, especially where they refer, briefly, to Ernie O’Malley. Because both books concentrate in other directions for the first months of conflict, either towards the fighting in the south, or to cover the wider activities of the government forces, they have mostly ignored the situation in Dublin itself, and consequently they contain very little information about that area under the O’Malley command, not until both give differing and inaccurate accounts of his eventual arrest.

The Singing Flame should be linked to what he wrote in his 1936 preface to On Another Man’s Wound: ‘My attitude towards the fight is that of a sheltered individual drawn from the secure seclusion of Irish life to responsibility of action.’ It is this responsibility which concerns him very much throughout the second volume, for in 1921–22 he held greater responsibility than when he was commanding the Second Southern for the last five months of the Tan war. Now, during this period, he is first the OC of that division; then Director of Organisation on the IRA General Headquarters Staff and a member of the Army Executive; then OC of the Headquarters section in the Four Courts, and later OC of its garrison; then OC of South Eastern Command; and finally for a period of four crucial months the (acting) Assistant Chief of Staff of the IRA and OC of the Northern and Eastern Command (Ulster and Leinster), and a member of the five-man Army Council.

It is the fullest personal account to be given until now of the 1921–24 years, and by a very senior officer of the Republicans, one who was at the centre of important events. A previously untold story of such dramas as the Limerick crisis of March 1922, the occupation and surrender of the Four Courts, and IRA leaders on the run in Dublin during the Civil War. It then becomes another of the scarce original sources for the jail experiences of men and women prisoners of the Free State, including many scenes of prison hospitals and prison life.

Moreover, the book demonstrates Ernie O’Malley’s share in the shaping of modern Ireland, in as much as his beliefs and actions were directly involved in the causes of the Civil War, and then in the course it took. Being OC of the Second Southern, which together with the First had borne the brunt of the fight against the British outside of Dublin – ‘the men who won the war’ – it was his own Second Southern which first broke away from the authority of both General Headquarters and Dáil Éireann, and acted in independence after the Treaty had been approved. This break led to the army crisis in Limerick, a part of his area, that nearly precipitated the Civil War. It was his idea to ‘kidnap’ General J. J. O’Connell of the National Army, thus creating the ‘mini-Sarajevo’ of the Civil War, as Ernest Blythe of the Provisional Government was to call it. He was indeed that most dangerous of opponents, at once an idealist and a man of action, much more so than were many of his anti-Treaty colleagues.

Throughout the three years covered here, July 1921 to July 1924, O’Malley was twenty-four to twenty-seven years old. He noted once ‘the youth of our officers’. He himself was a very young man to be in military command, however nominal in practice, of Leinster and Ulster, comprising half of Ireland. It has been remarked how young were the men of the IRA who fought for and dreamed of ‘The Republic’, suspicious if not actively hostile towards all politicians, and O’Malley was the youngest of the men of high status on both sides. This was a factor he had grown accustomed to in the Tan days; mentioning his early hesitation in giving orders to men old enough to have been his father – a diffidence that did not last very long as he was a natural leader.

In appearance he is remembered as a long-striding young man, tall and thin, with lean features and a steady unflinching gaze, very noticeable red hair, but a pale complexion. He did not suffer fools gladly.

When O’Malley died, in 1957, with five bullets still left in his body, the Sunday Press declared: ‘His life could itself be a record of the War of Independence in which wounds, imprisonments, hunger strikes, audacious escapes and stern battles were interspersed with years of stern and ardent service.’ Ernie O’Malley would not have called it the War of Independence, since nations have to win those wars, and like other Republicans he used the words ‘Tan war’, but his story is incomplete by remembering the Tan years only. The Singing Flame tells, perhaps, of an even greater personal contest.

Again it should be recorded that throughout the four years before the opening of this book in mid-1921, as an itinerant IRA officer he had travelled and fought in many areas of Ireland, often in wild or very poor country, to organise, inspire, train and lead men into action. From the age of nineteen he knew the hardships of weather, whether on bicycle or on foot, whether winter or summer; the sleeping rough; the unpalatable food; the loneliness of living and working with the country people whom his favoured Dublin upbringing had not prepared him to know; scant privacy, no life of his own, and the strain of little rest and constant peril. During that time he had gathered numerous wounds of his own on which to sleep. He had been shot in the wrist and ankle; afterwards in the thigh. He was twice burnt on the face, neck and hands when police barracks were attacked. Once he was hit by bursting grenade fragments and required a secret operation in hospital. When he was finally captured by the Auxiliaries, tougher foes than the Black and Tans, he was maltreated and often threatened with death; his feet were crushed and he was stabbed with bayonets. In Dublin Castle he was so brutally beaten that his friends failed at first to recognise him, and a red-hot poker kept before his eyes had permanently injured his sight.

That British war background should be kept in mind when considering the present story, for much of his subsequent sickness in prison, as related in the later chapters, may have been due in part to an eventual collapse after all the privations undergone since 1918. He might say in his first book that he had an Erewhonian contempt for disease, and that his body was hardy enough, but the price would be paid one day, especially as it seems that the hardiness he achieved was through his own self-discipline. Apparently he had rheumatic fever as a child, and always had a heart condition.

It is also significant to note how Ernie O’Malley endured all kinds of dangers and troubles associated traditionally with the Republican movement, collectively more than did any others from the army or political ranks. It is true that he was not shot dead – the one element missing to make a perfect Republican martyr – but he very nearly died under a hail of Free State bullets, in addition to his other ‘honours’ which together make up the most comprehensive Irish Republican career of an officer of the period.

His life, then, did surely mirror the whole Irish struggle. No other contemporary went through all his IRA experiences. He was to be the last Republican leader released from internment, and although it was by just a matter of hours, it showed the special value which the Free State always put on him. Always the same story – ‘outstanding in courage’ – said one of his comrades from the wars.

Certainly he was a ‘text-book officer’ as some of the Cork men complained, but he was a field officer also, and a guerrilla fighter too, which was an unusual combination for the IRA, who were just as ‘irregular’ in 1919 as when Piaras Béaslaí coined the term for them in 1922. O’Malley was not simply an intransigent military man; he was fighting for a better Ireland, socially and politically and economically. When he describes the personal qualities of Liam Mellows on hearing of his death, consciously or not he reflects things of himself as well. Quite probably the Free State feared O’Malley’s brand of idealism, courage and spirit of intransigence at least as much as they feared what were inaccurately labelled as Mellows’ Communist policies.

Once he wrote some evocative lines to express that feeling for Ireland, for the Holy Grail of ‘The Republic’, and they were selected in 1966 for an anthology of the Easter Rising, although they rightly belong to the Civil War period: ‘ … a strange love was born that for some was never to die till they lay stiff on the hillside or in quicklime near a barrack wall’.

The Singing Flame will show how the ‘notorious rebel’, as police reports from Dublin Castle called him in 1921, Ernest O’Malley, wanted by the British, was to become Earnán Ó Maille, hunted more bitterly by the Free State forces in 1922.

When Ernie O’Malley began to write down his experiences and memories of the Irish struggle, he was then in New Mexico in the United States. He started to write around 1930 and worked on his book at intervals until 1935 in New York. When he returned to Ireland in 1935, and following the publication of his story up until the Truce of 1921, he must have intended to complete the second part, for he rewrote some sections of the middle chapters as late as the 1950s. Some of this was partly based on fresh information supplied from the hundreds of interviews he had conducted with veterans of both the wars; but he never assembled the entire work, put it into final shape, or made revisions. I have tried to undertake this task on his behalf.

It has been my wish to produce the definitive version of his Civil War memoir. This has meant the compiling and amalgamating of some drafts, revision and general editorial decisions, but the text is O’Malley’s own. It is hoped that the result reads as a fluent and finished story, the one that he wished to tell, and which best continues his first volume.

My own interest began when I first read his name (in 1972) in Thomas Coffey’s book on the Rising, Agony at Easter: ‘ … later to become an Irish revolutionary hero himself but at this time not yet interested in the nationalist movement’, together with some passages from his own book that described the scenes outside the GPO in O’Connell Street. From Calton Younger’s Ireland’s Civil War came a few further glimpses: ‘… O’Malley was to break away from his Unionist background and throw his poet’s soul and the steel of him into the struggle for freedom’. Eventually, it was the reading of his own book that caused me to seek for anything else he might have written, especially on the period following the Truce. Inquiries were made, research was begun, and in due course his various writings were brought together to make up the content of this book, which he himself entitled, and dedicated to ‘Ireland the ever-living and to her dead sons’. It is presented especially for those who like myself had regretted that there seemed to be nothing that continued his history from July 1921.

A letter written in recent years by someone who knew him briefly in the Civil War period (a man whom Ernie had once liked very much indeed), admired his ‘grit and cast-iron courage’, but also remembered him in this way: ‘He was prepared to win all or lose all, and looked upon compromise as weakness. His estimation of people was similar: they were either the best or the worst. He was rather a lonely type and made very few but very fast friendships. He was not endowed with tact, and I don’t think he was much concerned about death.’

I believe there was always more to him than that, but such a man can often be seen through the pages of this volume.

Six months before the start of this book, on Christmas Day 1920, Ernie O’Malley was a prisoner of the British in Dublin Castle, and he made a promise with a garrison officer, an ex-Trinity man who was friendly. ‘“Two years from now when the Irish Republic is recognised, we’ll meet on Christmas Day and dine.” “Remember, that’s a bargain,” he said, as we shook hands.’ So confident a faith, then; so poignant when recalled later in these pages revealing that he was in fact in Free State custody at Christmas 1922.

On Another Man’s Wound was a story of hope and high endeavour. The Singing Flame, that gas-jet flame which flickered and faded in the prison cells, is a study of failure. Much of it is harrowing. There is no happy ending, at least for Republicans. Yet a spirit survived, and at the close he can find some solace in the thought that though he and his companions had lost the war, they had withstood that other fight in jail.

Ernie O’Malley died in March 1957. The only books he wrote were about the Irish wars, and it is in those that he should be most remembered.

Frances-Mary Blake, 1978

1 JULY TO OCTOBER 1921

WE THOUGHT THE Truce on 11 July would last for about two or three weeks, and we issued a series of orders and instructions to cover the change of situation and worked as hard as we could to make the most of the breathing space. Hostilities would soon restart, and we wished to meet our officers and plan operations now that we could move about freely. There was a tendency to relax discipline, especially as the period of the Truce became prolonged. Suppressed feeling became articulate, the tension was eased, and men who had been for a long time names only returned to visit their families and friends.

The Irish Republican Army was in danger of becoming popular; recruits came in large numbers. Soon men appeared in uniform who had never shown much anxiety to run special risks when courage was needed. We had to give the officers sufficient work to keep them busy and do our best to prevent them from entering towns and cities where they would become known to enemy intelligence agents.

After three weeks of truce we decided to change divisional headquarters. We had remained in Mrs Quirke’s in Donohill for nearly three months. She had never complained. The numerous dispatch riders and visiting officers had been fed there, though occasionally we supplied the food ourselves. I told her that we intended to leave.

‘Sure what do you want to do that for?’ she said. ‘You’re always welcome. I’m rough and ready but the house is yours. You’re not a bit of bother in the world. I like to see the boys around.’

‘We will come back when the war begins,’ I said, and she hastened to prepare an egg-flip.

We moved to a small cottage where there was one occupant, a man named Dinny Kelly. It was a red-bricked cottage with a slate roof. There were two rooms on the ground floor, the kitchen and a small bedroom. A steep wooden stairs led to the second storey, which contained a room with a low ceiling where Dinny slept. The house was not high and the sloping roof restricted space. We worked in the kitchen at two tables which were piled high with books and papers. Empty wooden boxes, which had once contained explosives, held our files. Maps, fastened by drawing pins, hung on the walls. A large map of Ireland was on the back of the door, with the divisional area outlined in red ink, and underneath it a 1-inch map of the surrounding district. Above the table where I worked was a ½-inch map of the division. It had been pieced together from four sheets. Brigade and battalion areas were marked in red and green, companies with a red circle, enemy posts in blue. Our belts, with guns in holsters, hung on pegs on the wall, my uniform tunic near them. We cooked in turns at the kitchen fire. The assistant quartermaster was the most successful; we thankfully handed over the culinary arrangements to him. The bedroom consisted of mattresses laid on the floor, which were rolled up in the daytime. We slept in blankets, three or four of us in the room.

Eoin O’Duffy, Deputy Chief of Staff, advised me to change to a hotel in Tipperary. ‘The place is too small, too uncomfortable, and you will not have proper food. I have advised officers in other areas to go into the towns and cities. You should have a proper headquarters,’ he said.

‘We have little money,’ I said, ‘and need it for office expenses.’ When I inquired how the bills would be met, he said that I could have credit. ‘You can run a bill in the town.’ But we remained in the little hut.

The spirit of the people was good in my divisional area. They understood there would be further fighting and were undaunted. We found less difficulty in getting the loan of horses and carts or traps to carry supplies, or for our dispatch riders. People who were once indifferent had become friendly, even gracious. ‘You’re quite welcome,’ they said to our demands. The Truce had given us additional status in their eyes and somehow they felt sorry that they had remained aloof. The tradition of those who had helped had spread. Some were anxious to join a movement that had now become popular, others began to realise that they had not contributed or had given grudgingly.

Liaison officers were appointed by both armies to see that the Truce was kept and to seek redress for such breaches as occurred. In the main the terms of the Truce were observed. In July President Éamon de Valera, with members of his Cabinet, had gone to London to meet David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister. The British published proposals for a settlement which de Valera in a reply refused to accept, and in August, at the first meeting of the Second Dáil Éireann, his decision was confirmed. The British Premier was acquainted with the decision of the representatives of our people. The English press, even the most liberal elements of it, advocated the acceptance of Lloyd George’s proposals, proving that they also, like the British in general, as an Irishman once said, had found Ireland a nation and had left it a question, but the interchange of notes continued.

Our Divisional Quartermaster was busy buying military books, getting equipment made, and trying to establish a munitions plant. Near Oola in east Limerick he was given outhouses for the factory. Men came from the foundries in Limerick. They had left good positions there, but there was no word of complaint. They were willing to serve in any capacity. Soon piles of scrap-iron were collected and melted down, moulds were made and grenade cases manufactured. Weapons were repaired by the staff at first, then a smith and a boy who had worked in a jeweller’s shop looked after the damaged weapons. Empty revolver cases were forwarded, as we hoped to refill them. We found it easier to purchase grenades, bodies and necks, from our Quartermaster-General, but they were expensive and in time we felt we would be able to turn out complete hand-grenades ourselves. Rifle-grenades and improvised Stokes guns were discussed and tried. The Divisional Engineer, Bob de Courcy, and some Limerick officers began to work on a compressed-air gun which they had been planning.

I learned to drive a motor car. My lessons began at night, the car was a Ford and it had no lights. I ran into a gate in the darkness, but succeeded in negotiating the winding road near Donohill before I went to bed. I was able to inspect areas over fifty miles away and time was saved. Travelling at night was a little risky. Trenches and potholes on the roads had not been filled in. We had trouble with the county council who wished to repair the roads, but we were thinking in terms of active service. One had to memorise long stretches; a journey was an undulating spiral, changing from one road to another, crossing fords, traversing fields. Often our cars had faulty lights or none at all. That was exciting, driving in the dark without lights on very bad roads. A journey of forty or fifty miles became an adventure as exciting as a night advance before the attack.

One evening after dusk, returning from Kilkenny city with four officers in a big car, a German Daimler, I ran out of petrol some miles from Clonmel. It was a commandeered car and we had to be careful of it in garrison towns.

‘We’ll halt the next car that comes along,’ I said. We waited in the darkness; I heard the noise of a motor car, a high-powered one, I thought, by the sound. As the lights approached I held up my hand and shouted ‘Halt!’ The brakes were jammed on and the car stopped. I could not see it on account of the headlights. I walked beyond the lights. It was an open Crossley tender of the Royal Irish Constabulary. They were seated on either side as I approached, both sides pointing their rifles at me. I reached down, drew my long-barrelled Parabellum automatic and held it, with arm bent, in my right hand. The sergeant was seated beside the driver.

‘Can you give me some petrol, please?’ I asked.

‘What do you want it for?’ he asked. He was a big, burly man and spoke with an English accent, curtly.

‘For my car,’ I said, pointing to where it stood in the shadow of the hedge. Two of my officers walked to one side out of the glare of the headlights; the third had moved silently some yards to the rear of the tender.

‘Whose car is it?’ he demanded.

‘Mine,’ I said. ‘It belongs to the Irish Republican Army.’

‘Who are you?’

‘That does not matter. Can you give me some petrol to bring us to Clonmel?’

The police talked amongst themselves. The sergeant hesitated. He wanted to obtain the number of the car, I knew, but could not make up his mind to order his men to get down.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you a tin.’

He handed me a tin and I paid and thanked him. They drove off slowly.

‘That was a close thing,’ said the quartermaster, who was standing behind. ‘I thought they’d blow into you.’

The Truce continued. We did not receive any news from our General Headquarters as to how long it would last. Bob de Courcy had begun a training camp for the engineering officers in the division, and I was looking for a suitable site for a camp which I intended to run; I had no director of training and had to undertake the work myself. Up on the slopes of the Galtees was Galtee Castle. It would be far enough from towns to avoid detection; the ground varied in character from wooded country to steep rises, and below in the plain, enclosed territory. I obtained permission from the owner to use the huts of the workmen. The castle was not a mile and a half from the Mitchelstown road, up on the hillside, reached by a winding road, open at first, then bordered by trees, and towards the end a steep ravine running away to the left. The castle was a new building with turrets of the French Renaissance type, strongly built and well furnished.

The workmen’s huts stood together in a large sloping field; they were in good repair, built of wood, with corrugated roofs. There were fireplaces and stoves, a few tables and chairs. The local brigade commandant promised to obtain long tables, forms, chairs and beds, and to equip the place for sixty officers. In the centre of the group of buildings was a small hut which I intended to use as my headquarters. The commandant had to arrange for food supplies and for cooking. ‘The Cumann na mBan will be only too glad to cook for the men,’ he said, ‘and they will want to supply the food, too. One of the girls will be here shortly, if you’ll wait.’ A girl arrived on a bicycle. He introduced her as the captain of the Cumann na mBan company, a straight-eyed girl with a smiling face. ‘We’ll be only too pleased to help,’ she said. ‘The girls can cook in turns, and bake cakes, too. If you’re good, we’ll wash for you also.’

Each of the five brigades in our division was instructed to send officers from brigade and battalion staffs for training and to have them thoroughly equipped with rifles, bayonets, small arms, grenades and kit. On the appointed day all the officers arrived, close on seventy, and some in uniform. A camp staff was appointed; the officers were divided into sections and squads and they inspected their quarters. The long rooms overhead had been converted into dormitories and the girls had decorated them with branches and flowers. People in the area had supplied crockery and cooking utensils, the schools had provided forms and blackboards. The commandant, who now became assistant quartermaster, had done his work well. In the centre of the sloping field a flagstaff had been set up, from which floated the tricolour.

I had an American officer, Captain John Prout, to help me. Of late he had been attached to the intelligence squad of the Dundrum battalion in Dublin. We worked hard. The men were first trained for two weeks as Volunteers, to make them proficient in the use and application of arms. Officers took squads and sections in turns. By the end of the fortnight they were trained in the elementary work of an infantry soldier. At six o’clock in the morning the bugle call summoned them on parade. Breakfast, then, and a rest. Inspection of arms, a short route march and a run across country in full kit followed. There was a short interval after all classes and fieldwork. At lectures the officers were induced to take notes and copy the blackboard diagrams; lectures were held in the open. Extended order across country, reconnaissance or patrol work. After the midday meal, a rest. Another lecture; then bayonet practice, revolver and grenade training, and musketry with .22 ammunition. That was welcome. We had been so accustomed to save every round of ammunition that the men looked forward to this part of the day’s work as a treat. There was great rivalry between the squads to see who would have the highest number of marks and the best grouping on the small targets. An interval of an hour and a half for rest or recreation. The men had their camáns and played hurling, or handball, against the gable end of a hut. Tea was at six. A parade in full kit at sunset, the company drawn up two deep in squads, squad commanders in rear, section commanders behind them again. The ceremony was a mixture of Irish, American and English drill. ‘The sundown parade,’ Prout called it. The men, with bayonets fixed, were called to attention by their officers, who then gave the order: ‘Present arms.’ The rifles were brought to the ‘slope’, then to the ‘present’. The officers turned and saluted the green, white and orange flag as it was lowered. Before they went to bed the men were expected to study for an hour or more, write essays, or read the books in the library, which was my own. The bugler sounded ‘lights out’ at ten o’clock.

In the night-time I dealt with the administrative work of the division, prepared lectures and helped to type training notes for the company. The men were not permitted to leave the camp grounds without a pass, but each was given a certain number of hours’ leave a week. Discipline was strict, but gradually all took a pride in their own efficiency. Rivalry between the squads developed. All were on their honour not to drink and to reduce cigarette smoking. All papers around the camp, dead leaves and weeds had to be taken up; they had to respect the mountainside as well as their huts. Soon the surroundings were spotless. During rest intervals men could be seen picking up odds and ends of paper, decayed leaves or cigarette butts. The Cumann na mBan girls in their turns came to cook and wash. Fresh flowers in empty tin cans would appear on tables; sweet pea, wild roses, bunches of heather and carnations. The girls came on foot, on bicycles, in ponies and traps, some of them in uniform. Always they brought presents: honey, homemade jam, freshly churned butter, griddle or large white oven cakes, a flitch of bacon, packages of cigarettes. Amongst them one day I recognised a certain girl. She it was who had once stopped me, a year ago, on the Ballyporeen road and warned me that police were lying in ambush in the direction I was going. She belonged to the Mitchelstown Cumann na mBan, outside of the divisional area, but they also helped. The assistant quartermaster supplied mutton from the mountain sheep, sweet and wholesome. Butchers from local battalion areas had killed and dressed the meat.

On Sundays we marched to Mass at the chapel, six miles away, swinging along in the dust of the country roads, singing Irish marching songs. Places were reserved for us in the choir. The people stood to watch us as we paraded after Mass, and passed comments on our appearance. There were weekly dances which the Cumann na mBan girls attended. The girls were interested in the strange officers. Foreign cows, as we said, have long horns. A local sports day was organised and we carried off some of the prizes. A few days later I heard that one of our company was a champion weight-thrower, another a fine long-distance runner; they had assumed different names for the occasion.

Dermott MacManus, who had been an officer in the British Army and was now attached to the training staff at our General Headquarters, came to inspect and remained a while with us. There was a special inspection of arms that morning. One rifle was dirty. I saw the company commander glance down the barrel after we had passed on to another rank. I heard his strong whisper, ‘Christ, man, there’s hair on it.’

We trained the men in administration, organisation, scouting, field-sketching, engineering; we rehearsed imaginary barracks assaults and ambushes, taught them the use of explosives and land mines, and how to manoeuvre. One day on manoeuvres, a position up the hill was being attacked; machine-gun fire was maintained by beating tin cans to make attackers realise that they could not advance rashly. I was an umpire, mounted on a horse that seemed to reach the heavens, he was so high. I came upon one of the defenders in the angle of a hedged field, sitting down, smoking. ‘Why the deuce don’t you open fire?’ I demanded. The officer pointed to his large tin can. ‘It’s a new make of machine,’ he said, smiling, ‘and I think it’s jammed. I can’t strip it.’

–LivesDecameron

This edition is dedicated to Emmett Ernie O’Malley Boyle

THE SINGING FLAME

ERNIE O’MALLEY

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

1

JULY TO OCTOBER 1921

THE
SINGING
FLAME