Chapter 12 #2
My heart stuttered and dropped, unable to read the expression on his face.
For four long years, Sidney had fought under horrific circumstances and nearly died for Britain.
I had also fought and sacrificed in my own way, trusting my country was in the right.
As such, the fear and dread I felt confronting my feelings about my country’s handling of the Irish choked and rattled me.
For I couldn’t look away from it and I couldn’t condone it.
For hundreds of years the Irish had tried both the violent route and the peaceful one to regain their independence.
And they’d finally succeeded with the latter in at least winning the vote for Home Rule.
But it happened just as the war was beginning, so they’d accepted the necessity of postponing its implementation until after the conflict, joining the army by the hundreds of thousands.
Only to be played false again as the war dragged on, and the Irish casualties mounted, and the government fiddled with the terms of their pending Home Rule.
The Irish’s votes in the 1918 elections had made it clear how a large majority of them felt about the British government’s handling of matters and their renewed desires to become a full republic.
It had also made it clear the continued divisiveness some of the politicians within our government had been fostering for years between the few predominantly Protestant counties in the northeast of the country and the rest of predominantly Catholic Ireland.
The favoritism toward those few counties was evident, even being so blatant as to arm the Protestants against their Catholic neighbors.
And it was the defiance of those northern Protestants, who hadn’t been prevented before the war from smuggling in arms to be used against British forces should the Home Rule vote be enforced; and the defiance of the British army officers at Curragh under General Wilson’s leadership, who threatened mutiny if they were ordered to enforce it; that Sinn Féin and the IRA touted as the lessons that taught them that a policy of disobedience and rebellion against the Crown could succeed.
Kevin Barry had said so himself in his sworn statement prior to his execution.
Yet, the notion of my supporting a rebel force against my own government, my own soldiers, was nothing short of horrifying.
How much more must these discoveries trouble and torment Sidney, given all the sacrifices he’d made?
How much more difficult must it be to even consider withdrawing his support from the government for whom he’d fought and the troops with which he’d served?
To accept such a decision from his wife?
I wanted to fling myself at him, to deny what he was saying. But he seemed so certain that it made me doubt myself and my own impressions of the matter. So instead, I gazed back at him in agonized uncertainty, not knowing what to say or do.
Then he sighed. “And I don’t blame you.”
I blinked in surprise. “You don’t?”
He reached out to grasp my upper arms. “No. I’m struggling as well.” His face hardened. “Especially after what they did to you in the Castle.”
“But they’re not all bad.” I thought of Maxwell and his men, and the Auxiliaries who had cheered for me as we left the Castle. “In fact, I think most of them aren’t.”
“And yet a few rotten apples spoil the bushel.”
“Yes. A few rotten apples led or compelled by a few blighted trees.”
He arched a single eyebrow at my strained metaphor. “Are the trees supposed to be politicians?”
“Yes.” I lifted my hands, pressing them to his chest over his heart as I sought to make him understand—to understand myself.
“I’m not against Britain. Truly I’m not.
I love my country. But that doesn’t mean I can’t see her faults, can’t mourn the error of her ways.
” I squeezed my eyes shut. “And when I see our government adopting policies and encouraging our military and police to act in ways they rebuked the Germans for doing in the occupied territories during the war, when I’m not the only one to see the correlations between the acts of frightfulness and barbarism I witnessed in Belgium and France, well, I …
I can only hate what we’ve become. I can only feel … ”
“Betrayed.”
I looked up at him, seeing the same pain echoed in his features. “Yes.”
His head tipped forward, his forehead touching mine.
“I wish we’d never come here. And yet, how could we not have?
And would I truly be better off for my ignorance?
” He lifted his head so that he could meet my gaze, his brow puckered with misgivings.
“It wouldn’t change the truth, just my awareness of it. ”
“It makes you wonder what else we’re ignorant of, and how much we’re at fault for that ignorance.”
“I spoke with my Uncle Oswald.”
I leaned back so I could better see him. “You did? Oh, you mean, during my detainment.”
Sidney’s Uncle Oswald, the Marquess of Treborough, was an old bachelor, and Sidney his only nephew and eventual heir.
“Yes, but I also urged him to go to London.”
My eyes widened in astonishment.