Author's Preface - Page 2

his opportunities of getting out of Ireland. Stimulate his
loyalty, and he will stay in Ireland and die for her; for,
incomprehensible as it seems to an Englishman, Irish patriotism
does not take the form of devotion to England and England's king.
Appeal to his discontent, his deadly boredom, his thwarted
curiosity and desire for change and adventure, and, to escape
from Ireland, he will go abroad to risk his life for France, for
the Papal States, for secession in America, and even, if no
better may be, for England. Knowing that the ignorance and
insularity of the Irishman is a danger to himself and to his
neighbors, I had no scruple in making that appeal when there was
something for him to fight which the whole world had to fight
unless it meant to come under the jack boot of the German version
of Dublin Castle.

There was another consideration, unmentionable by the recruiting
sergeants and war orators, which must nevertheless have helped
them powerfully in procuring soldiers by voluntary enlistment.
The happy home of the idealist may become common under millennial
conditions. It is not common at present. No one will ever know
how many men joined the army in 1914 and 1915 to escape from
tyrants and taskmasters, termagants and shrews, none of whom are
any the less irksome when they happen by ill-luck to be also our
fathers, our mothers, our wives and our children. Even at their
amiablest, a holiday from them may be a tempting change for all
parties. That is why I did not endow O'Flaherty V.C. with an
ideal Irish colleen for his sweetheart, and gave him for his
mother a Volumnia of the potato patch rather than an affectionate
parent from whom he could not so easily have torn himself away.

I need hardly say that a play thus carefully adapted to its
purpose was voted utterly inadmissible; and in due course the
British Government, frightened out of its wits for the moment by
the rout of the Fifth Army, ordained Irish Conscription, and then
did not dare to go through with it. I still think my own line was
the more businesslike. But during the war everyone except the
soldiers at the front imagined that nothing but an extreme
assertion of our most passionate prejudices, without the smallest
regard to their effect on others, could win the war. Finally the
British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British
blockhead did not lose it. I suppose the enemy was no wiser. War
is not a sharpener of wits; and I am afraid I gave great offence
by keeping my head in this matter of Irish recruiting. What can I
do but apologize, and publish the play now that it can no longer
do any good?