situation, as if that alone existed. Looking back, it seems to me
strange that one should have been so engrossed in any preoccupation as
in reality to ignore the vast and imminent possibilities. Yet, after
all, I believe my case was typical of many. For us Irish, this was the
crucial point, the climax of a struggle which had been intense and
continuous now for a period of four years--which in its wider sense had
gone on, with ebb and flow, yet always in progress during the whole
adult lifetime of our leader and his principal colleagues. For more than
us, for scores of Labour men and Liberals, it had become almost a fixed
belief that European war was only a nightmare of the imagination. War in
the Balkans, war possibly in the East of Europe, we could think of; but
war flinging the complex organization, so potent yet so delicate, of
great and fully civilized States into the melting-pot--that we never
really believed in. Prophets of finance, prophets of the labour world,
had told us the thing was impossible. Even our most recent experience,
the irruption of armed forces into the political arena, had contributed
to fix in our minds the view that all armaments were merely _in
terrorem_, part of a gigantic game of bluff.

In a world organized as was Europe in 1914 on the basis of universal
military service, it is dangerous, not only materially but morally and
intellectually, to be as the people of these islands were, segregated
from all military experience. We were almost like children in a magazine
of explosives: we knew, of course, that there were dangerous substances
about us; but we did not realize how suddenly and irretrievably the
whole thing might go off.

I do not know how Redmond gauged the situation. But he spent the end of
the week in town, and must have been less unprepared than was one like
myself, who during the Saturday, Sunday and the Monday Bank Holiday was