Under these circumstances the Crown forces, principally the R.I.C., took counter-reprisals; this was the only possible method by which they could save their own lives and the lives and property of the Loyalists, who looked to them for protection.
For many weary months unhappy Ireland was rent and torn by this form of warfare, and it became obvious to most that if one side did not win pretty soon the country would be ruined. Twice the Crown forces wriggled their hands free, and on both occasions had the I.R.A. on the verge of collapse: one stout blow would have finished the show. And each time the I.R.A. were saved by the screams of their English allies. Each time the Government quickly took fright, quickly tied the Crown forces’ right hands, and even threatened to tie up their legs if they set the English Radicals on the howl again. And once more the I.R.A. plucked up courage, and the old weary game of ambush and murder started afresh.
At long last the Government took a sudden notion to make a desperate effort to finish off the gunmen before the gunmen finished them.
After the failure to round up the big force of gunmen in the Maryburgh Peninsula, Blake returned at once to Ballybor with all his men, arriving to find a cipher wire from the County Inspector to tell him that the gunmen had turned up in the Ballyrick Mountains, and that as soon as the Crown forces could be regrouped another effort would be made to come to grips with these slippery customers.
No sooner had Blake started to deal with a fearful accumulation of official correspondence than the head constable told him that Constable John M’Hugh, who came from the east centre of Ireland and had not been long in the force, wished to see him—adding that M’Hugh’s father had been murdered, and that the constable was most anxious to go home, but that the police at his home had wired that it was not safe for the man to go.
Blake saw M’Hugh at once, and found him in a pitiable state of grief, the first great sorrow of his young life—but had to refuse his request, though the boy pleaded hard, with the tears running down his cheeks. M’Hugh’s case is a good example of the murder gang’s reprisals on those who will not fall in with their views.