Returning in the early hours of the morning from a raiding expedition to the south of Annagh, the Auxiliaries were surprised to see a tall priest standing in the middle of the road and holding up his hand. Fearing a trap—there was a blind corner just behind where the priest was standing—they stopped about two hundred yards off and beckoned to the priest to advance.
They were still more surprised to find that the tall priest was Father John, who, having received information after they had started that the Volunteers were going to lay trees across the road at this corner in the hope of smashing up the Auxiliary cars, had spent the whole night walking up and down the road in order that he might warn them of their danger.
Father John drove back to Annagh with the Cadets, and by the time they reached the village every Cadet swore that the priest was the finest man they had yet met in Ireland, and they didn’t believe there was a finer one.
From that on Father John accompanied the Auxiliaries on many a stunt, and there is no doubt that he gave them every help in his power and all information which reached him; but though he would travel anywhere with them, he would never accept hospitality from them, nor would he enter M’Andrew’s house.
About six miles from Annagh, in a hollow of the mountains, is the tiny village of Glenmuck, completely isolated from the rest of the world, and so situated that its presence was quite hidden until you literally walked on top of it. None of the inhabitants, who lived chiefly by making poteen in the winter time and going to England as harvesters in the summer, possessed a cart, for the very good reason that the nearest so-called third-class road was five miles away, and only a goat track passed within a mile of the place.
Here in due course arrived the flying column of the I.R.A., seventy strong, every man mounted on a bicycle and armed with a British service rifle and as many pistols as he could find room for. They were also the proud possessors of a Lewis gun.
As usual, the gunmen were billeted so many in each farm, and after being badly harassed for some time in the south, Glenmuck seemed like Paradise to them. The nights were spent in dancing, card-playing, and drinking poteen. Somewhere about noon the gunmen got up, and after breakfast visited each other in their different billets after the fashion of our troops in France, walking about openly with their rifles slung over their shoulders. The Lewis gun team passed their days teaching the boys and girls of the village the mechanism of the Lewis gun.