Both the sons, Cormac and Dominic, had served during the war in the British Army. Dominic willingly and eagerly, and Cormac, the elder, only because he feared his father, who was a staunch Loyalist.
The spring of 1919 found the two brothers at home. Cormac for good and all as he believed, and Dominic until he could decide how and where to make a living.
In England there is nowadays a large class whose one and only object in life appears to be to take sides with any and every enemy of their country, be he Boer, Boche, Bolshevik, or Sinn Feiner. This party never ceases to aid and abet these enemies by every means in their power, short of endangering their own skins, and at the same time never let an opportunity pass of accusing our soldiers and police (in Ireland) of every abominable crime which man has been known to commit. During the war this class of Englishmen greatly puzzled and irritated the French, as they have every nation that has ever admired the British as a race. A French interpreter once said to a British officer, “Many of your race are noble, the rest are swine.”
In Ireland, by some lucky chance, we have escaped this detestable and despicable breed of man, to whom a sincere rebel is infinitely preferable, but at the same time we have a class of men and women who are first cousins to them. In many good Irish families, noted for generations past for their unswerving loyalty, there is often one member who is an out-and-out rebel. Luckily he or she has generally less brains than the rest of the family, and is looked upon as a harmless lunatic, and one of the crosses which have to be borne in the world.
A plausible reason often advanced for this sporadic appearance of a rebel in a loyal family is the complete lack of conversation at the dinner-table, once sport has been exhausted, when all members of a family see eye to eye in politics; and as a “mutual admiration society” quickly palls on many young men and women, one member expresses contrary political opinions to the others out of pure cussedness, and the anger and recriminations of the rest quickly turn the bored jibber into a red-hot rebel.
Not many weeks after the brothers had returned home from the war, Cormac, who had spent many hours of his youth reading books and pamphlets on the wrongs England had inflicted on Ireland instead of hunting and shooting, and had even appeared at breakfast once in a weird ginger-coloured kilt, raised the red flag of Sinn Fein one evening at the dinner-table. Probably he did it from sheer boredom, hoping to draw his father into a wordy argument and so pass the time. The result, however, had a far-reaching effect on the lives of both Cormac and Dominic.