The Henson Journals

[638]

Friday, May 5th, 1916.

641st day

An extremely depressing day from beginning to end, damp & dark. I finished the Westminster Sermon. Bailey arrived from Ireland. He gives no pleasing account of the attitude of the Irish population. Priests & people were "sitting on the fence", waiting to see what turn events would take, and secretly sympathising with the rebels. Ernest and I walked out in the rain, purchasing exercise with discomfort. I wrote cheques for the month's household accounts. They reflect the enhancement of prices but too faithfully.

After dinner we read from Lecky's History of Ireland an account of the Irish Rebellion in 1798. In many respects it presents a curiously close parallel to the occurrences of the last fortnight. The extraordinary outrages perpetrated by the British forces engaged in suppressing the rebellion make strange reading at the present time, when we are all shivering with horror at the performances of the German Army in Belgium. There is no more depraving condition than that of panic–fear: & no situation more favourable to that fatal temper than that of troops in the midst of a bitterly hostile population, who, they believe, rightly or wrongly, but certainly with large plausibility, meditates an attack upon them. There is much evidence to show that the German soldiers were obsessed by a dread of imaginary Belgian franc tireurs. With better reason the British Troops in 1798 suspected the Irish peasants, who were organized, armed, & bitterly hostile. The parallel between Ireland in 1798 and Belgium in 1914 is at least close enough to impose some moderation on British denunciations of German outrages. And the moralist draws a measure of comfort from the suggestion that it is not necessary to assume that Germans are abnormally & irreparably base.

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