The Peace
The war ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, and the world that came after it was not the world that had existed before it in any sense that the people who had lived in the before world would have recognised without significant adjustment.
The peace terms were signed in stages over the following months, in various rooms in various cities, by men who had not fought in the war sitting across tables from other men who had not fought in the war, dividing up what the men who had fought in it had left behind. The terms, taken together, amounted to the following:
The Germano-Hungry no longer existed. This was the largest single fact of the settlement and the one that required the most time to fully believe, since the Germano-Hungry had existed for long enough that its existence had become one of the assumptions the continent built its thinking on, and assumptions of that kind do not dissolve cleanly even when the thing they assumed has formally ceased to be. In its place stood a collection of successor states — smaller, newer, their borders drawn by committees in rooms in Paris who used maps and rulers and the occasional ethnic or linguistic argument to justify what were, in most cases, decisions that had already been made for other reasons.
The Republic of France recovered the territories it had lost in previous decades, the lands along the eastern border that the Empire had held and that French nationalism had been gesturing toward for a generation. The settlement gave them back, along with a considerable section of the Empire's western industrial capacity, which was less a gift than a calculation about what it would take to ensure the Empire could not rebuild what it had been within the lifetime of anyone currently sitting in the rooms where the terms were being decided.
Poland was independent. The proclamation said so specifically and repeatedly, in the way that things get said specifically and repeatedly in official documents when the people writing them understand that the thing being proclaimed is less settled than the proclamation implies. Poland was independent in the sense that it had a government and a flag and a seat at certain tables that had not previously had a Polish seat at them. It was independent in the sense that the German advisors who had been managing its affairs since the puppet arrangement of 1917 had been formally withdrawn, their withdrawal being one of the terms the settlement required. Whether it was independent in the sense that its government made decisions based on Polish interests rather than on what the powers surrounding it would tolerate was a question the settlement left open, in the way that settlements leave open the questions whose answers everyone knows but nobody wants to write down.
The Empire military was restricted by specific numerical limits that the settlement's drafters had calculated with the care of men who wanted to ensure that what had just finished finishing could not begin again within a generation. The enchanted battalions — the mage divisions that had turned the war's sky into something contested and lethal in ways that ordinary aircraft could not match — were banned entirely. Not restricted. Banned. The settlement used the word specifically and defined its consequences specifically, because the drafters understood that of all the things the Empire had done militarily, the enchanted battalions were the thing the Allied powers were least willing to see rebuilt under any circumstances.
Bulgaria lost territory along its southern border, the settlement redrawing the Macedonian boundary in ways that satisfied no one completely and everyone partially, which was the settlement's general approach to territorial questions that had more than one legitimate claim attached to them.
The Ottoman territories were distributed among the Allied powers in the particular way that losing empires' territories get distributed — with the language of liberation and mandate and protection and the practice of simply taking what the taking could be justified for, the justifications being various and the taking being consistent regardless of which justification applied in any specific case.
The Empire's debt — the cost of the war as calculated by the settlement's financial committees — was a number large enough that the people who wrote it into the document reportedly paused when they saw it assembled in full, the way you pause when a number that has been theoretical becomes specific and you understand for the first time what specific means. The Empire's allies were assigned portions of this debt according to formulae that the financial committees had developed over several months of argument, and the portions assigned were large enough that the question of how they would be paid was, for most of the Empire's allies, the dominant political question of the following decade.
This was the world that came after the war. This was what four years of it had purchased.
---
Liam
The boat from Liverpool came into Dublin Port on a grey November morning three weeks after the armistice, and the city was still celebrating in the specific way that Dublin celebrates things — not cleanly, not with the organised joy of a people who have been told what to feel and when to feel it, but with the accumulated, slightly chaotic energy of a city that had spent four years being anxious and had been given permission to stop being anxious and was working through what that meant in various ways simultaneously.
There were bands. There were flags. There were men singing on corners in the particular Dublin style that treats singing as both entertainment and argument, the songs changing without warning from celebratory to mournful and back again in a way that accurately represented the complexity of the emotion even if it confused anyone who had been expecting consistency.
I am Liam Connolly, twenty-six years old, from the Liberties, and I had been away for two years fighting a war that was not mine in any meaningful sense, for an empire that was not mine in any sense at all. I had come home alive and more or less intact except for certain things behind the eyes that I had not left with and would not be discussing with anyone in the near future.
I want to be clear about something from the start because I have found, in my limited experience of coming home from wars, that people prefer a particular version of the returned soldier and I am not going to provide it: I do not regret what I did over there. I know that is not the thing you are supposed to say. The thing you are supposed to say involves tragedy and waste and wishing things had been otherwise. I do think it was a waste. I do think four years of it was a catastrophe that the continent had inflicted on itself through a combination of ambition and stupidity and the specific failure of imagination that prevents powerful men from believing the thing they're starting will actually happen in the way it actually happens.
But the specific men I killed on the western front — with a rifle at range and twice with my hands in the particular close and ugly circumstances that the trenches occasionally produced, once with a man's hands around my throat and once in a shell crater in the dark with nothing but what I had available — were trying to kill me or the men beside me at the time. I find, examining my conscience with reasonable honesty, that I have no unresolved feelings about the outcome of those encounters. They were trying to kill me. They did not succeed. I came home. That is the complete accounting as far as I am concerned.
What I do feel, coming off the boat at Dublin Port with the city celebrating around me, is something more complicated and more interesting than guilt about the dead, which is this: I spent two years fighting for the Island Nation of Commonwealth and came home to a city that had, in those same two years, made certain decisions about the Island Nation of Commonwealth that I found entirely reasonable and entirely mine as well.
The Great Irish Island had decided something while I was away. I was in agreement with what it had decided. I had come home specifically to be in agreement with it, which meant that whatever was going to happen next was something I had been heading toward since before the boat docked.
---
My mother was at the port.
I don't know how she knew which boat or which time — she would not have told me how she knew if I'd asked, on the grounds that the answer was obvious to anyone paying attention and questions about obvious things were a particular kind of waste of time that she did not have patience for. She was standing at the edge of the crowd with her coat on and her arms folded in the specific posture she used when she was feeling something she had decided not to be seen feeling, and when I came through the crowd and she saw me she unfolded her arms and put them around me and held on for a moment that had enough in it that I will not try to describe it.
"You look terrible," she said, when she let go.
"I've had a difficult two years," I said.
"Come home," she said. "There's food."
My mother's solution to most things was food, which was not a bad solution and which I had been missing specifically for two years in the way that you miss specific things when you are eating what the army provides, which is not food in the sense she meant it.
I came home. There was food. We did not talk about the war that evening, which was her decision and which I respected, and we did not talk about what was coming, which was mine, and between the two decisions we had a quiet evening in the Liberties with the sounds of the city celebrating outside the window, and it was enough.
---
The elections came in January of 1919, and the Independence Party won them the way a river wins an argument with a stone wall — not dramatically, not in a single moment, but with the accumulated weight of something that had been building long enough that the wall's opinion about the matter had become irrelevant.
I voted for the first time in my life. I voted for independence, which was not a difficult decision. The Great Irish Island was an island full of Irish people who had been managed by someone else for longer than was reasonable and who had expressed, clearly and in the appropriate administrative format, a preference for managing themselves. That seemed to me a settled question and the vote a formality confirming what the settling had already decided.
The Commonwealth disagreed.
I found out how much the Commonwealth disagreed the way most of Dublin found out — one morning the streets had more police in them than the previous morning, and the police were a different kind of police from the ones Dublin was used to. Not local men who knew the streets and the faces and had at least the quality of being local. These were brought-in men. Commonwealth men. Men who had the quality I recognised from the western front of soldiers wearing a different uniform — men who had been told a place was hostile and had decided, before arriving, to treat it accordingly.
The mood of the city changed the way weather changes. Not all at once but in a direction, the temperature dropping by degrees until it had become something different from what it had been before.
---
I went back to work at the docks, the same work I'd done before the western front, loading and unloading whatever the ships brought in and took out of Dublin Port. The men I worked with were the same men, more or less, and the conversations in the breaks had the quality of men watching something develop and deciding what their relationship to the developing thing was going to be.
The deciding did not take long.
---
The first riot started in February, on a Tuesday afternoon. I was there because I had been to a meeting the previous evening — a gathering of men in a hall on Thomas Street who had various opinions about the Commonwealth's deployment of additional police and whose collective conclusion had been that a visible public presence on the streets was the appropriate first response.
Two hundred of us on O'Connell Street by midmorning, more arriving from the side streets as word spread the way word spreads in Dublin — instantly and with embellishments. Signs, mostly. Hand-painted boards with various statements about the election and what it meant. A reasonable amount of noise, because two hundred Dubliners gathered in one place generate noise as a natural baseline.
The police arrived at noon in numbers suggesting they had expected something larger, or had decided to treat what was there as something larger, which came to the same thing practically.
Batons. The specific posture of men who have been told they are restoring order, which is a posture that relieves men of the obligation to enquire too carefully into what order looks like or who decided. They formed a line and told us to disperse and gave us approximately thirty seconds before the line moved.
What followed on O'Connell Street was not an uncontrolled eruption. It was more like a negotiation conducted with the wrong vocabulary. The police pushed and the crowd pushed back and the batons came out on the people pushing back and some of those people used whatever they had in response, and the street became the specific kind of ugly that streets become when two groups of people are both certain they are right and have run out of words for it.
I was in the middle of it, which is where I tend to end up, a character flaw I have never successfully addressed. Arms up, protecting my head, moving backward through a crowd also moving backward in the chaotic way of retreating crowds where nobody is in charge of the direction.
A man went down to my left — a docker I knew by face named Séamus, a large quiet man with the quality of being entirely harmless until the precise moment he wasn't. Two batons caught him simultaneously across the shoulders and the back of his skull, dropping him to the pavement in a way that told me the large quiet quality was going to be unavailable to him for a while. I grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the side street with the focus the western front had installed in me for moving people who needed moving without asking permission.
We got clear. I stood in the side street with my back against a wall and my hands on my knees and breathed.
"Well," Séamus said from the ground, blood running from a cut above his ear. "That went well."
"Shut up, Séamus," I said.
---
The riots continued through February and into March, the police presence escalating in step with the resistance in the way that things escalate when both sides have decided the other's response justifies their own, which is a logic with no natural endpoint and which both sides appeared entirely committed to.
I went to all of them. Partly conviction. Partly something else — the specific restlessness of a man who has spent two years in circumstances of extreme intensity and found that ordinary life does not sit easily afterward. The riots were not the western front. Nothing was the western front. But they had a quality of immediate physical stakes that ordinary life lacked, and I found myself more fully present in them than in most other hours of my days, which told me something about what the western front had done to me that I have not finished processing.
---
The guns appeared in April.
Men like the ones I was associating with do not acquire weapons from nowhere — they acquire them from the places weapons go when wars end, which is various and which I will not detail. By April the gatherings included men who were armed and willing to use what they carried, which changed things in ways that were obvious and not fully understood until already changed.
The first ambush happened on a Thursday, in a narrow lane in the Liberties. A police column of eight men met twenty men positioned in the buildings on either side and the mathematics of that encounter resolved quickly in favour of the twenty, three constabulary going down in the initial exchange before the rest broke. I was three streets away watching a corner, heard the shots, counted them, understood what they meant and felt something complicated about it that I have not resolved into a simpler form.
The shots meant we were in something different from riots and batons. Different from a negotiation in the wrong vocabulary. Something that had its own momentum now and was going to go where its momentum took it regardless of what any individual person inside it decided about their own participation.
The Commonwealth's response came within forty-eight hours. More police. Different police — men with the specific quality I recognised from the western front of soldiers in a different uniform, men who had been somewhere recently that had adjusted their bearing permanently. The Commonwealth had sent in reinforced constabulary that was a constabulary in the same sense that a rifle is a walking stick.
Dublin became something I recognised from the western front in certain specific ways. Street corners with men watching them. Routes that were safe and routes that were not, changing daily. The particular quality of a city conducting two lives simultaneously — the ordinary visible life, and the other life underneath it, the one that organised the ordinary life's ability to continue.
I was in the other life. I had made that decision sometime between February and April without a specific moment I could point to, the way you make certain decisions without noticing until you see you've been on the new path for a while already.
---
The beating came on a Friday evening in May.
I had been moving information between meeting points — carrying things that needed to get from one part of the city to another through channels that weren't being watched. Unglamorous work. Six weeks of it. I had become, I believed, reasonably good at it.
I was not good enough.
Three of them, coming out of a doorway on Aungier Street, which was a street I thought I knew well enough to trust. Reinforced constabulary, with the specific energy of men who had been given a job and found that the job agreed with them.
The first baton caught me across the shoulders before I'd processed the doorway opening, which dropped me to one knee — not all the way down, the western front keeping my feet under me longer than might have been expected. I got my arms up in time to partially deflect the second, which caught my forearm instead of my skull and sent a white-hot line of pain to my shoulder that told me the bone had been asked a serious question about its structural integrity.
The third strike caught me across the back of the legs and removed the decision about staying upright from my hands entirely. The pavement of Aungier Street received me with the specific indifference of Dublin pavement, and the three constabulary men continued the conversation with their batons for what felt like a long time and was probably less than a minute.
A baton beating feels like being hit with something hard in places your body did not anticipate, which produces percussive pain — each impact a discrete event, the body registering them individually before they blur into a general condition of everything hurting at once. My ribs said something that I noted for later examination. My forearm had its own ongoing commentary. My head, which I had kept covered as priority, had received less than it might have and more than it wanted.
Then they were done, with the abruptness of men completing a task, and they left me on the pavement and walked back the way they came, and I lay on the Dublin pavement and looked at the evening sky above the rooftops and breathed carefully, because breathing incautiously had become a thing with consequences.
A woman came out of a door across the street — a middle-aged woman with a shopping basket who had heard what had happened and had decided, in the specific way that Dublin women decide things, that the appropriate response was to come and see about it. She crouched beside me and assessed what the constabulary had made of me with the practical unsentimental attention of someone who has seen this before.
"Can you stand," she said. Not quite a question.
"Give me a moment," I said.
"I'll give you a moment," she said. "Then you're coming inside." She looked at my forearm, which had begun swelling in a way that suggested the bone had answered the question asked of it in the negative after all. "And you're not going back out tonight."
"I need to—"
"You need to come inside," she said, in the tone of a woman who knows exactly how this conversation ends. "Whatever you need to do can be done by someone who hasn't just been beaten on Aungier Street."
I found I could not construct a strong argument against this.
She helped me up and I went inside and the door closed behind us on the Dublin evening, and I sat in her kitchen while she put something on my forearm that stung considerably and told me without particular emphasis that if I was going to keep doing whatever it was I was doing I should stop trusting streets I thought I knew.
I did not argue with her about that either.
Through the window I could see the last of the evening light on the Dublin rooftops, the city going about its ordinary visible life on top of the other life underneath it, and somewhere in the streets below men were moving information and watching corners and planning the next thing that came after today, and I was going to be part of it, my ribs and my forearm and Aungier Street's opinion of my face notwithstanding.
I had come home from the western front specifically to vote for independence. Which meant I had always been heading here — to this kitchen, to this woman's practical hands, to the Commonwealth's constabulary walking the streets outside and the Great Irish Island deciding what to do about that.
The deciding was not finished. It was a long way from finished. I had learned that from the western front too — the specific quality of something that has started and has a long way still to go.
I was going to be part of the going.
I was not going to trust Aungier Street again.