Part 22

The Government feel that this is a matter which cannot be finally settled at the present time. They therefore suggest for the consideration of the convention that, during the period of the war and for a period of two years thereafter, the control of customs and excise should be reserved to the United Kingdom Parliament; that, as soon as possible after the Irish Parliament has been established, a Joint Exchequer Board should be set up to secure the determination of the true revenue of Ireland--a provision which is essential to a system of responsible Irish government--and to the making of a national balance sheet, and that, at the end of the war, a royal commission should be established to re-examine impartially and thoroughly the financial relations of Great Britain and Ireland, to report on the contribution of Ireland to imperial expenditure, and to submit proposals as to the best means of adjusting the economic and fiscal relations of the two countries.

The Government consider that during the period of the war the control of all taxation other than customs and excise could be handed over to the Irish Parliament; that for the period of the war and two years thereafter an agreed proportion of the annual imperial expenditure should be fixed as the Irish contribution; and that all Irish revenue from customs and excise as determined by the Joint Exchequer Board, after deduction of the agreed Irish contribution to imperial expenditure, should be paid into the Irish Exchequer. For administrative reasons, during the period of the war it is necessary that the police should remain under imperial control, and it seems to the Government to be desirable that for the same period the postal service should be a reserved service.

CONSCRIPTION IN IRELAND

The announcement of the British Government's twofold plan of home rule and conscription for Ireland caused an outpouring of protests from the whole of the Nationalist population. Preparations for resistance were begun, a great anti-conscription fund was opened, resolutions from public bodies began pouring in, and the Sinn Fein clubs renewed their

## activities.

The most striking feature of the opposition to conscription was that it welded together all the Irish elements represented by the Nationalist Party, the Independent Home Rulers, led by William O'Brien and Timothy Healy; the Sinn Fein, and the Labor organizations, which in recent years had not been very friendly to the Nationalists. Representatives of all these parties were present at a conference in Dublin, held, under the Chairmanship of the Lord Mayor, on April 18. The Catholic Bishops, at a meeting in Maynooth the same day, adopted a declaration against conscription. This meeting was attended by five representatives from the Dublin conference--John Dillon, Edward de Valere, Timothy Healy, a Labor delegate, and the Lord Mayor of Dublin.

A majority of the Nationalist members of the House of Commons decided to abstain from attendance in Parliament during the crisis, thus adopting the attitude of the Sinn Feiners who were elected to the House but have never attended. Fifty-five of the Nationalist members met in Dublin on April 20, with John Dillon presiding, and passed a resolution in which they declared that the enforcement of compulsory military service on a nation without its assent constituted "one of the most brutal acts of tyranny and oppression of which any Government can be guilty."

Fifteen hundred delegates of labor unions met at the Mansion House, Dublin, on April 20, and pledged their resistance to conscription. They also fixed April 23 for the stoppage of all work as an earnest of this resolve and to enable all workers to sign the pledge of resistance. The complete stoppage of work was duly observed on the day mentioned, and passed off for the most part in a quiet and orderly manner.

Sunday, April 21, was observed throughout Catholic Ireland as the day for the administration by the priests of the anti-conscription covenant. From every Catholic pulpit conscription was the subject of discourse, and the action of the Bishops and political leaders was explained. The assemblies where the pledge was taken were generally outside the churches, sometimes in the open air, sometimes in a hall. The practice followed in many cases was for the priest to read the pledge, sentence by sentence, the people reciting after him. In other cases the pledge was given by the raising of hands or the signing of a paper. The Bishops took part with the inferior clergy in administering the pledge, addressing the people and generally warning them against isolated and unconsidered action. They urged obedience to the orders of the recognized leaders, who act in co-operation. All classes, including lawyers, bankers, and merchants, as well as farmers and workmen, took the pledge.

On May 1 an Order in Council was issued by the British Government postponing the operation of the National Service, or conscription, act in Ireland beyond that date, to which it had been previously postponed.

Premier Lloyd George, commenting on the new attitude of the Irish Home Rulers in a letter addressed on May 2 to Irish workers on the Tyneside in England, wrote:

The difficulties have not been rendered easier of settlement by the challenge to supremacy of the United Kingdom Parliament in that sphere, which always has been regarded as properly belonging to it by all advocates of home rule, which recently was issued by the Nationalist Party and the Roman Catholic Hierarchy in concert with the leaders of the Sinn Fein.

While Nationalist and Catholic Ireland had already begun its campaign of resistance to conscription, the Ulster Unionists, under the leadership of Sir Edward Carson, prepared to oppose home rule. Sir Edward Carson declared that the Government had broken its pledges to Ulster by undertaking to pass a Home Rule bill, and on April 24 he advised the Ulster Unionist Council to reorganize its machinery for the impending struggle.

The appointment of Field Marshal Viscount French as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and of Edward Shortt, member of the House of Commons for Newcastle-on-Tyne, as Chief Secretary for Ireland was officially announced on May 5.

Lord French, before his new appointment, was Commander in Chief of the forces in the United Kingdom and had gone to Ireland in that capacity a few days before he became Viceroy. Edward Shortt, in addition to being a Home Ruler, had voted against the extension of conscription to Ireland until an Irish Government had been established.

Greatest Gas Attack of the War

_W. A. Willison, Canadian correspondent, cabled from the Picardy front on March 22, 1918:_

While British and German troops were struggling far to the south in the opening clash of the Spring campaign, the greatest projector gas bombardment in the world's history was carried out by the Canadians tonight against the enemy positions between Lens and Hill 70. Sharply at 11 o'clock the signal rocket gave notice of the beginning. A moment later over 5,000 drums of lethal gas were simultaneously released from projectors, and were hurled into the enemy territory from the outskirts of Lens, and northward to Cité St. Auguste and the Bois de Dix-Huit.

From his front lines and strong points favoring winds carried the poisonous clouds back upon the enemy's supports, reserves, and assembly areas. The whole of the front was lit up with enemy flares, dimly seen through the heavy mist, while the men in our lines could hear the enemy's gas alarms and cries of distress from the hostile trenches.

Nine minutes later our field artillery, supported by heavy guns and heavy trench mortars, opened up with a slow bombardment, which gradually increased in intensity, until, forty minutes later, the enemy positions were swept with a short, intensive, creeping barrage, which raked his forward and rear areas with high explosive. Caught by our gas without a moment's warning, caught again as he was emerging from his shelters by our artillery, the enemy's casualties must have been very heavy, for the effectiveness of our smaller gas operations has been emphatically proved by the evidence of prisoners.

Tonight's bombardment was three times greater than anything of its kind ever attempted by us on the Western front, and much greater than anything ever launched by the Germans, though the score of the second battle of Ypres and other reckonings are still to be settled, and will be settled.

Plucky Dunkirk

By Anna Milo Upjohn

_Inspector in Paris for the Fraternité Americaine_

[Since this article was written Dunkirk has faced a new peril from the blow struck in her direction by the powerful German armies around Ypres, to the southeast; but the author's vivid and sympathetic description of the daily life of the little city remains as true as in the Winter days when it was penned for CURRENT HISTORY MAGAZINE.

In the track of the wind stands the plucky little City of Dunkirk, still flapping the flags of courage and constancy in the face of an increasingly rabid enemy. It is the only city of France that is subjected to bombardment from land and sea and sky.

What is the every-day life in a town near enough to the front to be never free from the menace of a triple bombardment? That is what I went to find out, traveling by way of Calais in stygian darkness, for the train was without lights to avoid the danger of bombs.

A little before dawn the train drew into the black station of Dunkirk, through whose roofing the sky showed dimly in spots where air-raid shells had spattered. The silent crowd jostled through the darkness, the soldiers separating themselves from it at the military exit. Inside, only a ray from a dark lantern, held by the officer who scanned the passports one by one, made a spot of light among the overlapping shadows. The wind sighed through the draughty place, the snow entered freely, the floor was sloppy with mud. Outside in the empty square not a vehicle, not a porter, in sight. The street cars had stopped running.

My hotel lay beyond the centre of the town. In the driving storm, through unknown streets, I knew it would be foolish to attempt to find it. An officer passed and to him I appealed. "To the right, in the middle of the square," he said, with outstretched arm, "is the Lion de Flandre. If they can't put you up there, come back and we will see."

Not a point of light indicated the identity of the Lion de Flandre. On nearer approach all the houses appeared boarded up, as though long since abandoned. In the middle of the square was an oblong hump, like the roofed-over foundation of a demolished building. I learned later that this was a public refuge built for the inhabitants of the section.

HOTEL IN DANGER ZONE

As I turned irresolutely in the direction of the dark façades, the silhouette of a man in casque and puttees passed across the snow. A crack of light gleamed from a hidden doorway, and through it he disappeared. I followed hard after him and stepped into a lighted room full of smoke and soldiers, a _man's_ place, with sand-strewn floor and bottles conspicuously in evidence. Nevertheless, the comfortable woman behind the bar received me without surprise. A room she could give me, but as for food, that was a different matter. The boches had the habit of coming at about dinner time, and it had become a nuisance to abandon the untasted meal every night and to dive into the cave--it really had! So she had given up trying to have anything hot at night and let the fires go out at 6. But if I would like a sandwich and some beer--?

After the long, starved journey this was not alluring.

"Not a cup of tea with the sandwich?" I pleaded. A collaborator was called, a plump, dark woman, and after a hurried conference I was asked to wait in the room behind the café. Nothing could be more dismal than this compartment. It was high for its floor space, like a deep box with a lid, and had no outside windows, being wedged between the café and the kitchen. The ornate glass divisions were gone or clinging in fragments, the walls pierced in many places, the plaster down. A tiny point of gas burned high above the table.

They were very good to me, these warbound women, one of whom, I discovered, had an ulcerated tooth, the other two little boys captive in Belgium.

FIRST NIGHT'S EXPERIENCES

In a short time a small bit of steak and a potato cut in quarters and fried were placed before me, and simultaneously a large black dog with wistful eyes but determined manner stationed himself at my side. The steak was followed by a chilly little salad, bread and cheese, and more butter than I had seen for many a month in Paris--and a cup of tea which, for its grateful warmth, I drank without challenge.

Snatches of honest English, mingled with French, filtered in from the café, where the fire was not quite extinct and where beer was served until 9 o'clock. Before that hour I was fumbling upstairs guided by the patronne, who carried a two-inch stub of candle between her fingers. "This is the way to the cave," she explained, pointing to a doorway under the stairs. "In case of an alarm you have only to rush down there. There will be a light burning at the entrance." Passing through the hallway she indicated the spot where a man had recently been killed. "If he had stayed where he was, at the table where you have just eaten, Madame, he would have been all right, but as he ran to the refuge a bomb exploded outside in the square, burst open the front door, traversed the length of the corridor, passed through the kitchen wall and into the garden beyond. But you can rest assured that nothing will happen tonight, Madame," continued the patronne, who seemed as familiar with the habits of Gothas as a farmer's wife is with those of fowls--"Not in this wind, oh, no!"

After that first night I groped my way alone to bed, the candle stub having come to an end, feeling my way along the pitch dark passageways to the room with the linoleum mat, the room which had not known fire for three years and a half, whose paneless windows were boarded up, the one room in the house which had not lost a ceiling or floor or whose walls were not clipped through with shells. The regular inmates of the hotel slept nightly in the cellar. It saved time and was warmer.

Notwithstanding the reassurances of the patronne I confess to going to bed with half my clothes on. But under the wing of the storm Dunkirk slept tranquilly for three successive nights. Of course, there was always the soft bum-bum of the cannon on the northern horizon, strange tremors shook the bed, and the night was full of weird sounds, the rattling skeletons of dead houses.

BRAVE LITTLE DUNKIRK

Like an arm held up to protect the face, the coast between Calais and Dunkirk bears the brunt of storm from the North Sea. A dark sea, sombre and brooding, girdled by lowering clouds; on the snow-driven plain a few detached towers, etched as though in sepia against the gray sky and rising abruptly above the low line of roof--this is Dunkirk on a Winter's day. A homely little town with a deep fringe of docks and waterways on its seaward side and a girdle of fortifications built by Vauban encircling the rest. The whole set in a ring of dark water which fills the moat. It is thoroughly Flemish in character, and, seen from the water, must resemble a city on a delft tile. The moral attitude of the town has always been one of robust activity. Even its patron saints are among the most industrious and enterprising in the calendar--notably St. Eloi, who brought Christianity to the Dunkerquois and to whom the original Dunkirk (church on the dunes) was dedicated.

All the history of the town is tinged with a vigor which has blown in to it from the sea. Here the crusading ships of Baldwin of Flanders, and later those of St. Louis of France, were fitted out. After the momentous marriage of Marie of Burgundy had thrown the city for a time under the dominion of Spain it played a brilliant part in the game of the period--piracy.

The quaint tower on the quay--called Lugenhaer, the Liar--was used at that epoch to give false signals to ships at sea. But it dates from a much earlier period, and was one of twenty-eight towers with which Baldwin of Flanders bound together the wall with which he surrounded the city. The Liar and the belfry of the recently ruined Cathedral of St. Eloi were the only interesting architectural bits left in Dunkirk. The thirteenth century tower, dark and strong at its base, rises to a great height, flowering into restrained tracery at the top and shepherding under its shadow the heart of the town, which lies below it. This is the lodestone. Toward it I turned after leaving the battered hotel that first morning at Dunkirk.

[Illustration: A photograph, full of human interest, showing Americans, headed by a regimental band, marching to the front in France

(_American Official Photograph_)]

[Illustration: The Harvard University Regiment marching through the streets of Boston

(© _Underwood_)]

CITY OF SHATTERED HOMES

From the snowy Place de la Gare the street cars started regularly in divergent directions, but oh, the gloom of those dead streets which they passed! Wide streets, winding between rows of low houses, plain and solid, but built on a neighborly plan. Their desolation is the more marked because of this innate, homelike quality. In almost all of them the window and door spaces were boarded up, and the first impression was rather that of a deserted city than of a demolished one. But a second glance showed that destruction had come from the sky, tearing away the roof, annihilating the interior, and rendering the house uninhabitable, perhaps irreparable, though the walls might to a certain extent be left standing. Often the havoc was more apparent, exposing the bare skeleton of a home and the shattered remnants of household comforts in shocking nudity.

The freakishness of destruction by bombardment is proverbial. It is this which creates in the timid an intense anxiety and in the hardy the willingness to take a chance. The 8-year-old son of the chief surgeon at the Military Hospital, stretching out his hand during a bombardment, said calmly, "Of course it _may_ fall on _that_, but there is plenty of room on each side." And this rather sums up the spirit of the Dunkerquois who remain.

Of a population of 40,000, about 5,000 are left, and most of these have become modern cave men. To be thoroughly up to date one must live in a "casemate." In every quarter of the town posters announce the locality of these public refuges. They are either cellars reinforced overhead, or dugouts in the public squares, strongly roofed with corrugated iron, which is covered with wood and sandbags. Often there is extra trench work inside, always a tight little stove with a pipe running the length of the cave, plank benches along the sides, and usually beds with army blankets.

DODGING THE BOMBS

Into these refuges the Dunkerquois has learned to precipitate himself with extraordinary celerity. He considers a minute and a half sufficient time in which to gain safety, no matter where he may be when the "alerte" is given. When there is a bombardment from the land side the alarm is sounded as the obus leaves the gun at the front. It takes 90 seconds for its flight to Dunkirk. So accurately is this calculated that casualties seldom result from a land bombardment. The inhabitants scuttle into safety, and the damage is limited to bricks and mortar. The peppering from sea is also taken lightly. The firing is very rapid, but it is soon over, and the shots are comparatively small, passing clean through the walls without shattering them. It is the air raids which are dreaded, and these are increasingly frequent and destructive. Often the chugging of the motors can be heard in the thick darkness for a quarter of an hour or more before there is an explosion, and this is a nerve-racking experience.

A striking feature of the streets in Dunkirk is the incumbrance of the sidewalks by boxes filled with stones and sandbags. These cover the windows and approaches to the cellars and serve as shock absorbers against flying pieces of shell.

And why does any one stay in so precarious an outpost on the verge of the fighting line? Some perhaps because to set forth alone or with a brood of children into an unknown world already trampled by countless refugees seems an equally perilous outlook. Others because their maintenance still depends upon the docks and shipyards, though the 6,000 longshoremen usually employed about the piers have disappeared. Then there are those whose interests are bound up in a shop or other investment in the town, and business is brisk in Dunkirk, owing to the presence of two armies. A few there are who are not only _of_ Dunkirk but who _are_ Dunkirk itself, upon whose presence depends the prosperity of the town and its usefulness to the State.

STILL A LIVELY PORT

For if the picturesque landmarks have disappeared, Dunkirk has by no means lost its sea prestige. It is the third port of France, and though its position is singularly exposed it is largely through its harbor that the British Army has been revictualed since the beginning of the war. This renders still more remarkable the fact that not one ship has been lost between Dunkirk and the English port of clearing. One does not appreciate at first glance all that this implies. It means for one thing that some one must sit tight at Dunkirk. Traffic by sea has gone on uninterruptedly and until recently has been quite that of normal times. Now, owing to the recent restrictions on imports and exports, it is greatly reduced, though still regular. The sailings and dockings take place on schedule time.

One of those largely responsible for the order of the port is the Consular Agent of the United States, M. Morel, also President of the Chamber of Commerce of Dunkirk. His house, a mere skeleton, has long since been abandoned for the superior comforts and safety of the cellar. Attached to the jamb of the almost equally ruined office building his small sign in black and gold makes a brave showing. The front of the building had been largely torn away and with it a part of the roof. Looking up one saw a dizzy arrangement of laths and rafters, suggestive of the underside of a heap of jackstraws. But the staircase was firm and led to a small back room, where a bright fire burned and where business was transacted as usual; not only the business of the port, for while I was there an American Red Cross doctor and a bevy of nurses came in to have their passports renewed.