The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport - The Green Flag

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:01)

Section 1 of The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport.

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The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Green Flag When Jack Connolly of the Irish Shotgun Brigade, the Rory of the Hill's Inner Circle, and the extreme left wing of the Land League, was incontinently shot by Sergeant Murdoch of the Constabulary in a little moonlight frolic near Canterk, his twin brother Dennis joined the British Army. The countryside had become too hot for him, and as the 75 Schlinges were wanting, which might have carried him to America, he took the only way handy of getting himself out of the way.

Seldom has Her Majesty had a less promising recruit, for his hot Celtic blood seethed with hatred against Britain, and all things British. The Sergeant, however, smiling complacently over his six-foot of brawn and his 44-inch chest, whisked him off with a dozen other of the boys to the depot at Firmoy, whence in a few weeks they were sent on, with the spadework kinks taken out of their backs to the 1st Battalion of the Royal Mallows, at the top of the roster for foreign service.

The Royal Mallows at about that date were as a strange lot of men as ever were paid by a great empire to fight its battles. It was the darkest hour of the land struggle, when the one side came out with crowbar and battering ram by day, and the other with mask and with shotgun by night. Men driven from their homes and potato patches found their way even into the service of the government, to which it seemed to them that they owed their troubles, and now and then they did wild things before they came. There were recruits in the Irish regiments who would forget to answer to their own names, so short had been their acquaintance with them. Of those, the Royal Mallows had their full share, and while they still retained their fame as being one of the smartest corps in the army, no one knew better than their officers that they were dry-rotted with treason and with a bitter hatred for the flag of which they served.

And the center of all the disaffection was C Company, in which Dennis Connolly found himself enrolled. They were Celts, Catholics, and men of the tenant class to a man, and the whole experience of the British government had been an inexorable landlord and a constabulary who seemed to them to be always on the side of the rent collector. Dennis was not the only moonlighter in the ranks, nor was he alone in having an intolerable family blood food to harden his heart. Savagery had begotten savagery in that veiled civil war. A landlord with an iron mortgage weighing down upon him had small bowels for his tenantry. He did but take what the law allowed, and yet with men like Jim Holan, or Patrick McQuire, or Peter Flynn, who had seen the roofs torn from their cottages, and their folk huddled among the pitiable furniture on the roadside, it was ill to argue about abstract law. What matter that in that long and bitter struggle there was many another outrage on the part of the tenant, and many another grievance on the side of the landowner? A stricken man can only feel his own wound, and the rank and file of the C Company of the Royal Mallows was sore and savage to the soul. There were low whisperings in barrack rooms and canteens, stealthy meetings in public house parlours, bandying of passwords from mouth to mouth, and many other signs which made their officers right glad when the order came which sent them to foreign and better still to active service.

For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a distance looked upon the foe as though he might in truth be the friend. But when they have been put face on to him, and when their officers have dashed to the front with a wave and hello, those rebel hearts have softened, and their gallant Celtic blood has boiled with the mad joy of the fight, until the slower Britons have marvelled that they ever could have doubted the loyalty of their Irish comrades. So it would be again, according to the officers, and so it would not be if Dennis Connolly and a few others could have their way.

It was a March morning upon the eastern fringe of the Nubian desert. The sun had not yet risen, but a tinge of pink flushed up as far as the cloudless zenith, and the long strip of sea lay like a rosy ribbon across the horizon.