Buckingham Palace to Bachelor’s Walk

To the Tories George V was a “cipher”; to the Liberals a “kind of second-lieutenant to Bonar Law.” During the Curragh mutiny, both sides had accused him of favoring the other; the back-stairs of Buckingham Palace had been freely populated by rumor with seditious generals and whispering Nationalists; his movements had been questioned in Parliament. At last, in Bachelor’s Walk, Major Haig ordered his bruised rearguard to block the narrow road; and the rearguard lost its head. The soldiers had fired hastily and without orders; but if ever a slipshod killing deserved to be called a “massacre,” the killing in Bachelor’s Walk deserves that name. At Larne, 30,000 Orange rifles were landed while the police and the coastguards and the soldiers slept: at Howth, the landing of 1,500 Nationalist rifles could only be expiated in blood. And the Army, which refused to march against Ulster, had shown no unwillingness to meet the Nationalist Volunteers.

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