My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleywith appreciation and gratitude. I may take this opportunity of saying to you that inpresiding at the dinner to me, and in the wonderful speech he delivered, he put meunder a debt of lasting and warm gratitude.Yours very sincerely,T. P. O'CONNOR.It was this fight too which brought me in contact with one of the outstandingjournalists of my lifetime, H. W. Massingham, for whose character and capacity Ideveloped a considerable veneration. I was therefore deeply touched when he wroteof me in the subsequent 1922 election: 'To me the most attractive personal element inthe election is Mr. Mosley's "independent" candidature for Harrow. The force ofevents and Mr. Mosley's fine qualities have driven him to independence today, but hewill be the subject of a brisk competition among the parties before many more yearshave gone over his head. He has attached himself a good deal to Lord Robert Cecil,but he is a figure of individual strength and purpose, a young man of genius, perhapsthe most interesting in the late parliament. If character, a brilliant and searching mind,a sympathetic temperament and a repugnance for mean and cruel dealings fit men forthe service of the State, Sir. Mosley should rise high in it. It is hardly a compliment insuch days as these, to speak of him as a rising man. Yet I regard him as something ofa star, and of no common brightness."It was tough going for a man of twenty-three when I began, but I had the impetus bothof the revelations I had received and of my previous experience during a spell ofnominal light duty in Ireland not long after the rising of 1916. We regulars then hadour Irish experiences in the field, though most of the fighting was over by the time Igot back to the Curragh. The essence of the military events in Ireland was thecompetence of the regular troops and the incompetence of the irregulars. Thisaccounted in my view for the difference between 1916 and 1920. Often in humanaffairs the origin of brutality is incapacity. Our people in the 1916 period also sufferedthe extreme irritation of soldiers on being sniped by civilians.A man would be shot as they went through a village, and the subsequent search ofhouses would reveal nothing but women knitting and men digging the garden. Theassassin—for so the sniper in plain clothes is regarded by troops—had disappearedunder cover of the civilian population. Our men had the recompense of a completemastery over the guerrillas in the field. They did not fall into ambushes or booby traps,because they advanced in the proper formation of trained troops. If a point or flankerwere picked off, they would fan out and encircle the attackers in classic style atgreater speed than the enemy's untrained and unequipped capacity for movementenabled him to achieve. At that time our people knew all about fighting, and theinsurgents knew next to nothing. The Irish got very much the worst of it, and despitethe exasperation caused by civilian sniping, these regular troops had not such aserious temptation to commit any unsoldierly act, which in any case their firmdiscipline prevented.The end of effective fighting in this period was characteristic of the whole affair. TheIrish held the Shelborne Hotel in the centre of the city and dug themselves in on St.132 of 424