"The Trouble"

ARMY WITHOUT BANNERS--Ernie O Malley--Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

That nation of rhetoricians, the Irish, love to kiss the truth with generous euphemistic smacks, sometimes like to roll the tart bitterness of an understatement on their curly tongues. Such a concentrated less-than-truth is "The Trouble," their phrase for the five years of battle, murder & sudden death (1916-1921). Such Irishmen as Ernie O Malley, who not only saw the Trouble at first hand but did their best to help it along, referred to it simply as "the scrap." But as Author O Malley well knows, and as his Army Without Banners well shows, those troublous scraps were quilted together into a guerrilla pattern that nearly drove the British crazy, finally blanketed Ireland in Revolution.

Earnan O Maille, to give him his Gaelic, was a boy of 18 when the Trouble started. Old Mother Ireland and her woes meant little to him: his family were gentry and his childhood in Mayo and Dublin had been governess-guarded. But when the guns began to pop in Dublin's Easter Week rising, O Malley's heart told him that he was Irish too. He sneaked out of the house after dark, joined a pal who had a rifle, took turns firing at British rifle flashes. Soon he had joined the Irish Republican Army as a volunteer, left home for good. His governessy upbringing rubbed off fast. He was made an officer, sent out to organize country districts, given such perilous jobs as disguising himself as a British officer. He had to change his name often. Once, when his alias was Gallagher, the friendly countrymen called him Kelly, thinking his name might really be Gallagher. Worst thing about his hunted life was the food: everlasting bacon & cabbage, and "strong tea that a mouse could trot on."

O Malley and his men had many a brush with the police, the Black & Tans, the British soldiers, waged a waspish war attacking isolated barracks and police stations, barricading roads, ambushing convoys. He was wounded half a dozen times. One unlucky morning he was captured. Put through a grisly third-degree, beaten up, constantly threatened with death, he was finally clapped into Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin's strongest. Few months later, before his identity had been discovered, he and a few bold comrades escaped. A seasoned veteran now at 24, O Malley was sent back to his guerrilla battlefield, this time with 7,000 men in his command. He found the revolutionary movement driven literally underground, with headquarters in dugouts, but with a new spirit of hope: the lost cause was beginning to win. While he was planning bigger and better raids, peace came at last.

A real Irish stew of a book, Army Without Banners has a smoky flavor, is spudded with hunks of lyrical description, plenty of jagged bones and gristle of realism, and enough meat to go round. Author O Malley has not piled on his horrors as he might: more than once he obviously cuts a grim tale short. But not always. In the worst days of the Trouble, when the British were shooting any Irishman they caught with arms on him. O Malley's men captured three English officers. They were armed. Under standing orders from headquarters, O Malley had them taken out and shot.

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