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HE revolutionary movement in Ireland began in the year 1912. In September of that year thousands of men in Northeast Ireland, directed by Sir Edward Carson, entered into a covenant to resist the administration of a Government which the King, Lords, and Commons of the United Kingdoms purposed to set up in Ireland. At the time the covenanters had already a military discipline and a military manRumors came that they were actually acquiring arms. A small shipment of rifles was seized at Belfast, and from that time on much space was given in the newspapers to the formation, the movements, and the declarations of the Ulster Volunteers.

ner.

The editorial writers on the Conservative papers in England and Ireland rather missed the significance of happenings in Northeast Ulster. They thought that the arming of men there would kill Home Rule and the Liberal Government and safeguard the veto of the House of Lords. But the significant thing was that a section of the people of Ireland were handling guns. The British Government had always been jealous of Irishmen arming themselves. In the sixties and seventies men had been given long terms of penal servitude in horrible prisons for smuggling arms into Ireland. Of course Nationalist Ireland knew that Northeast Ulster was privileged. Still it was brought to the notice of Nationalists that the Arms Embargo act had been repealed.

Nationalist Ireland made no effort to obtain arms. Why should she? A Home Rule bill that satisfied the Nationalist leaders was being passed. Northeast UIster was said to be preparing to make it inoperative, but then, as the Nationalists thought, the Government was not so impotent as it seemed. Besides, Northeast Ulster had bluffed through all history, and there was no reason to believe it was

doing anything else now. Nationalist Ireland regarded the Ulster Volunteers and the Ulster Provisional Government as theatrical.

Coincidentally with the arming of the Ulster Volunteers came labor troubles in Dublin, Wexford, and Cork. The Dublin troubles amounted to civic disturbances in the Fall of 1913. Dublin has practically the same population now as it had in the eighteenth century-about 360,000 people. But in the eighteenth century Dublin was an industrial centre and had a spending population. Her industries decayed, her gentry vanished with her Parliament, but her population remained the same. Dublin can give adequate employment for only about 200,000 people. The city has a great brewery and great distilleries, but it is now mainly a centre for distribution and transportation.

The Dublin Transport Workers had been organized by Mr. James Larkin. They had headquarters in a former hotel near the quays-Liberty Hall, and they had a base in Croydon Park, a piece of ground they owned. In the lockout of 1913 the employers had been able to bring the authorities against the workers. The labor revolt was crushed, and baton charges by the police had broken up meetings in the streets. The intellectuals who had allied themselves with Liberty Hall and the two labor leaders saw that the workers would have to have some means of defense against police attacks.

Talk of arming men was in the air. One of the intellectuals who had allied themselves with the workers, a gentleman who had been an officer in the British Army, offered to organize a defense force from among the workers themselves. Most of the Transport Workers had been in the militia. They were easily drilled and easily led. In a few weeks the first organized force outside Ulster was drilling in Croydon Park. This was the Citizen Army.

Meanwhile Nationalists in Northeast Ulster were becoming alarmed. Men who regarded Home Rulers as enemies were in possession of arms, and at any time a storm of hatred might break out. Appeals for assistance began to come from the Home Rulers of the Northeast. In response to these appeals a distinguished Ulster Nationalist living in Dublin, Professor MacNeill, published in the Gaelic League journal " An Cleadheamh Soluis " a project for the creation of a body of volunteers for Nationalist Ireland.

In November, 1913, the enrollment of the Nationalist Volunteers began. The response was eager. The Irish are a soldierly people, and this was the first time in 200 years that they had had the chance to organize along military lines in defense of a national principle. In March, 1914, came the Curragh Camp mutiny. Eminent officers in the army declared they would not obey orders if they were sent to put down any revolt in Northeast Ulster. "The army has killed Home Rule," vaunted the Conservative press. There was a crisis in Parliament, and the incident helped enormously the recruitment of the Irish Volunteers.

The Ulster and the Irish Volunteers had now to arm themselves surreptitiously. In November, immediately on the formation of the latter body, an embargo on arms going into Ireland had been declared. In May, 1914, the Ulster Volunteers ran a big cargo of arms into Larne. The authorities made no move to stop the shipment. At the end of July the Irish Volunteers ran a cargo of arms into Howth, just outside of Dublin. The authorities moved to intercept the volunteers on their return to the city. The military was called out, and the regular and irregular forces met half way between Howth and Dublin. The volunteers dispersed and got away with their arms. As the military went back through the streets they were hooted by a Dublin crowd. Stones were thrown at them. The commanding officer, Major Haig, gave his men an order to fire on the populace. They fired, and afterward charged with the bayonet, killing and wounding men and women.

A week later the European war broke

out. Ireland was swept into it with a fresh memory of citizens killed by British soldiers and with a sense of unfair discrimination as between the Nationalist and the Ulster Volunteers.

The historian of the Irish insurrection has now to account for certain happenings in Irish public life during the eighteen months of war-first, the loss of accord between the Irish people and their Parliamentary representatives; secondly, the determination of the Irish Volunteers to hold their arms at all costs; thirdly, the growing ascendency of a secret society that in 1912 was regarded as moribund, and, fourthly, the exasperation that made Irish men and women long for the day of combat-these happenings made the insurrection of Easter, 1916.

A big minority of the Irish people supported the Allies in the war. But among the bulk of the people the belief persisted that any war in which England engaged was a war for conquest and spoliation. The Parliamentary party helped to recruit for the army in Ireland. Still, as Mr. Redmond and his followers spoke at recruiting meetings, many Nationalists were noting that while their men were being sent to the front, pains were being taken to keep the Ulster Volunteer organization intact. No accord was established between the Irish people and the men who, to the Irish mind, stood for the English ascendency. In the first month of the war Mr. Balfour made a demand that the Home Rule bill be withdrawn. Finally the Home Rule bill was put upon the statute book. No date was given for its being made operative, and the measure was tied up with an amending bill that would reduce powers and perhaps curtail Irish territory.

Three threats kept the Irish nationalist public in a state of alarm. The first was that of conscription. Ireland's effective male population had been terribly reduced by emigration and people felt instinctively that the loss of many more young men would have a grave effect on the Irish stock. The second threat was that of a taxation that would leave the people hardly any margin for life. The third was that of actual famine. The Irish. people have ghastly recollections of the

famine of 1846-7. Then, as they believe, the food they produced was swept into England to pay landlords' rents. If there was a scarcity of food in England, their stock and crop, they thought, would be swept out of the country to supply the English industrial centres. In order to safeguard the food supply, to guard against conscription, and to put up a threat against increased taxation, the Irish Volunteer command issued instruc'tions that the rank and file of the volunteers were to resist disarmament.

A split had occurred in the volunteer ranks. Those who favored Mr. Redmond's policy separated themselves as the National Volunteers, and those who remained with Professor MacNeill kept the title of Irish Volunteers. The Irish Volunteers became more and more uncompromising in their attitude to the administration in Ireland. Meantime the Liberal Government that had put the Home Rule bill on the statute book had gone out of existence, and the new Coalition Cabinet included such opponents of home rule as Sir Edward Carson, Mr. Bonar Law, and Mr. Arthur Balfour.

It was the apparent inability of the Irish Parliamentary Party to save the country from a devastating taxation that broke the accord between the people and Mr. Redmond and Mr. Dillon. Before the war Ireland, it was calculated, was overtaxed to the amount of $15,000,000. Then she had to raise a revenue of $45,000,000. She had now to raise a revenue of $85,000,000-that is to say, the revenue she had to raise was greater by $10,000,000 than the revenue of Bulgaria, greater by $10,000,000 than the revenue of Norway, greater by $25,000,000 than the revenue of Denmark. In England and Scotland there were compensations for the increased taxation. Workmen were earning high salaries in the military and naval arsenals. But in Ireland, outside of Belfast, there were no such compensations.

More and more the Irish public turned

toward Professor MacNeill and the Irish Volunteers. And now, for some reasons not yet apparent, many of the volunteer higher command - Professor MacNeill was not among them-went over to a secret revolutionary organization—the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Using secret and open means, and supported more or less by an alarmed and exasperated public, the seven men whose names appeared on the republican proclamation prepared for revolt. An understanding now existed between members of the Irish Volunteer command, representing the Nationalist professional, business, and farming classes, and the command of the citizen army, representing the Dublin workers.

About last March the heads of the revolutionary organization were made to feel that a crisis had come. Several journals were suppressed, and men important in the volunteer organization had been arrested. Threats of conscription and disarmament had come up again. Public meetings were being held in Dublin to protest against overtaxation and deportation of prisoners-a private letter written at the time said, "Things have reached the breaking point here."

On April 19 a document was read to the Dublin Corporation which had an effect on the revolutionary preparations. It purported to be a secret order issued to the military; it was in cipher, and had been stolen off the files in Dublin Castle. According to this document all the heads of the Irish Volunteers, the National Volunteers, the Citizen Army, the Sinn Fein Council, and the Gaelic League were to be put under arrest on an order from the military commander. With this document made public the revolutionary group felt that they would have to move at once or their preparations would end in a fiasco like that of 1867. So on Easter Monday the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen Army paraded, and the revolutionists struck their resounding blows in Dublin and the country districts.

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BEGINNING OF THE BATTLE HE City of Verdun itself, in spite of its high, encircling, walls and citadel covering an immense subterranean town, has no longer any military significance; it owes its importance to the belt of detached forts which, spreading over a circuit of forty-eight kilometers, (thirty miles,) was intended to render stationary an entire army, to insure the investment of the city in view of a regular siege. General Séré de Rivières, the creator of the intrenched camp, estimated that it would take four army corps (160,000 men) to besiege it. But the present attack had forces of a very different character and means of action which Séré de Rivières could not have guessed at, and was made at first on a sector of about seven kilometers, (four and a half miles,) that is to say, on one-seventh of the line of forts.

Séré de Rivières held that an offensive against Verdun must of necessity be directed against the works on the left (west) bank of the Meuse, which make a curve from Dugny, down stream, to Charny, up stream; he thought that the line of the ridges of the Meuse was too strong to be the object of an attack, and considered hazardous any operations on the central sector. Yet this sector was the one attacked.

The enormous human flood, rushing upon a narrow stream, is without example in history, even in this war. It explains the successive withdrawals of our troops up to the limits fixed by Séré de Rivières for the advanced defenses toward Douaumont, limits which the enemy did not quite reach, since Pepper Ridge (Côte du Poivre) is still two miles from the Terre-Froide works, and these are in front of the line of forts which

Belleville,

immediately cover Verdun Saint-Michel, Souville--and protect the road and railway to Metz.

For several days the French commanders knew that the attack was near; our intelligence department had noted the preparations of the enemy; beginning with Feb. 15, we looked for the first storm of cannon shots. These were fired on Sunday, Feb. 20. An enormous quantity of artillery of all calibres, of all ranges, disposed on a front of thirty miles, from Montfaucon in Eastern Argonne, to Etain in the heart of Woevre, opened fire on our trenches, on the forts on the northern sector, and on the City of Verdun itself, which was soon subjected to a systematic destructive fire. The Governor of the town was forced to order the departure of the last inhabitants who lingered in the unhappy city.

Monday, Feb. 21.-In the evening, after a lively cannonade, the Germans made a first infantry attack with very considerable forces; capturing certain of our first line trenches, they reached our second line, from which counterattacks drove them back.

Tuesday, Feb. 22.-The enemy bombardment stretched across both banks of the Meuse, covered the ridges and was prolonged in Woevre to the neighborhood of Etain, near the village of Fromezey. The conflict was intense.

To the north of Verdun the Meuse descends by wide and harmonious curves as far as the village of Brabant; its course, skirted by the railroad to Sedan, exceeds twelve and a half miles, but the road which cuts across its curves is only nine miles. Opposite Brabant the Forges brook enters the Meuse; its valley up to its source almost exactly marks the line between the French and German trenches. On the right (east) bank of the Meuse