Bloody Sunday: The Story of the 1920 Irish Rebellion

By Joseph Murphy

To thousands of fans, the wait is over. The sequel to the highly acclaimed The Mystery of the Angels, this epic volume continues one of historys greatest fictional journeys. This is the second in what hopes to play out as an extraordinary series of novels by Joseph Murphy. A riveting tale of suspense and illusion, the provocative story line centers on four United States Marines who return to Ireland, in the year 2006, searching for a mysterious mist corridor to take them back in time. Convinced that parallel universes exist, they encounter more than they had bargained for. They find themselves in the year 1920, in the middle of the Irish Revolution, assisting Michael Collins in his war to free Ireland from the hated British occupiers. Before theyre done, they will undergo a test of individual personal mettle with results that will surprise even the most hardened of them.

This novel is filled with crackling realism, love and adventure, and that special flair for intricate plotting that readers enjoy when the Marines, being Marines, from the year 2006 fall in love with beautiful Irish maidens, from the year 1920. With unfailing honesty, the author puts the reader inside the hearts and minds of the men who fought, for Irish freedom, and loved up close in a time gone by.

The book offers a glimpse of what may have occurred at one of the most critical moments of the Irish rebellion, Bloody Sunday in 1920, and attempts to settle one of the most intriguing mysteries to date: how a few thousand Irish rebels brought the British Lion to his feet and beat a numerically superior army almost twenty times its size!

The novel is a powerful love story that extends beyond two eras, and contains a labyrinth of twists and turns that culminates in a final stunning ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 26, 2006
• ISBN: 9781462823055

Joseph Murphy

Joseph Murphy wrote, taught, counseled, and lectured to thousands of people all over the world, as Minister-Director of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles. His lectures and sermons were attended by thousands of people every Sunday. Millions of people tuned in his daily radio program and have read the over 30 books that he has written.

Book preview

Copyright © 2006 by Joseph Murphy.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

PROLOGUE

Part I

1 The Mist

2 Recovery

3 Fifth Dimension

Part II

4 The Road to Freedom

5 Black and Tans

6 Death Strikes

7 Black Clouds

8 Pale Rider

9 Spirits

10 Death Stalks

Part III

11 The Year of Terror

12 Bloody Sunday

13 Revenge

Part IV

14 Peace Overtures

15 Assassination

EPILOGUE

AFTER-WORD

END NOTES

Copyright

Timeless written by Patsy Croce Copyright @2006

Portals written by Patsy Croce Copyright @2006

Fear written by Patsy Croce Copyright @2006

Sweet dreams written by Patsy Croce Copyright @2006

Passage written by Patsy Croce Copyright @2006

Also by

Joseph Murphy

NON FICTION

The Wild Geese Trilogy

Volume I: A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation

Volume II: Duty Honor Country

Volume III: Valhalla

FICTION

The Mist Series

Volume I: The Mystery of the Angels

Volume 2: Bloody Sunday

Reader Praise for Bloody Sunday

I have just finished your novel Bloody Sunday. It’s the first novel of yours that I have read. I enjoyed it so much that I could hardly put it down.

J. Nolan

Stunning! Bloody Sunday was terrific! I was glued to the book every waking moment.

C. O’Sullivan

History comes deliciously alive on the page.

D. Dean

A feast for ravenous readers of The Irish revolution.

M. Theo

Ingenious . . . an exuberant potpourri.

H. Hayes

Wonderful . . . his bent for historical accuracy is unmatched in commercial fiction

W. Drake

He shows you Michael Collins, Sir Henry Wilson, Thomas MacCurtain, Eamon deValera, and a vast array of other historical figures whose contending ambitions control the events.

J. Nahon

Special Thanks

This book could not have been written without the extraordinary help of the following people:

Heather Murphy for her diligence in editing this book; while handling the more arduous task of teaching disabled students. She has a Master of Arts degree and a Bachelor of Science Degree both from the University of Connecticut. She is married with two children and is presently a licensed Special Education Teacher.

Patsy Croce for her magnificent poetry which is the lead inserts to several chapters in this book. She was born in Madisonville Kentucky, raised in a military family, married her husband Carmine (Buddy) Croce, then a member of the 101st Airborne Division, gave birth to five children and is presently the proud Grandmother of twelve. She has written over a hundred poems, several of which have appeared in the following publications:

The Color of Life, by the International Library of Poetry, Copyright 2003;

The International Who’s Who in Poetry, by the International Library of Poetry, Copyright 2004;

The Best Poems and Poets of 2004, by the International Library of Poetry, Copyright 2005;

In addition she won several prestigious awards such as the Outstanding Achievement in poetry Award, August 21, 2005, presented by the International Society of Poets and The Poet of Merit Award, presented by the International Society of Poets at the Poetry Convention and Symposium, held in Florida in 2005.

Patsy now resides in North Carolina with her husband of 45 years.

Michael Theodorou, for his military technical assistance. Mike is a Gunnery sergeant, with more than 15 years experience, in the United States Marine Corps, both active and reserve duty. He also served a combat tour in Iraq conducting counter-insurgency operations utilizing his extensive experience in engineering and communications operations. A former NYC Police officer, he is currently a detective in the Nassau County Police Department Investigation Squad.

0

Jodi Murphy for her assistance in designing the cover of the book. Jodi is a graduate of the University of New Haven with a degree in computer Science. She resides in New Hartford New York with her husband and three children.

PROLOGUE

In early 1920, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began a guerrilla war against England and quickly succeeded in clearing out vast districts of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC); that were ever England’s right arm in Ireland.

The IRA was still an underground, virtually independent force, answerable only to the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and not to the Sinn Fein or the Dail.

Lloyd George, of England, met this threat not only by pouring into Ireland regiments of soldiers with tanks, armored cars, airplanes, and all the other terrorizing paraphernalia that had been found useful in World War I, but also by organizing the most vicious and bloodthirsty force known to history; which quickly became notorious to the world under the title of the Black and Tans. Lloyd George planned to quickly break the Irish spirit and subdue the nation by waging war upon the Irish people, both combatants and non-combatants, Irish women as well as men, toddling children and tottering aged seniors. It was a war of vengeance, unparalleled for blind fury and fearful cruelty by any war in any civilized country of the world since the seventeenth century.

The IRA could not win a military victory. Some 3,000 active gunmen could, with almost daily raids and assassinations, render the country ungovernable, but they could not drive 50,000 British soldiers, and an RIC that, with the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, numbered 8,000 more, into the sea. However, the IRA could and did win the propaganda war. The British greeted the IRA campaign of murder with angry indifference, but when the news came through of the Black and Tan reprisals, which the IRA made sure were fully reported, the average British citizen was shocked; it was not his idea of war. Nowadays we are all hardened by news of constant terrorism and reprisal from all over the world, but in the first quarter of the century public sensibility was still tender. War was regulated and honorable; it was fought by national armies, defined by their uniforms, and civilians were left out of it. If the IRA operated underground, used terror and dispensed with uniforms, that was their business; they could not be considered real soldiers. But for uniformed British forces to take undisciplined and indiscriminate revenge on a civilian population, to drag innocent people from their beds and shoot them, set fire to their houses and drive whole families into the fields, this outraged the British sense of decency.

The IRA also won sympathy for Ireland with hunger strikes. In 1917, when imprisoned Volunteers went on hunger strike in Irish gaols (a tactic they had picked up from British suffragettes) the authorities had simply let them go and then, when they had had a few good meals, picked them up again. Prison officials had tried force feeding, too, until Thomas Ashe died. Then, in 1919, ninety prisoners detained in Dublin’s Mountjoy jail went on a hunger strike and after a week, became ill.. Their relatives were summoned to harrowing scenes. A general strike was called, backed by the Catholic Church, and the hunger-striking prisoners were released. But government is not mocked and when, during the summer of 1920, Terence MacSwiney, the republican Lord Mayor of Cork, went on hunger strike immediately after being arrested for carrying the notes of a seditious speech, he was sent to Brixton gaol in London and slowly died there, riveting the attention of the world for seventy-three days, The British people respected his courage, and began to wonder if, for a man to endure such suffering, there were not something very wrong in Ireland.

Then on November 21,1920, a day which has gone down in Irish history as Bloody Sunday, the struggle reached new heights of violence. Michael Collin’s intelligence service had discovered that certain Englishmen in Dublin were British intelligence agents and he planned their assassination. At about 9 a.m. armed IRA men broke into the houses and the hotels where the Englishmen were staying and shot eleven of them, some in front of their wives.

But that was not the end of Bloody Sunday. The IRA had had their turn; the Black and Tans must have theirs. In the afternoon the Black and Tans invaded a Dublin sports ground, where a Gaelic football match was being played, and fired indiscriminately on both payers and crowd. Dublin, at the time, was a small city where everybody knew everybody. The Black and Tans were regarded with enmity, revulsion, and fear, as the representatives of a foreign power.

The war entered a new and desperate phase. Flying columns of IRA men, with a core of thirty-five or so highly trained, full time gunmen, ambushed lorry-loads of auxiliaries in county Cork, killing almost all of them. On the night of December 11, 1920, auxiliaries and Black and Tans took their revenge. They poured into the city of Cork, drinking looting, wrecking and burning. A arge part of the center of the city was set ablaze with the fire brigade prevented from reaching the fires and the fire hoses cut. Afterwards, the British government released a story that the people of Cork had burned down the center of the city themselves, but the truth became known as the auxiliaries, with macabre and boastful humor, swaggered about Dublin with burnt corks in their caps.

Yet when 1921 began the IRA was still unscathed, and evidence of their dreadful activity was discovered almost daily. Corpses were found in the fields reading „Tried by court martial and found guilty—all others beware——IRA „ or simply „Beware the IRA". The British government finally made overtures towards peace. Afler Bloody Sunday, the authorities had arrested Arthur Griffith and Eoin MacNeill, more as a gesture than anything else, and deValera, still in America raising money for the war, decided to return to Ireland.

Peter and Fiona Somerset Fry

A History of Ireland

This is the story of Bloody Sunday with a macabre twist. The interpretation of character in this book is my own . . . . Joseph Murphy

To The Reader:

This is the story of Bloody Sunday, told from the viewpoints of Michael Collins, Sean Culhane and some of the other Irish rebels who fought for Irish Freedom.

A famous classical author once said that reading cold history was not enough; he wanted to know what it was like to be there, what the people felt; especially, in this case, toward the hated British occupiers. This book was written for much the same reason.

You may find it different, especially from a time-travel perspective, which will drag you into its chilling web of terror, mayhem, and bloody murder. Some of the action has been condensed for the sake of clarity, and some minor characters have been eliminated. I have tried to hold the reader spellbound in this fast paced, unforgettable novel of perhaps the most famous moment in Irish history. Against the background of the shadow and shade of Irish landscape, the home of the banshees, ghosts, fairies, leprechauns, it is also the story about two people, from different parallel universes; caught in the fifth dimension of space and time, who meet and fall in love. It is a spellbinding novel of passion and history that combines time travel, adventure and romance for the ages.

Mythic figures, including witches and demons, fill the pages of this thrilling page-turner; some of which have stirred the soul and curdled the blood of avid Irish readers for hundreds of years.

The description of Ireland in the time of the Troubles, in this book, is historically accurate. However, the conversations of Michael Collins and other Irish leaders is the work of the author’s imagination.

Part I

Light, as explained, is vibrations in the fifth dimension. In this way, one can see that the laws of light and gravity become simpler in five dimensions. Thus the hyperspace theory can be viewed as vibrations that ripple through the fabric of space and time. Therefore, everything we see around us, from the trees and mountains to the stars themselves, are nothing but vibrations in hyperspace. If this is true, then this gives one an elegant, simple, and geometric means of providing a coherent and compelling description of the entire universe; and is the unification of all known physical forces.

Michio Kaku

Hyperspace

CHAPTER ONE

The Mist

In dreams we feel the fire of hell

The beauty of a kiss

Then awaken from a deepest slumber

Engulfed within the Mist

Where time and truth are equal

Not all is as it seems

The beauty and the sadness

Is still within our dreams

-Timeless by Patsy Croce

County Meath, Ireland

2330 hrs October 10, 837

M oira’s heart was pounding hard and fast. The night was chilly but she was sweating. She felt faint nausea in her stomach. This was real and she was terrified. Her heart was pounding harder and faster than it had just five minutes before. She walked her horse slowly, quietly, to the edge of the woods. She then looked into the forest, her face as pale as the fat moon rising overhead. It was full and glowing when she and her horse reached the wood-line and looked back at the castle. There was once laughter in the castle. Echoes of it still lingered in her mind; quick snapshots of them together embracing, of both of them laughing, of walking along the sea front hand in hand. Dim pictures, faded with time as if improperly fixed; but they were there. And they were real.

It seemed to her that it took an hour to cover that distance. Every step was long and heavy and so loud it shook the earth. It seemed to her that every night sound, from owls to crickets, stopped in those moments. Watching, she thought. They were all watching to see what would happen.

Only trees that kept leaf or needle had any green about them. Snarls of last month’s bramble spread brown webs over stone outcrops and under the trees. Nettles numbered most among the few weeds; the rest were the sorts with sharp burrs or thorns.

At first, when the trees surrounded her, she took comfort from them. They helped her from the events that took place last year; or was it just last month? As she moved through the woods, moon shadows shifted and it began to seem as if the darkness of the forest changed and moved, too. Trees loomed malevolently; branches writhed toward her. But were they just trees and branches? She could almost hear the growling moans stifled in their throats while they waited for her.

She stood still, listening. Night sounds came to her, almost imperceptibly. The longer she stared out into the black abbess, the more her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Seconds stretched into minutes. Minutes seemed an eternity. She realized she wasn’t breathing and exhaled a long stream of air. She neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary.

A huge hemlock lay on its side nearly parallel to a stream. It looked like a hand that had managed to reach out to her. She shuddered at the image. Everything suddenly seemed alive and malevolent, closing in on her.

You needed sleep to be normal, she thought. She hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in so long. You needed regular meals. She lost ten pounds in the last few weeks alone and had watched her long rangy frame go bony. You needed peace of mind. She couldn’t remember if she had ever laid claim to that. Friends? Certainly she had friends, but no one close enough to comfort her in the middle of the night.

She leaned against a tree for a minute, inhaled deeply, and smelled the fragrant, pine-filled air that marked the season. Night could be so strange; the autumn sky like velvet and so near the rolling hills. A million stars shining cleanly against the darkness.

She realized she had been distraught since the moment he was suddenly taken from her. The darkness, the scent of the earth around her entered into her instinct and made her afraid. A peal of thunder heralded a brewing storm; thunder that echoed and re-echoed in the hills until it finally died away, grumbling like an angry old man. There was a flash of lightning, and then the sky seemed darker than ever. She heard a tree fall somewhere behind her; fall and crash among other trees, tearing their giant limbs until they seemed to scream and moan with pain. An unbidden sense of panic seized her, and the air was thick and heavy as death. She panicked totally. Her vocal cords were frozen. She stared, breathing out desperate little choking sounds, since she could find no voice. She tried to speak, to cry out, but nothing came from her mouth. All she could do was stand there with the pain, alone and frightened beyond description.

She had loved him deeply and since he was gone she walked in a trance. Her mental image of Brendan was so strong, her memory of their time together so intense. «We never shared the sunlight or the wind or the feel of the rain. When we were together it was always so temporary we never had time to be ourselves.»

She felt that if she slipped into her room he would be there, waiting for her. Brendan with his sandy brown hair and brown eyes, his strong arms that wrapped around her, making her feel a kind of happiness that in all her twenty years of life she had never imagined possible.

She desperately wanted to see him again no matter how or in what life time. She sobbed heavily . . . she wanted to see him one more time; but how?

She remembered one thing Brendan said about some theory relating to Hyperspace. He said height, width and depth are the first three dimensions while space and time bring you to the fifth dimension. Under extreme circumstances, space may be stretched until it rips or tears. In other words, Hyperspace may provide a means to tunnel through space and time. He said something about «wormholes,» of tunnels that link distant parts of space and time. Closing her eyes Moira stilled her mind and opened herself to vibrations and feelings of a time gone by.

The lightning flashed again and her horse snorted. A rumble of thunder, like an avalanche tearing down a mountainside crashed and, a second later, jagged lightning streaked across the sky. In that moment it illuminated the heavens and she saw . . . .

Walter Reed Hospital, Virginia

0800 hrs September 20, 2006

You can stay dead only so long. When first there was nothing, the pieces all come drifting back together like a movie of an exploding shell run in reverse. The fragments come back slowly, grating together as they seek a matching part and painfully jar into place. You’re whole again, finally but the scars and the worn places are all there to remind you that once you were dead. There’s life once more and, with it, a dull pain that pulsates at regular intervals, a light that’s too bright to look into and sound that’s more than you can stand. The flesh is weak and crawly, slack from the disuse that is the death, sensitive with the agonizing fire that is life. There’s memory that makes you want to crawl back into the void but life is too vital to let you go.

He knew why. He had entered a dream pattern, and it had scared him. It had made him wonder if, in doing so, he could enter a new universe. I do not believe . . . ! He told himself. And yet . . . . just as he had never forgotten her, he had not, in the last days, months, been able to rid himself of the vision of Moira.

Ghosts and ghost-busters! He thought angrily. Yes tricks could be played with the mind, and all of this was playing tricks with his.

County Meath, Ireland

2345 hrs, October 10, 837

The rage that erupted inside her jolted her, it was so sudden, so powerful. She trembled with it, clenched her fists in her lap, and had to bite back the hot words she wanted to spit out.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, how could you do this to me? she said aloud. Just as she did so, the threatened storm came. First, a few raindrops fell on her head. Then the wind kicked up as if the hand of God had indeed reached down to stir up a tempest.

In fury she threw her fists in the air and screamed! The sound died in the forest. Then rain, not a soft gentle mist, but a drenching rain, that splashed against her face, without warning began to fall. The raindrops suddenly became a deluge. The night was getting darker and darker. The wind whipped around an eerie noise, as if all the banshees in Ireland howled at once. The rain seemed to come down more fiercely.

Between her sobs she felt as if she was being engulfed by something. She thought she was imagining it at first. But then . . . she saw approaching mist. It came closer and closer. Even in County Meath Ireland, it was rare for a mist to just begin on the ground and swirl to something as thick as pea soup in a matter of minutes. When she started out, it was fine. There were plenty of lights in the Castle and the surrounding village; but in the forest, the thick canopy of trees created strange slashes of darkness, shadow, and eerie green light. Her hair seemed to shine with an exceptional depth of red, while her eyes appeared a deeper forest shade than the trees themselves. She was not that far away. She hadn’t been gone that long before it began to churn in puffy, blue-gray swirls around her feet. She stood. The mist crept around her, and in a few minutes it was completely black. She felt ice trickles into blood and limbs and then . . . . It was almost touching her. She felt her hair move . . . . pulled? Cold seemed to slap her right across the face.

The trees sprang up, thick and close, the branches and draping moss barred her way. She shook off the thought and concentrated on making her way through the dark woods. It was not hard in and of itself; the faint light from the flashes of lightning was more than enough for anyone who had been taught to navigate the forest by her father, and the ground had a slow, easy roll. But the trees bare and stark against the night sky, constantly reminded her that this was no childhood game, and the keening wind sounded all too much like Viking horns. Now that she was alone in the darkness, she remembered the wolves that usually ran away from people had been behaving differently the past few weeks.

The wind rose up and howled and slapped at her in flat-handed, punishing blows. Spears of saw palms struck out like swords. She turned, but where the path had been was now the stream, cutting her off from the castle. The high grass along its slippery banks waved madly.

It was then that she saw herself, standing alone and weeping on the other bank.

It was then she knew she was dead. The rain stopped as abruptly as it began.

Walter Reed Hospital 0845 hrs,,

September 21, 2006

She came to consciousness in a white mist, not able to feel her limbs at first. Then the mist rolled away and she was pushing a cart of sorts, inside a building of white. She found herself in a hospital, walking down long, empty corridors; white so much white, unending, going on and on, forever. She smelled ether fumes, sweet and heavy, the ammonia scent of urine, the stench of vomit. She opened each white door along the corridor. All the beds were empty; the white sheets stretched military tight. No one; where were all the people?

So long, the hallwayjust went on and on and on and there were moans coming from behind all those doors people in pain, but there were no nurses, no doctors, no one at all. She knew the rooms were empty, she’d looked into all of them, yet the moans grew louder and louder. Finally, as she moved towards the last door, a person dressed in a long white robe, beckoned and pointed towards the door. She then felt as if she had been absorbed by a being