the concession had been made, it was made in a very different way from that used in dealing with Sir Edward Carson.  Redmond had no voice whatever in the organization.  The choice of a divisional commander was of infinite importance; and it fell upon Lieutenant-General Sir Lawrence Parsons, K.C.B., an artillery officer of great distinction, a man of wide general knowledge and culture and of strongly marked individuality.  Yet his individuality did not make him easy for Redmond to work with.  He was not simply a typical professional soldier of the old Army; he was an idealist in his profession; and part of the professional soldier’s idealism is to resent and despise political considerations.  He recognized that Redmond had spoken and acted with a statesman’s vision; he failed to recognize that in many matters political tactics are necessary to carry out a statesman’s plan.  Also, it was very difficult for him or for any other professional soldier to realize that recruiting, under such conditions as then prevailed, was a politician’s task, not a soldier’s, even in Great Britain; and that this was tenfold more true of Ireland.

The point requires to be emphasized, because it applies to a greater personage—­Lord Kitchener himself.  I believe that Lord Kitchener honestly desired the success of Redmond’s mission.  To my personal knowledge he sent for one officer long known to him and took him from a command in which he was comfortably placed and sent him, against his will, to raise one of our battalions in a difficult area.  The choice was absolutely sound, and success was achieved by methods which did not always follow strictly the letter of King’s Regulations.  But these departures from rule were quite in accordance with the spirit of the old Army, and Lord Kitchener was ready to stand over any of them.  He would do the best he could for our division on the old lines.  He would, I am certain, have said that he had done the best thing possible for it in appointing to the command an Irishman who was a first-rate soldier and a first-rate man to supervise the training of troops.  So far as my judgment is able to go, the credit for making the Sixteenth Division what it was when we went to France belongs chiefly to the divisional general under whom we trained.

General Parsons had the gift, which appears to be rare in soldiers, of imparting ideas not merely about discipline but about the art of war; and he had an enthusiasm which communicated itself.  But these were the qualities of the soldier in his own sphere, with which Redmond had no contact.  What Redmond knew was the writer of letters which now lie before me.  Running through them all is the tone of a soldier in authority who accepts assistance from a friendly, influential, well-meaning but imperfectly instructed civilian.  There is no recognition of the fact that Redmond was the accepted leader of a Volunteer Force numbering over a hundred thousand men; no glimpse of any perception that morally, and almost officially, Redmond was the accredited head of the nation in whose name the division was being raised—­a nation to which the statutory right of self-government had just been accorded.