It is very difficult now, after all that has crowded in upon us, jading the sensitive recipient surface of memory, to reconstitute the frame of mind in which we passed those days.  One thing I clearly remember, perhaps worth noting for its significance.  In a division lobby, probably on the Wednesday night, I came in touch with a friend, then a subordinate member of the Government, who had been among the keenest advocates of our cause.  I asked how he thought things were going.  My question had reference to our affairs, which had been for so many months the dominant issue; but he answered with reference to the European situation, as if that alone existed.  Looking back, it seems to me strange that one should have been so engrossed in any preoccupation as in reality to ignore the vast and imminent possibilities.  Yet, after all, I believe my case was typical of many.  For us Irish, this was the crucial point, the climax of a struggle which had been intense and continuous now for a period of four years—­which in its wider sense had gone on, with ebb and flow, yet always in progress during the whole adult lifetime of our leader and his principal colleagues.  For more than us, for scores of Labour men and Liberals, it had become almost a fixed belief that European war was only a nightmare of the imagination.  War in the Balkans, war possibly in the East of Europe, we could think of; but war flinging the complex organization, so potent yet so delicate, of great and fully civilized States into the melting-pot—­that we never really believed in.  Prophets of finance, prophets of the labour world, had told us the thing was impossible.  Even our most recent experience, the irruption of armed forces into the political arena, had contributed to fix in our minds the view that all armaments were merely in terrorem, part of a gigantic game of bluff.

In a world organized as was Europe in 1914 on the basis of universal military service, it is dangerous, not only materially but morally and intellectually, to be as the people of these islands were, segregated from all military experience.  We were almost like children in a magazine of explosives:  we knew, of course, that there were dangerous substances about us; but we did not realize how suddenly and irretrievably the whole thing might go off.

I do not know how Redmond gauged the situation.  But he spent the end of the week in town, and must have been less unprepared than was one like myself, who during the Saturday, Sunday and the Monday Bank Holiday was away in a most peaceful country-side, remote from news.  Even on the Tuesday, the instant bearing on our own questions and our own lives of what we read in the newspapers was not clear to me.  There was to be a debate, of course; but only when I saw the attendants setting chairs on the floor of the House itself—­a thing which had not been done since Gladstone introduced his second Home Rule Bill—­did I grasp the fact that something wholly unusual was expected.