I Signed My Death Warrant Read Online Free PDF Page A

me?’
    â€˜No,’ Darling replied. ‘I think I know your friends, but I don’t know you.’
    â€˜I am Michael Collins.’
    â€˜Are you the Michael Collins whom the British police have made famous?’
    â€˜What do you mean by that?’
    â€˜A police force has a duty to apprehend criminals,’ Darling explained. ‘If they fail to apprehend criminals one defence is to say that the criminal whom they cannot apprehend is the most astute, remarkable, astonishing criminal in history, and so I say: “Are you Michael Collins whom the British police force have made famous?”’
    Collins laughed at that. The talked on the way to Dublin and they were driven to ‘an hotel in one of Dublin’s squares’. The official went into the hotel with the other two, while Collins and Darling followed and had a couple of bottles of stout and chatted together until the official was ready to leave.
    â€˜That was an astonishing thing meeting Michael Collins,’ Darling remarked when they got into the car.
    â€˜What do you mean?’ the official asked.
    â€˜You knew that was Michael Collins with whom I sat in the car?’
    The man rushed back into the hotel, but Collins was not there. Darling did not identify the official, but it may well have been Cope, because very shortly afterwards, just before the Truce came into effect, Cope and Collins met. Tim Kennedy, who had worked for Collins in Dublin and was the intelligence officer in charge of the Kerry No. 1 Brigade of the IRA, was in Dublin to meet with Collins. He called to Vaughan’s Hotel in Parnell Square. Christy Harte, the porter was rather drunk, and he called Collins out to meet Kennedy as he had a companion with him. Collins brought the two of them in.
    â€˜When we got inside the door in the hall he told me the war was over and Sir Alfred Cope of the Castle was in the room to which he was taking me and that I wasn’t to disclose anything to him and his two bodyguards. Collins introduced Kennedy under an assumed name to Cope and the two RIC head constables accompanying him. One of the head constables had actually been stationed in Castleisland, County Kerry, so he and Kennedy recognised each other immediately.
    â€˜Mick again announced about the Truce’, and they drank brandy and champagne to celebrate it. ‘Cope and I got talking and we discussed the troubled times,’ Kennedy noted. ‘I was regretting it was over and said I enjoyed it. Both Cope and I and Mick kept drinking glass after glass and Mick pretended to be drunk but I discovered afterwards he was drinking some coloured liquid.’ Kennedy said that he and Cope passed out, and Collins arranged for Kennedy to be taken back to his hotel in a taxi. ‘I awoke that evening in a bed fully clothed, with the taxi driver, also fully clothed, outside me,’ Kennedy continued. ‘Apparently he was warned by Mick to look after me and to stay with me ’til he knew that I was all right and over the shock of the war ending.’
    The Truce came into effect at noon on 11 July. The terms were the subject of an honourable understanding with no signed, formal agreement. In the following months each side tended to interpret the terms differently, even though there was a remarkable similarity in their understanding of the Truce. De Valera issued instructions to the IRA to cease all attacks on crown forces and civilians, to prohibit the use of arms, to cease military manoeuvres, to abstain from interference with public and private property, and to avoid any disturbances of the peace that might necessitate military interference.
    De Valera selected a delegation consisting of four cabinet colleagues, Griffith, Stack, Count George N. Plunkett, and Robert Barton, as well as Erskine Childers, the acting minister for propaganda, to accompany him along with a number of others.
    On the evening of the Truce Kathleen O’Connell noted that