Quotes from Erskine Childers

I had always detested the meddlesome alarmist, who veils ignorance under noisiness, and for ever wails his chant of lugubrious pessimism.

vague, very vague.

Take a step or two forward, lads. It will be easier that way.

Germany's a thundering great nation . . . I wonder if we shall ever fight her.

A keen wind from the west struck our faces, and as swiftly as it had come the fog rolled away from us, in one mighty mass, stripping clean and pure the starry dome of heaven...

This Irish war, small as it may seem now, will, if it is persisted in, corrupt and eventually ruin not only your army, but your Empire itself. What right has England to torment and demoralise Ireland?

I served four years in the War under the belief, growing ever fainter but held to the end, that it was fought to make such things impossible, and now I am daily witness to the prostitution of the Army I served in to fulfill the many aims I loathed and combated. I am Anglo-Irish by birth. Now I am identifying myself wholly with Ireland....

I do not know how I stand this parting from Molly, save that by a paradox we are so absolutely one that in the sense we never part, but talk to one another and watch one another and commune night and day, and grip fast the same ideals. The North Star is our only meeting place, in this manner. We both look at it every night. A 1915 letter written to his aunt in regards to his wife Molly Childers.

One of the charms of Africa, is the long settled periods of pure unclouded sky, in which the sun rises and sets with no flaming splashes of vivid colours, but by gentle, imperceptible gradations of pure light, waning or waxing.

By Jove! we want a man like this Kaiser, who doesn't wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country, and sees ahead.

What we all know is that Ireland is permeated with spies, ordinary and extraordinary, imported Englishmen and perverted Irishmen, in and out of uniform, in low places and high places....punishing first and foremost the great national crime of Republicanism, and in the second place real crimes artificially promoted by the regime––symptoms of a disease invariably arising from the forcible suppression of a national ideal.

Take a step or two forward lads.....it will be easier that way. His last words to the firing squad, lined up before him holding rifles, at his execution.

The treaty, though it has good points, is a vast trap.