The Green Flag

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The Green Flag

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Green Flag, by Arthur Conan Doyle
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Title: The Green Flag
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Release Date: December 13, 2003 [eBook #10446]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREEN
FLAG***
E-text prepared by Lionel G. Sear of Truro, Cornwall, England

THE GREEN FLAG.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.

CONTENTS.
THE GREEN FLAG.
CAPTAIN SHARKEY.
THE CROXLEY MASTER.
THE LORD OF CHATEAU NOIR.
THE STRIPED CHEST.
A SHADOW BEFORE.
THE KING OF THE FOXES.
THE THREE CORRESPONDENTS.
THE NEW CATACOMB.
THE DEBUT OF BIMBASHI JOYCE.
A FOREIGN OFFICE ROMANCE.

THE GREEN FLAG
When Jack Conolly, of the Irish Shotgun Brigade, the Rory of the Hills
Inner Circle, and the extreme left wing of the Land League, was
incontinently shot by Sergeant Murdoch of the constabulary, in a little
moonlight frolic near Kanturk, his twin-brother Dennis joined the
British Army. The countryside had become too hot for him; and, as the
seventy-five shillings were wanting which might have carried him to
America, he took the only way handy of getting himself out of the way.
Seldom has Her Majesty had a less promising recruit, for his hot Celtic

blood seethed with hatred against Britain and all things British. The
sergeant, however, smiling complacently over his 6 ft. of brawn and his
44 in. chest, whisked him off with a dozen other of the boys to the
depot at Fermoy, whence in a few weeks they were sent on, with the
spade-work kinks taken out of their backs, to the first battalion of the
Royal Mallows, at the top of the roster for foreign service.
The Royal Mallows, at about that date, were as strange a lot of men as
ever were paid by a great empire to fight its battles. It was the darkest
hour of the land struggle, when the one side came out with crow-bar
and battering-ram by day, and the other with mask and with shot-gun
by night. Men driven from their homes and potato-patches found their
way even into the service of the Government, to which it seemed to
them that they owed their troubles, and now and then they did wild
things before they came. There were recruits in the Irish regiments who
would forget to answer to their own names, so short had been their
acquaintance with them. Of these the Royal Mallows had their full
share; and, while they still retained their fame as being one of the
smartest corps in the army, no one knew better than their officers that
they were dry-rotted with treason and with bitter hatred of the flag
under which they served.
And the centre of all the disaffection was C Company, in which Dennis
Conolly found himself enrolled. They were Celts, Catholics, and men
of the tenant class to a man; and their whole experience of the British
Government had been an inexorable landlord, and a constabulary who
seemed to them to be always on the side of the rent-collector. Dennis
was not the only moonlighter in the ranks, nor was he alone in having
an intolerable family blood-feud to harden his heart. Savagery had
begotten savagery in that veiled civil war. A landlord with an iron
mortgage weighing down upon him had small bowels for his tenantry.
He did but take what the law allowed, and yet, with men like Jim Holan,
or Patrick McQuire, or Peter Flynn, who had seen the roofs torn from
their cottages and their folk huddled among their pitiable furniture upon
the roadside, it was ill to argue about abstract law. What matter that in
that long and bitter struggle there was many another outrage on the part
of the tenant, and many another grievance on the side of the landowner!

A stricken man can only feel his own wound, and the rank and file of
the C Company of the Royal Mallows were sore and savage to the soul.
There were low whisperings in barrack-rooms and canteens, stealthy
meetings in public-house parlours, bandying of passwords from mouth
to mouth, and many other signs which made their officers right glad
when the order came which sent them to foreign, and better still, to
active service.
For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a
distance looked upon the foe as though he might, in truth, be the friend;
but when they have been put face on to him,