Notes from Travels in Europe …

A GRIM NIGHT IN NORTH IRELAND

In spite of my rather extensive travels I have never taken an ocean voyage. Like most travelers, I don’t bother with such close communion with the high seas, choosing to fly over them instead. So the five-hour trip by steamer from Ardrossan, on the west coast of Scotland, to Belfast in North Ireland, which took me across the North Channel of the Irish Sea, is my longest sea voyage. I anticipated it with great delight, but the bitter cold and the high winds made it a disappointing experience. It left me so queasy that I didn’t know whether I was headed for Campbell country or Marlboro country, and I couldn’t have cared less. In such dire moments one wishes he could forget the whole thing and be back home with his loved ones.

But the fair land of the Irish is good for the soul. Once in Belfast I was as good as new, and I found that I still loved the Campbells and Restoration history. My enthusiasm was dampened only by seeing with my own eyes that I was now in a besieged country. British troops were walking the streets with Tommy guns. Some streets and sections of the city were barricaded. I could not enter a hotel, if but to use the telephone (phones are not as accessible in other countries as in our own), without leaving my bag with authorities in an improvised booth and submitting to bodily search. And one is constantly aware that where he is at any moment may be the very place the bomb will explode. I had cause to recall all the warnings I had been given along the way, Don’t go to Ireland!, and I was ready to concede that it was good advice. I had one advantage, however, in that insofar as tourists were concerned I had it mostly to myself.

In Belfast I was only about 30 miles from Ballymena, the birthplace of Alexander Campbell, and it was my intention to go there and trace out the places referred to in Robert Richardson’s description, including the remains of Old Shane’s Castle. Alex was born within a mile of those old ruins, but the exact place is not known. I could not do much more than walk about the area and thank God that he was born, there or wherever, so I decided because of bus schedules to forego Ballymena so as to have sufficient time for Ahorey, the place the Campbells lived before leaving for America, which I shall tell about in my next installment. In getting to Ahorey I was destined for a grim experience in beleaguered Ulster, which is what this essay is all about. So hang in there with me. If I could take it, you can too.

I shared a seat on a bus out of Belfast with a poor, uneducated Roman Catholic woman who had strong views about what the British call “the Irish problem.” There would be no problem, she assured me, if the British would get out of her country and mind their own business. She was embittered over the occupation by British troops, her home being searched time and again, and her beloved land torn by strife and war. It was all England’s fault. She spoke scathingly of “the rich Protestants who live in fine homes and take advantage of poor Catholics.”

In talking with the British I concluded that they see Ireland as an albatross about their necks, and that nothing would please them more than to excuse themselves from the whole sordid mess. British mothers are especially resentful that their sons have to die as soldiers in Ulster in an inexcusable religious war. In talking with other Irish, especially Protestants, I found that many believe there would be catastrophe if the British troops were withdrawn. The dispute is not easily defined. It is a class struggle between rich and poor, Ulster in the North being the “haves” and Eire in the South being the “have nots.” It is also a conflict between deep-seated religious traditions, with prosperous Protestants dominating the North and less prosperous Catholics in the vast majority in the South. And it is a confrontation of ideologies, with Eire wanting a united Ireland completely independent of England and Ulster insisting that such talk is an empty dream of what never has been and never will be. In the meantime the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and other underground belligerents are continuing with their bombings and killings, with the North catching all the hell. Eire is of course no longer a part of the British Commonwealth, while Ulster is.

I was to spend the night in Armagh and then make my way to Ahorey out in the country the next day. It was a clear winter evening, brisk and lonely, when I stepped off the bus on the mall just outside the main part of the small city, a week before Christmas. I was early enough to get a hotel room, but in the empty streets there was no one to ask. Across the way children and an occasional adult were hurrying into a Baptist Church for a Christmas party. I made my way over, introduced myself, and soon found myself talking to the pastor, a tall, handsome man of middle years named Jim Armstrong. “I am afraid we have no hotels that are still in business; they’ve all been bombed out,” he told me. But to make sure he inquired of some of the others, and they decided there was still one hotel still standing. A young brother was commissioned to direct my way, several squares into the city, helping me with my bag while he was at it. We walked around and in under numerous barricades on the way. The streets were deserted but well-lighted. The ghostlike atmosphere gave me an eerie feeling. I was in a pleasant little city, one whose rich history not only dated back to the boyhood days of Alexander Campbell but on back to old St. Patrick himself, but it behaved more like a scarred but illuminated tomb. Our low voices seemed to echo against the dead silence and the sound of our steps on the cobblestone streets may have reached to the nearby hills.

It was the first time ever that I knocked at the door of a hotel in order to gain entrance, and enter I did once I was OK’d by the native standing at my side. I was pleased to find lots of life on the inside. The Irish like to drink and make merry, and there were two or three such parties going on in the ante rooms of the Charlemont Arms. I presumed that they had all walked, for the streets were as barren of autos as they were of people. The barricades were for that purpose, to keep vehicles out, for the IRA planted bombs in them and parked them in the streets as death traps. Sometimes they kidnap a man’s wife, place a bomb in her car, and compel her husband to deliver the car to a designated spot in a city. Once he does that, he can get his wife back. So I found all the cities of Ulster sealed off, even small villages like Richhill where the Campbells once ran a little school. It is quite an assignment for the British troops.

The lovely, hospitable people at the church invited me to return later in the evening, so once I had dined rather well on typical Irish fare, I did just that, winding my way once more, this time alone, through those quiet corridors of a proud but chastened little city. I stopped off on my way to give greetings to an Evangelical church, which was also frolicking with its kids, but it was unsuccessful. They thought there was something wrong with me to be visiting such a place at such a time, or maybe they supposed I was up to something. But at the Baptist church Santa Claus was winding up his merry evening, including even me in his handouts, and I was able to visit with some of the townspeople.

One young couple, the man formerly an American, told me that they had grown accustomed to living in peril. “We love our enemies and pray for them, but we know nothing else to do,” they told me. It is not unusual for them to be dining at home when they hear another explosion, they said, and virtually everyone in the congregation had relatives or friends who had been killed or injured. They learn to walk with danger, trusting the Lord, and not thinking too much about it.

Pastor Armstrong gave me tender loving care, introducing me to his people as “a believer from America.” He kept saying that, “Meet Mr. Garrett, a believer … “ Who ever heard of introducing anybody like that, a believer? But I liked it, and it was to take on much more meaning as the evening wore on. I keep thinking of that unique introduction, and I find myself asking, as I mingle among our own people, How many of them could be introduced as really believers?

When the pastor learned that I had not yet seen much of Armagh, he resolved to take me for a walk. I was soon to have the feeling of being with Diotrophes, who bore a lantern through the streets of Athens, even in the daylight, or with Jeremiah, who lamented over Jerusalem, or even with Juvenal, whose heart bled for his native Rome. Jim Armstrong is as Irish as Gerald Ford is middle American, and is both dynamic and self-assured, humble and contrite. Armagh is his native home, and he once walked her streets as a policeman. The next hour or so was to be one of the most moving experiences of my life, and the one that stands out above all those of my eventful tour. It was especially meaningful to me since I realized that my host was a native who loved the city and its people and who had walked its streets in its happier days. He has seen it all and has stuck with it through thick and thin. Like Jeremiah, he could testify from experience: “How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she that was great among the nations!”

Still the streets were bare as we walked them. Jim pointed to the apartments above the business establishments, and I could see the night sky through their gutted roofs. Ugly bombs had driven scores from their homes in the inner city. Every two or three businesses would be in shambles, a black hole in the wall rather than a salon, a grocery, an apothecary, or whatever it once was. My mind raced back to my own little business that we had back home — all the trouble, worry, money, time, hard work. What if it had all gone up in smoke in a moment’s time, and my family along with it? So it was in Armagh. Some destroyed businesses spelled murder as well as monetary loss. “This man was my neighbor,” Jim told me as we paused before a mass of wreckage that was once a haberdashery. “He walked down this street one day, into the Catholic section, and didn’t come back. Later they found him with a hole in his head.” I noticed the man’s name, still legible above the door. “They came back later and bombed the business out from under his widow,” he added.

We paused in front of the fire station, and I could see the bullet holes in the doors and windows, many of them British troops were shot down here, as well as Protestants and Catholics, in a battle in these streets, Jim told me. He pointed to the high roofs with their chimneys. “Sometimes snipers fire from there.” He paused, then added, “People would say we were fools to be in these streets tonight, but I am not afraid!” I was made uneasy about what might happen to us, for it was obvious that no one else was taking such a chance, not even the troopers (I was told that they did their watching from hiding in the distance, lest they be sitting ducks for sniper fire). And Jim’s assurance that he was not afraid did not help all that much, for I thought he might be so resigned to it all that he had just as soon go on to be with the Lord as not, and that he didn’t care whom he took with him. Heaven is my home, but I am not homesick just yet. I thought of Ouida and knew she would be terribly worried if she knew where I was, almost as much as I!

I had that feeling, rare in my peaceful world of course, that I was walking through the valley of the shadow of death. It was a grim experience. I felt so deeply for those oppressed people who had to suffer such injustices through no fault of their own, and that it is citizen against citizen, rather than some foreign foe, makes it all the more tragic. But Jim is convinced that the whole thing is Communist inspired, a judgment that was confirmed by other responsible leaders that I talked with. “Look at all this devastation,” he would say, pointing now to an entire corner once housing several businesses. “Who can believe that people would destroy their own town like this?” I felt a tinge of his lost pride when he added, “Mr. Garrett, these were once as lovely little stores as you would find anywhere.” I studied them, but had trouble restoring them in my mind as to what they might once have been, for I saw only burned brick and mangled steel girders, all in a hole in the ground. A German howitzer could not have done a better job.

We stopped in front of still another catastrophe, and Jim explained that one of his parishioners walked into that store a few weeks since and noticed that the sound coming from a stroller parked at the entrance was hardly that of a baby. It was rather the ominous sound of a bomb, ticking off its countdown. She sounded the alarm and the people scurried to safety, only to stand by and witness one more business go up in flames. “Twenty or thirty people would have died right there if that sister had not sounded the alarm,” Jim said with a mixture of disgust and anger. But what can you do when evil people bring their bombs to your door in a baby stroller?

Jim wanted me to see his native Armagh from a hill overlooking the little city, on which stands the great St. Patrick’s Cathedral. As we walked toward the brow, across the dark cemetery and before the cathedral, I asked him if those representing the old Protestant religion were part of the answer to Ireland’s peril. “That is the problem. They are not really believers. To them it is the gospel plus the Union Jack or it is the gospel plus the Green Sash. It is not Jesus Christ and him crucified.” He told of how his people were sending the message of  the Cross to Catholics and Protestants alike, and of how in his pulpit the Christ is lifted up as the answer to all their problems. It grieves his soul that many of his own fellow ministers do not even believe in the deity of Christ, while others leave the country discouraged.

“Look at my city, Mr. Garrett, look at it!” he cried to me as we stood on the crest of the hill. It was unbelievable to behold. I thought of those lines in Isaiah: “The daughter of Zion is left like a booth in a vineyard, like a lodge in a cucumber field, like a besieged city.” But Jim said it just as well when he added, “It is now a ghost town.”

But there is something real about Jim Armstrong that all that darkness cannot apprehend. He really believes the gospel and he trusts in Jesus’ power to save. He is not inclined to blame either Catholics or Protestants for the tragedy. “It is the work of evil men who need Jesus,” he told me. In his own soul there is that simple trusting faith that God will bless him and his ministry. As we walked through his scarred city in the very presence of death itself, he quoted so beautifully some lines from John Ryland (1777):

Sovereign Ruler of the skies,

Ever gracious, ever wise,

All my times are in Thy hand,

All events at thy command.

His decree, who form’d the earth,

Fix’d my first and second birth;

Parents, native place, and time,

All appointed were by Him.

He that form’d me in the womb,

He shall guide me to the tomb;

All my times shall ever be

Order’d by His wise decree.

As we bade farewell he said, as one last loving gesture, “Our meeting was not simply a coincident!”

All this touched my soft soul very deeply. It is one thing to read a tragic news story or to see its aftereffects on TV, but to move inside it as I did that night was almost too much for me. Back in my hotel room I felt that I was too old to weep and too shaken to pray, but I could not refrain from either. I could only say, “Oh, my God!” to all the darkness, and yet I could praise His name that in that darkness walked my newly discovered brother, Jim Armstrong, reflecting the light of the risen Christ.

A letter from Jim of recent date says: “We are all well here. Weather is getting spring-like and we are enjoying some sort of ‘truce’ at present. Mysterious killings still go on. We have had about a dozen during the past week, some of them the result of feuds in Republican circles, others by so-called Loyalists. A Communist element is becoming more apparent. I.R.S.P. is the new name they have been using during the past week. It stands for Irish Republican Socialist Party.” And with it some more lines from John Ryland, who must have written so that the likes of Jim Armstrong could. quote him.

Plagues and deaths around me fly;

Till he bids, I cannot die:

Not a single shaft can hit

Till the God of love sees fit.

O Thou Gracious, Wise, and Just!

In Thy hands my life I trust:

Have I something dearer still?

I resign it to Thy will. —the Editor