Poems In The Light

Dooley is a Traitor James Michie

“'So then you won't fight?'

‘Yes, your Honour,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’

‘Now is it that you simply aren’t willing,

Or have you a fundamental objection to killing?’

Says the judge, blowing his nose

And making his words stand to attention in long rows.

I stand to attention too, but with half a grin

(In my time I’ve done a good many in).

‘No objection at all, sir,’ I said.

‘There’s a deal of the world I’d rather see dead —

Such as Johnny Stubbs or Fred Settle or my last landlord, Mr Syme.

Give me a gun and your blessing, your Honour, and I’ll be killing them

all the time.

But my conscience says a clear no

To killing a crowd of gentlemen I don’t know.

Why, I’d as soon think of killing a worshipful judge,

High-court, like yourself (against whom, God knows, I’ve got no

grudge —

So far), as murder a heap of foreign folk.

If you’ve got no grudge, you’ve got no joke

To laugh at after.’

Now the words never come flowing

Proper for me till I get the old pipe going.

And just as I was poking

Down baccy, the judge looks up sharp with ‘No smoking,

Mr Dooley. We’re not fighting this war for fun.

And we want a clearer reason why you refuse to carry a gun.

This war is not a personal feud, it’s a fight

Against wrong ideas on behalf of the Right.

Mr Dooley, won’t you help to destroy evil ideas?’

‘Ah, your Honour, here’s

the tragedy,’ I said. ‘I’m not a man of the mind.

I couldn’t find it in my heart to be unkind

To an idea. I wouldn’t know one if I saw one. I haven’t one of my own.

So I’d best be leaving other people’s alone.’

‘Indeed,’ he sneers at me, ‘this defence is

Curious for someone with convictions in two senses.

A criminal invokes conscience to his aid

To support an individual withdrawal from a communal crusade

Sanctioned by God, led by the Church, against a godless, churchless

nation!’

I asked his Honour for a translation.

‘You talk of conscience,’ he said. ‘What do you know of the Christian

creed?’

‘Nothing, sir, except what I can read.

That’s the most you can hope for from us jail-birds.

I just open the Book here and there and look at the words.

And I find that when the Lord himself misliked an evil notion

He turned it into a pig and drove it squealing over a cliff into the ocean,

And the loony ran away

And lived to think another day.

There was a clean job done and no blood shed!

Everybody happy and forty wicked thoughts drowned dead.

A neat and Christian murder. None of your mad slaughter

Throwing away the brains with the blood and the baby with the

bathwater.

Now I look at the war as a sportsman. It’s a matter of choosing

The decentest way of losing.

Heads or tails, losers or winners,

We all lose, we’re all damned sinners.

And I’d rather be with the poor cold people at the wall that’s shot

Than the bloody guilty devils in the firing-line, in Hell and keeping

hot.’

‘But what right, Dooley, what right,’ he cried,

‘Have you to say the Lord is on your side?’

‘That’s a dirty crooked question,’ back I roared.

‘I said not the Lord was on my side, but I was on the side of the Lord.’

Then he was up at me and shouting,

But by and by he calms: ‘Now we’re not doubting

Your sincerity, Dooley, only your arguments,

Which don’t make sense.’

(‘Hullo,’ I thought, ‘that’s the wrong way round.

I may be skylarking a bit, but my brainpan’s sound.’)

Then biting his nail and sugaring his words sweet:

‘Keep your head, Mr Dooley. Religion is clearly not up your street.

But let me ask you as a plain patriotic fellow

Whether you’d stand there so smug and yellow

If the foe were attacking your own dear sister.’

‘I’d knock their brains out, mister,

On the floor,’ I said. ‘There,’ he says kindly, ‘I knew you were no

pacifist.

It’s your straight duty as a man to enlist.

The enemy is at the door.’ You could have downed

Me with a feather. ‘Where?’ I gasp, looking round.

‘Not this door,’ he says angered. ‘Don’t play the clown.

But they’re two thousand miles away planning to do us down.

Why, the news is full of the deeds of those murderers and rapers.’

‘Your Eminence,’ I said, ‘my father told me never to believe the papers

But to go by my eyes,

And at two thousand miles the poor things can’t tell truth from lies.’

His fearful spectacles glittered like the moon: ‘For the last time what

right

Has a man like you to refuse to fight?’

‘More right,’ I said, ‘than you.

You’ve never murdered a man, so you don’t know what is it I won’t do.

I’ve done it in good hot blood, so haven’t I the right to make bold

To declare that I shan’t do it in cold?’

The judge rises in a great rage

And writes Dooley Is A Traitor in black upon a page

And tells me I must die.

‘What, me?’ says I.

‘If you still won’t fight.’

‘Well, yes, your Honour,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’”