Books: The Horrors & the Poetry

THY TEARS MIGHT CEASE by Michael Farrell. 577 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

The first guerrilla war of modern times was neither Lawrence's campaigns in Arabia nor the Boer War—two of the usual candidates—but the century-long struggle of the Irish for independence from Britain. The Irish experience, in its factionalism and atrocious savagery, was just like the more recent guerrilla wars, but it is set off from the others by its sense of Irish gaiety in the midst of bloodletting, of poetry rising from its bitterness. Thus the most rousing songs of the best Irish tenors...