Books: The Trouble

ARMY WITHOUT BANNERS—Ernie O Malley—Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

That nation of rhetoricians, the Irish, love to kiss the truth with generous euphemistic smacks, sometimes like to roll the tart bitterness of an understatement on their curly tongues. Such a concentrated less-than-truth is "The Trouble," their phrase for the five years of battle, murder & sudden death (1916-1921). Such Irishmen as Ernie O Malley, who not only saw the Trouble at first hand but did their best to help it along, referred to it simply as "the scrap." But as Author O Malley well knows, and...

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