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Generalised warfare broke out all over the country as the British introduced new men and new methods in a vain effort to counter the guerilla tactics of Collins' Active Service Units and the Flying Columns of Volunteers, which lived on the run, eating and sleeping where they could.
Held back from making a full scale use of their Army by the force of world opinion, largely Irish American opinion, the British tried to fight a police war carried on by hastily formed forces of ex service men and officers troubled by little discipline and less conscience. The Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries wrote new chapters of horror in the bloodstained story of the Anglo Irish relationship. Reprisals for the activities of Collins and his colleagues included the burning of homes and creameries, random murder and the widespread use of torture. Through it all Collins lived a `life on the bicycle'. The most wanted man in Europe, he smiled his way through a hundred hold ups never wearing a disguise, never missing an appointment, never certain where he would spend the night.
One of his central ideas was derived from G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. He was given the book by Joseph Plunkett, his immediate superior in 1916. Plunkett, who was dying of tuberculosis, took part in the fighting and was married in his cell, ten minutes before facing a firing squad. Obviously any relic of such a figure would be prized by his lieutenant.
And Collins prized in particular the advice of the Chief Anarchist in the Chesterton book: `if you don't seem to be hiding nobody hunts you out'. Accordingly, Collins never seemed to be hiding. He always wore good suits, neatly pressed. And time after time, this young businessman was passed through police cordons unsearched, with his pockets stuffed with incriminating documents. It seems to be an iron law with policemen both in Collins' time and ours, that terrorists are not expected to wear pin striped suits and clean collars and ties.
He had a network of safe houses and secret rooms where he transacted business. One room I examined was reached by pulling a lever which caused the bottom half of a kitchen dresser to swing upwards on hinges. Collins used to work in the house, until it was raided and then slip into the secret room and work away until the soldiers surrounding the house moved out of the garden. None of them ever realised that there was an unaccounted for window in the back wall of the house.
In addition to his campaign of warfare Collins ran a national loan which was banned by the British so that its advertisement or sale became illegal. Yet the loan was fully subscribed and every subscriber got a receipt. He was President of the omnipresent I.R.B. which regarded him as the real President of the Irish Republic, and Minister for Finance in the Sinn Féin Cabinet. In addition, he was Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.). Any one of those jobs would have consumed the energy of an ordinary man, but Collins combined them all efficiently and effectively.
He combined a mind like a laser beam with a hawk like eye for detail. Nothing escaped his attention. Everything attracted his interest. Shaw’s latest play, the way the Swiss organised a Citizen Army, Benjamin Franklin’s proposals for dealing with loyalists, or the latest edition of Popular Mechanics. An article in this journal in November of 1920 led to the first use in warfare of the Thomson gun. Collins saw the article on the recently invented weapon and had enquiries made about “this splendid thing”l, which led to the Irish-American leader Joseph McGarrity of Philadelphia buying five hundred of the weapons. Two Irish-American ex-officers were sent to Ireland to train the I.R.A. in the use of the weapons. Only a handful got through the American customs, but these were duly used in a number of Dublin ambushes. Collins was tough and abrasive with his male, and sometimes female, colleagues. But he was gentle and playful with children and old people. Throughout the eighteen months that Eamon de Valera was in America, on a propaganda and fund-raising mission, which lasted most of the Anglo-Irish war, Collins risked his life to call each week to his absent chief’s family, bringing them money and companionship.