‘I’m disgusted with the whole thing,’ Hughes said. ‘It means that people like myself … have to carry the responsibility of all those deaths.’ If all that carnage had at least succeeded in forcing the British out of Ireland, then Hughes might be able to justify, to himself, the actions he had taken. But he felt robbed of any such rationale for absolution. ‘As everything has turned out,’ he said, ‘not one death was worth it.’
