First Sentence

"Anyone who might have seen the young Michael Collins in a loft on a sunny summer day on the family farm at Woodfield in West Cork a hundred years after the foregoing letter was written would have found it very hard to credit that he would ever survive to march into captivity - or live to smash the system of informers and intelligence-gathering that enabled Major Sirr to be in the right place at the right time to capture Lord Edward Fitzgerald."