18

The crucial meeting was held in Sir Matthew Nathan’s office in Dublin Castle. In addition to Nathan, General Friend and Major Price were present, as Douglas expected they would be. That Admiral Hamilton, the naval intelligence chief, had come over from London to hear his report underscored the Admiralty’s continuing concern.

This time it was Douglas who stood at the map of Ireland, ruler in hand. Dressed in a dark suit and tie, he looked more like a barrister briefing clients than an army officer to his superiors. “The assumption that the German landing will take place at one or more existing harbors”—he pointed at Westport, Galway, and Kilrush—“is incorrect. There are no facilities to receive oceangoing vessels in those harbors, and what few boats that might off-load the ships at anchor are controlled by men who have no sympathy with a German-sponsored revolution.”

General Friend interrupted. He and the other two military men were seated in stiff-back chairs flanking Nathan, who, by contrast, leaned casually back in the large leather seat behind his ornate desk. This was Nathan’s turf, but Friend seemed to challenge it suddenly by challenging Tyrrell. “How do you know that, Captain?”

“I know it, General, because I’ve spent the last three months talking to them.”

“All of them?”

“General, the west of Ireland is not the west of England. There are barely fifty motor-powered workboats from Kerry to Mayo.”

“And you want me to believe their crews are all loyal?”

Douglas shrugged. “Loyalty is a relative matter. Corner boys in Dublin can spout slogans, even treasonous ones, but they never have to confront the reality of a German alliance. In the west such slogans have a specific meaning: an active collusion with England’s enemy. However much they may squirm under London rule, men of the west are not throwing in with Berlin. That’s why the leaders of the rebellion have kept their dealings secret not only from England, but from Ireland. Ireland won’t support it.”

Major Price sat forward. “That conviction of yours, Captain—”

“Not a conviction, Major. A conclusion.”

Price waved the distinction off. “—is what justifies your refusal to identify by name the coastal insurrectionists?”

“The names I could give you are of the Irish Volunteers in Cork, Limerick, and Galway. You have those names. Those men are quite public. You’ll find them on their parade grounds wearing their homemade uniforms, drilling with broomsticks, every Sunday. My point to you, sir, is that the Germans will not need a large shore party because they won’t off-load their ships at anchor.”

“Then there will be no German landing, is that what you’re saying?” General Friend made a show of his impatience.

Douglas stared back at him. “No, sir. I’m saying the opposite. The rebels are planning an elaborate landing, but not the one that you expect. The ships will beach themselves. They will off-load what cargo must be kept dry—weapons and ammunition—in their own lifeboats. The troops will go over the bows into shallow water. The only Irish-based support required will be a pilot boat to rendezvous with the ships offshore, to guide them in, and a handful of Irishmen to direct the invaders to their first bivouac. You said in our meeting in London, sir, that the period of transfer from ships to shore will be the period of absolute vulnerability. I’m telling you that period will last from midtide to high, a period of less than three hours. The transfer itself will cover not a half-mile of open water, but a few dozen yards of lapping surf.”

“Ridiculous!” Friend snorted. “Ridiculous! The west coast of Ireland is all rocks. There’s no such beach.”

“There is.” Douglas poked the map with the ruler. “It’s here, at Fenit in the lee of Dingle, in the Bay of Tralee.” Tralee. The name hung in his mind. Now Tralee meant Jane—the place where he had witnessed his sister’s perfidy. And he hated himself now for thinking that she might even be there to welcome the bloody Germans.

General Friend was still snorting. “It’s impossible!”

Douglas turned away from the general toward Admiral Hamilton. He sat, his hands pursed at his mouth, staring at the map. After a long silence, he asked, “What’s the slope of the beach?”

“Gradual, sir. Twenty degrees, sloping out from low water three hundred yards.”

“What is the range of tide?”

“Maximum of eleven feet between low and high water.”

Hamilton let his gaze drift to Douglas; it conveyed the experience of his awakening. “And next month’s maximum falls . . .”

“Right, sir. Easter weekend. In point of fact, Good Friday.”

The date registered with all of them.

Hamilton looked at Friend. “Not impossible, General, not at all. Wooden-hulled ships beached themselves all the time. Iron is less resilient than wood. One doesn’t want to take a metal vessel ashore like that every day, but for proper cause . . .” Hamilton shrugged. What was proper cause for the Germans if not the blow to England this landing would be? “Given the right slope, suitable weather, and perfect timing with the tides, it’s not impossible at all. Of course, every naval operation requires perfect timing.” He looked back at the map, and now his amazement showed itself. “I didn’t think such a beach existed in the west of Ireland.”

“Well, by God, we’ll have it covered!” Friend turned to Sir Matthew. “Now will you get me proper reinforcements? I need real soldiers. Not Irishmen. I need Tommies!”

Nathan sat forward, his chair snapping under him. “You know what our job is, General. It’s to handle this without asking London for troops. The German victory occurs in Ireland the moment we draw off forces from the Front to defend against it. We will not do that. There are no troops for Ireland.”

“There must be troops! Give me the Ulster Division at least. Do we leave this to the RIC? They’re Catholics!”

Tyrrell slapped his own hand with the wooden stick he held. “General, I must protest. The Royal Irish Constabulary has proved itself again and again. It serves no one’s purpose to lump every Irish Catholic in with rebels but the rebels themselves.”

“Captain Tyrrell, you’ve made your report, such as it is.” Friend glared at him. “What we wanted from you were the names of the insurrectionists. Unless that’s what you have to give us, further comment from you is unnecessary and shall be regarded as insubordinate.” He faced Nathan. “I tell you, these Irish will welcome the Germans! They’ll pull them ashore!”

Admiral Hamilton, with a supremely patronizing touch of General Friend’s sleeve, said, “The Germans won’t be pulled ashore by anyone, my dear General. They won’t get as far as the surf. Now that we know where to await them, those ships will be intercepted”—he gestured at the map—“as they steer between Kerry Head and, what are those islands, Captain?”

“Magharee Islands, Sir Edward.”

Hamilton nodded. “The British navy will stop them there.”

“The British navy!” This was too much for Friend. “It’s everything the navy can do to keep a supply line to the BEF open across the Channel. The British navy can’t even protect the east coast of England from German attacks! The Germans shell Harwich and Ipswich! They cruise at will off Great Yarmouth! How the hell can you protect the west coast of Ireland?”

“Not the west coast, General.” Hamilton nodded at Tyrrell. “Because of your army man here, the navy’s task is simpler than that. Quite within our competence, believe me.” His finger shot up toward the map. “What your man has brought us is worth far more than the names of rural malcontents. Tralee Bay! If nothing else in this trying season, Tralee Bay will be secure!”

Sir Matthew tapped his desk nervously. “Still, General Friend has a point. We must, of course, reinforce our garrisons in the southwest, even if it means leaving the country elsewhere undermanned. And we must preempt the rebels’ initiative with Defense of the Realm arrests everywhere.”

“Absolutely not!” Hamilton bellowed. “We must do nothing to alert the Germans to our foreknowledge. They would call the landing off. Don’t you see, we want them to try it. They must fail, of course. But we want them to try it.”

“Why, in God’s name? If we can demonstrate ahead of time a level of readiness that deters them?”

“Because Ireland joins Belgium then as a small nation they are trying to devour. A German attempt to invade Ireland for whatever motive makes our point better than anything we can say or do ourselves.”

“Makes it to the Americans,” Friend said.

“Of course, to the Americans, General. Imagine the effect of it when our destroyers escort half a dozen German ships, flying false flags and carrying weapons and gray-uniformed German soldiers, into the harbor at Queenstown! We won’t sink them, we’ll capture them. And then we’ll turn the newspapermen loose on them, like red ants. A German assault not only against Ireland, but against the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic! This event will bring America into the war, which, gentlemen, I’m afraid to say, is our only hope of winning it.”

Tyrrell said, “In which case, the Irish rebels will have saved England.”

Hamilton nodded, but said, “A debt we won’t acknowledge.”

The group fell silent.

Douglas alone remained standing. After a moment he shifted his weight awkwardly.

General Friend said to Sir Matthew, as if no one else were present, “I understand the Admiral’s concern, but we simply must have a force at standby in the region.”

Hamilton began, “General, please indulge my—”

“I was addressing the secretary for Ireland!”

Nathan shook his head. “Sir Edward represents Lord Kitchener, General, and not merely the Admiralty. He has authority in the matter.” It was a concession made without animus. Nathan had learned nothing in all his years of colonial service if not when to step aside for London. And he knew better than to step between military men who had their pistols cocked.

As if the secretary’s announcement freed him to display his authority, Hamilton stood up. “I had hoped not to make you feel intruded upon, General. But you give me no choice.” He crossed to the map as Douglas stepped aside. “The RIC has normal jurisdiction throughout this area. They are to maintain it. As the date approaches, we will bring the chief constable in and, with him, establish a special service unit that will move, simultaneously with the naval operation, though not before, against the rebel shore party.”

“I’m telling you the RIC can’t do it.”

“Of course, there should be overall army authority, if that’s your point. An army man in charge—your coachman on the box, so to speak. What rank would it require?”

“Major at least,” Friend snapped. His eyes shot quickly toward Major Price.

Hamilton turned to Tyrrell. “I want you in charge.” Then he looked stonily at Friend. “I’ll rely on you to arrange Captain Tyrrell’s promotion, General.”

Good Friday dawned, as it often does in theological Ireland, chill and bleak. Douglas Tyrrell had posted a dozen mufti-clad RIC men each in Fenit, Spa, Derrymore, and Blennerville, the towns ringing the shores of Tralee Bay. He had taken up his own position at Church Hill, a promontory jutting out into the bay above Fenit. It wasn’t far from the place, marked by three boulders, from which he’d first watched his sister leave Curry’s cottage. From his new vantage he could see the whole of Tralee Bay out to Kerry Head and the sea beyond. He could still see the cottage, but he knew that Curry wasn’t in it. Curry had spent the night on board the Sea Lark, a thirty-foot fishing boat that had been tied to the small wharf at Fenit. Now, in first light, Tyrrell watched through his binoculars as the boat headed out to sea with two men aboard, the helmsman and Curry. If he could keep the Sea Lark in his glasses, Tyrrell knew, he would see everything.

He scanned the open water beyond Kerry Head for signs either of the German ships or the British force that was waiting for them—two heavily armed destroyers, HMS Zinnia and HMS Bluebell, and two lightly armed but swift eighty-foot motor launches, HMS Sand Lance and HMS Minnow.

He saw nothing. The gentle swells of the bay became choppy water beyond the sheltering reach of Dingle, but the mists of dawn made it impossible to see much farther than the mouth of the bay. Not even the Magharees were visible.

He lowered his glasses and looked at his watch. It was shortly after six, nearly an hour before low water. The Germans would be planning to steam into the bay proper in three hours, hitting the beach in four, getting off with the tide in seven. It consoled Tyrrell to realize that everything would be over, one way or the other—the nightmare of these six months would be over—by early afternoon.

With his naked eyes he watched the Sea Lark steadily moving away, growing smaller, yet pitching more severely as it left the lee of Dingle. He pictured Curry holding on to a stanchion, his bearded face in the wind. He tried to imagine Curry’s feelings, and realized they would be something like his own. Douglas wondered suddenly what Curry had told Jane. But he ruthlessly put his sister out of his mind. At least Jane had not reappeared in Tralee. Douglas had not had to repeat the ignominy, for which he still loathed himself, of turning his glasses on her.

Soon the Sea Lark disappeared in the distant fog. Time passed. Again and again his thoughts drifted to Pamela. That distraction he did not resist. He wanted the horror of these events over for many reasons, but none more than to have done with the awful deception of his wife. That was his perfidy. He longed to tell her everything. Only Pamela would understand what these months had cost him.

But even thoughts of Pamela were dangerous now. This was the time for alertness, not consolation; for will, not love. He shut his mind against her.

From where he waited, Douglas could see one of his detachments of RIC men huddled near a ruined stone oratory on the hill above Fenit. He looked over at them regularly, then would check his watch compulsively. He tugged at the leather strap of his Sam Browne, and he nervously fingered the snap on his holster. This was the first time he’d worn his uniform since coming home to Ireland. It contributed to the strange feeling of unreality that now threatened to override his calm. When had he had this feeling before? It haunted him, filled him with dread. Then he remembered that morning in the poisoned trenches at Messines, waiting for the order to go over. Then, at least, he’d had his lads nearby, so that by bolstering them he could bolster himself. Here, he was alone, watching like some divinity from his solitary ledge.

What kind of thought was that? Divinity indeed! He reined his anxiety and channeled it into the simple act of focusing his eyes, as if by an act of will he could increase the field of his vision. Over the next period of time that seemed to happen, as first the dawn hill mists evaporated and then the sea fog rolled back.

Nearly three hours had passed; the time had come. Just as he began to fear that nothing was going to happen, a black form appeared in his glasses, a ship. He watched it grow and waited for others to appear beside it. But none did, apart from the tiny vessel just ahead of it, which he took to be the Sea Lark. Without breathing, Tyrrell watched their progress. They were headed directly into the bay. Soon it was apparent that the ship was a freighter, therefore not one of the British warships. German therefore! A single ship only, but a German vessel! A German landing after all; a deadly cargo—troops and weapons! Tyrrell realized with shock that until now he had not really believed this could happen, as in Trier he had not believed he was really hearing Irishmen coax Irishmen toward treason. Was there a brigade of Irish traitors aboard this vessel? Were some recruited from the men he’d left behind? Suddenly he felt the power of the rage he’d first felt in the prison camp, that compatriots of his would truly do this, and he wanted to see this ship blown to smithereens as the Germans in those very waters had blown the Lusitania.

With a rush of panic, it occurred to him that this ship had somehow eluded the British destroyers and that it was actually going to succeed in coming fully into the bay. It was close enough now that he could see its flag, the flag of Norway—falsely flown, of course. He checked his watch once more. The ship would make it to the beach precisely on the tide and disgorge a force of hardened troops against whom Tyrrell’s own constables would be no match.

Just as he began to think General Friend had been right, there appeared from beyond the jagged hill of Kerry Head the distinctive black bow of a destroyer. As it came fully into view, Tyrrell saw the three smokestacks and the telltale fore-to-aft sloping wedge of the hull. From inside the Magharees a smaller form shot out into the open water, a swift motor launch, converging, with the destroyer, on the freighter. The freighter showed its broadside suddenly, changing course—he could read its name, the Aud—and then a ball of smoke rolled off the destroyer. A second later Tyrrell heard the faint report of a heavy gun, a warning shot. The freighter seemed to stop. The two British vessels bore down on it.

The other warships were nowhere in sight. Tyrrell could only presume that they had intercepted the main body of German ships farther out to sea, perhaps near Skellig—that place which had first led him here to Tralee.

The Sea Lark meanwhile continued to power toward the head of the bay, the British vessels apparently ignoring it. That would have been fine with Douglas—This one’s mine, he’d have said—but then he realized he was going to have to move now against Curry. It was a moment he’d somehow expected would never come.

He left his position, dashing toward the road where the Crossley and its RIC driver waited. He wanted to be at the Fenit wharf before the Sea Lark was. As he leapt aboard the mud-colored military vehicle, waving the driver toward Fenit, his eyes snagged on something in the open water on the opposite side of the Church Hill peninsula. A fast-moving curragh, he thought at first, because of its small, black beetlelike form. But it was moving far too fast for a curragh. He stared back at it as the Crossley jolted under him, headed in the opposite direction.

“Wait!” The armored car stopped abruptly and Tyrrell stood, balancing against the windscreen. In the distance the Aud and its two escorts were just disappearing behind the Magharees, while here, well into the bay, something new was happening.

He watched unbelieving as the sinister black form grew larger. “What the hell is that?” he asked no one in particular. Before it had surfaced fully—for that’s what it was doing—he knew, though he’d never seen one before, that it was a submarine. A bloody submarine.

The sight staggered him. As the water streamed off the conning tower and hull, and as its cigar-form became fully visible—he read the stark bow number, 19—he felt the visceral repugnance one feels for the obscene. That Ireland’s fate should have become entwined with that machine, as the place from which the Germans hoped to extend its range, seemed like a primitive Gaelic myth, the island devoured by a monster from the deep. The machine was all, Tyrrell realized, and for a moment so was his hatred. It cut both ways. Neither Germany nor England cared a whit for Ireland as Ireland. Their argument was over this fucking machine.

But it wasn’t heading into the bay. Though why should it have? Would a U-boat have beached itself? It seemed to wallow, pitching and rolling unsteadily. With his glasses, Douglas scanned that part of the bay. The nearest land was the Banna Strand, a rough, rocky shore that took the full brunt of ocean swells in an impossibly heavy surf. With his binoculars fixed on the U-boat, Douglas waited. What in hell was happening? He tried to guess its dimensions, but, lacking a reference point, he couldn’t. The thing might have been fifty feet long or four hundred, the tower five feet high or fifty. A heavy wave crashed over it, forcing the nose down, and for a moment Douglas feared the boat was going under again. But the water coursed free and the U-boat bobbed in its own wash.

Something moved on the deck, behind the conning tower, and Douglas adjusted the focus wheel on his glasses, trying to bring it up. A mistake: the boat blurred. In the seconds it took him to find focus again, a man had come out of a hatch and was now stooping down to it, hauling another man up after him. Then they stooped together and pulled an object—a crate?—up to the deck. Not a crate, he saw, as they righted it and began to slide it overboard, but a tiny boat, a dinghy.

The pair clambered into it and floated free. The craft nearly swamped at once in the swirl of water off the hull of the submarine, and Tyrrell thought it was going to sink. But it was the submarine that sank. More quickly than he’d have believed possible, the black hulk simply disappeared beneath the waves. The dinghy tossed wildly, then found its course as one of the men began pulling on the oars. They made at once for the nearest point of land, the rocky, surf-ridden Banna Strand. Never, he thought.

He scanned the bay again—not a sign of a ship anywhere. If not for the Sea Lark and the tiny skiff struggling landward in the rolling Atlantic swells, Tyrrell might have wondered if he’d imagined it all.

“Move!” he said to the driver. “Not to Fenit . . .” There was not time to summon the others. “. . . to Banna!” He pointed the way, and the driver wheeled the lumbering vehicle around. The road off Church Hill sank into an inland valley, and for a crucial ten minutes their view of the water was blocked. Tyrrell kept pressing the driver to go faster, but the road was dangerously rutted. At one point they had to stop to clear a fallen tree, which, in their hurry, they tossed aside as if it were brush.

Finally the road cut back toward the shore. The sea came into view and the road snaked down toward it. The dinghy was just then struggling into the far edge of the rough surf, where the whitecaps became breakers. The Sea Lark was bearing down on it from behind. Curry had seen the submarine too.

More than two hundred yards of steeply sloping headland—boulder-strewn and covered with thick briers—separated the road from the water’s edge. Tyrrell halted the Crossley, ordered the driver to bring his rifle, and they plunged into it. If the dinghy did not capsize in the surf or get crushed against the rocks, it would hit the beach about the time Tyrrell and the RIC man would. What he could not calculate yet, crashing through the thorny undergrowth, was what role Curry would play in this.

The Sea Lark was still coming full-throttle toward shore. Tyrrell realized he’d made a mistake in bringing the Crossley into view.

Thirty or forty yards from shore, a fierce wave tossed the small rowboat into the air. An oar pinwheeled into the spray, and the men flailed as they were hurled into the water. The boat disappeared in the cascading foam.

Tyrrell and his man arrived at the beach.

The Sea Lark continued to gun for it at a distance now of less than a hundred yards.

The form of a man appeared in the surf, tossed helplessly about, flotsam. The water hurled him ashore, but just as quickly sucked him seaward again. Tyrrell started for him as the second man appeared farther out, equally helpless. “Go for that one!” he ordered. He and the RIC man separated.

The Sea Lark, breasting the waves, was aimed right between them, and it barreled into the surf.

Tyrrell ignored it. The man he’d gone after was in danger of being pulled back out to sea. He plunged into the water and grabbed him. The man was wearing drenched leather overalls, what submariners wore to protect against scalding pipes, and was hopelessly encumbered. Only with the greatest effort was Tyrrell able to hold him and then drag him ashore.

With a great futile roar of its engine as the propeller came out of the water, the Sea Lark hit the beach, then bounced back from it against a large rock. With half its hull exposed, it seemed huge.

Tyrrell dropped the half-drowned man onto the sand—the German C-in-C?—to reach instinctively for his pistol. Had the water made it useless?

A man appeared over the cockeyed rail of the Sea Lark. He too had a pistol drawn, and when he saw Tyrrell, he fired.

Tyrrell shot him dead.

The German at his feet grabbed Tyrrell’s legs, crying, “No! No! No!”

The German?

Only when Tyrrell looked down at him—a haggard, bearded scarecrow lost in the oversized leather overalls—did he recognize Roger Casement, the bastard from Trier.

“Stand still, Major!” Dan Curry showed enough of himself from under the prow of the Sea Lark to make it clear to Tyrrell that he had him in the sights of his pistol, but not enough to make a decent target.

Instead of dropping his weapon, Tyrrell lowered it, pressing its snout against Casement’s head and cocking it.

Curry came out from behind the wrecked boat, his gun level, but his indecision was apparent. Tyrrell did not waiver, while Curry, whose own resolve only moments before had brought the boat crashing onto the beach, did not know what to do.

It was Casement who broke the impasse, clutching at Tyrrell. But Tyrrell forced the pistol harder against his skull.

“I’ve come back to call it off,” Casement said. “We can’t do it! We can’t do it!”

Despite himself, Curry demanded, “What?”

Casement looked toward him. “Call the Rising off! The Germans have reneged. They won’t help us! We can’t do it!”

Even Tyrrell looked down at Casement now. “What about the Aud? I saw the Aud.”

Casement shook his head. “It’s nothing, a German nuisance gesture, scavenged rifles from the Russian front, a tenth of what we need. The Aud is all there is and it is nothing!”

“No brigade?” Curry asked in disbelief. “No German troops?”

“Nothing, I tell you!” Casement screamed at them. He seemed mad. “Nothing! They betrayed us!”

“But why?” Curry had convinced himself, as Pearse had, that the Germans would do anything for their North Atlantic U-boat base.

“Because the chancellor won out over the admirals. The Kaiser has called off the U-boat onslaught. They are afraid of bringing America into the war.”

Tyrrell pushed the pistol harder against Casement’s head. “Because you couldn’t raise an Irish Brigade and they saw that they’d have to come to Ireland as conquerors. Isn’t that it? They saw that the Irish people would never support you. Isn’t that it?”

Casement slumped. “Yes.” He reached an arm toward Curry. “So go to Pearse and MacNeill and call it off. Tell them it’s hopeless. There’s no help. There’s no point. Our men will be slaughtered. Call it off.”

Curry stared at him as at a ghost. He recognized the failures Casement described as the very failures he had himself predicted once. Why, then, had he ignored his own instinctive rejection of the German alliance? But he knew. He had ignored it because of Pearse. He felt doubly devastated by what Casement said. Casement had been the first to believe in the Rising and was now the first to abandon it. This was the truth Curry himself had seen in a flash at that prison camp in Trier; what fools they’d been to throw in with Germans. And now it was an obvious truth that the plan drawn to depend on Germany could not go forward; a Catholic people could not rise up in hopeless revolution. It would be suicide, and killing done in its name would be murder. But it had taken a Protestant to point it out. Curry took a step back from Tyrrell and Casement as the recognition crystallized of what he had to do.

But then he felt the blunt object in his back, and he heard the uncertain Irish voice behind him. “Don’t move. I’ll shoot you.”

It was Tyrrell’s driver. The man he’d pulled ashore after a great struggle in the sea was sprawled on the beach behind him. The driver was terrified that he was actually going to have to shoot Curry, so it came as a large, if mysterious, relief when Major Tyrrell said, “Let him go, Sergeant.” The RIC man hesitated, then withdrew the point of his rifle from Curry’s back.

Curry fled at once.

Tyrrell watched him running up to the road. He thanked God for the more than ample reason he’d been given to spare the man his sister loved.

Curry, for his part, felt an infinite desolation. It was nearly noon, the hour when the sky darkened and the temple veil was rent. All over Ireland, for the next three hours, there would be silence. But there was no silence inside Curry. The words reeled through his mind. He repeated them over and over as he ran, the words of Roger Casement: “Tell them it’s hopeless. There’s no help. There’s no point. Our men will be slaughtered.”

And the words of Jesus Christ on the cross: “Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabactani?” My God! My God! Why have You forsaken me?

It was early evening when the train from Limerick carried Curry into Knightsbridge Station in Dublin. By then more than ten thousand Volunteers had been on alert status at mustering points all over Ireland. Only a few insurgent leaders were privy to the broad outlines of strategy, but local groups everywhere had successfully met the first tests of timing and coordination. Now they were waiting for the order to go forward, and most of them were waiting for their rifles.

Any revolution requires an exquisite correlation of diverse efforts, and in those first hours the Irish revolution achieved it. The various factions had in the ultimate moments laid aside their disagreements. For example, once it seemed that the initiative Pearse, Casement, and Devoy had taken toward Berlin was going to bear extraordinary fruit, the others swallowed their misgivings and rallied to the plan. Only when the hours of Friday morning passed without word from Kerry, and then, in the early afternoon, when the word that came was an unconfirmed rumor of disaster, did the organizational disagreements begin to surface again. The message from Dan Curry—“Hold all operations! Casement captured! No arms! Await arrival Dublin!”—exacerbated those disagreements, but the leaders agreed there was nothing to do but wait for Curry and learn what had happened.

The streets outside the railroad station were deserted and, rather than wait for a cab, Curry began to run. Two blocks to the Liffey, the gray sunken wound of a river, which seemed to spawn the dank mist that choked the twilit city of all its color. Then up the Ormond Quay past the drab warehouses and sober shipping companies, trying to remember which building it was, thinking for once only of his duty, for this was duty, at last—calling off the Rising—in which he believed.

His footsteps echoed eerily behind him as he ran, as if the adjacent river water was a skin stretched tight to amplify sound. It carried across the Liffey into south Dublin, perhaps as far as Merrion Square, where Jane was. He would be with her tonight.

But now, now was running, finding the place, an innocuous narrow brick building that he knew, when he came upon it, by the cracked glass in the first-floor window. He hurled the door open, flew by the lone sentry, and took four flights of stairs without slowing. On the landing he stopped to recover his breath, but the door snapped open at once and Eoin MacNeill stood there. He was dressed in a formal black suit, as for a funeral, but his collar was open, his shirt disheveled. “Where the fuck have you been?”

Curry stared at MacNeill, gasping still. It hadn’t occurred to him that the leaders would be in a state of barely reined rage or that they’d greet him with it. Curry knew that to them he was the messenger of disaster, but the disaster could be trimmed, and his job was to show them how. “I’ve been getting here, Commandant.”

“Let the man in, Eoin!” someone ordered from within the room. When MacNeill stepped aside, Curry saw that it was Connolly. He had discarded his suit coat; his shirtsleeves were rolled past the elbows of his powerful arms. He looked ready for a fistfight.

Even from the way Connolly stood there in the center of the dingy room, Clarke and Plunkett on either side of him, like seconds, Pearse at a table by the window, bent over a pencil like a scorekeeper, it was apparent that Connolly was now the man with authority. A surprise, since MacNeill was the chief of staff of the Volunteers, who far outnumbered Connolly’s Citizen Army. Curry grasped instinctively that Pearse, removed at his table, had been undercut more than the others by the day’s events.

MacNeill closed the door behind him. “What the hell happened?” He glared at Curry.

Curry still wasn’t breathing right, and he hesitated. MacNeill misunderstood, thought Curry was panicked, and he grabbed his shoulder. “Damn it, man, tell us . . . !”

But it was MacNeill on the brink of panic, not Curry. Curry calmly removed MacNeill’s hand from his shoulder. “I’ve come to make my report, Commandant, not to be caned.”

“Give him room, MacNeill,” Connolly barked. “Jesus, man, give him room!”

Curry sensed their tension and imagined how they’d been bickering while they waited for him. He glanced at Pearse, his one friend, who had yet to greet him or even look at him. Pearse’s collar was firmly closed, his necktie securely knotted, his schoolmaster’s dark suit perfectly creased. But the stern impression he made was not a matter of his clothing. Pearse was cloaked in his despair. Curry thought of the defeated band of Jesus’ disciples on that Friday night in a shuttered upper room. But enough of that! he told himself. This was not a pious tableau.

“What exactly did Casement say?” Connolly asked.

“He said, it’s off. The Germans reneged. There can be no rising.”

“There’s not another landing planned?” Clarke asked. “We thought perhaps tomorrow or—”

“Nothing!” Curry was abrupt. He looked from Clarke to Connolly to Plunkett and MacNeill. They were all waiting for him to explain the new strategy. Curry realized that they’d have embraced any new arrangement he chose to describe for them—a flotilla of dirigibles landing on the Aran Islands? What they didn’t want was all he had. “The Rising must be canceled,” Curry said. “Casement risked his life to tell us as much.”

“We expect to hear from Washington,” Plunkett began.

Again Curry was abrupt. “Don’t. Washington has nothing to do with it. The invasion was always nine parts Casement’s dream. If Casement has abandoned it, then it’s over. Forget it. We’re alone.”

The leaders stared at Curry. No one could refute him. He spoke with the absolute conviction of a man who’d seen already what other men, like them, could only vaguely conjure. Curry had seen the beginning and the end of the great revolution. He was the one among them with authority now.

There was a kind of communal sigh as the officers implicitly registered the finality of Curry’s report.

It had happened, then. The worst rumors were true. There would be no new arrangement, no alternative strategy. Nothing.

For a moment they stood awkwardly, facing away from each other, ignoring Pearse still, unable to think what to do next.

Then Plunkett whined, “But how did the British know?”

“We’ve been betrayed, obviously,” Connolly said. “Perhaps the Germans learned we’d been compromised and they pulled back.”

MacNeill protested. “Don’t justify what the Germans have done. We were fools to trust them. They’ve destroyed our best chance.”

But Tom Clarke banged the wall. “We can’t call it off now! The British will round us up in any case, and if they prevail in Europe, they’ll turn their massive army against us. England will occupy us forever! But now, now she’s vulnerable! England will never be this vulnerable again!”

Curry stared at Clarke, disbelieving, and he waited for the others to dismiss his lunatic reaction. But instead Connolly agreed. “We have the men. Everyone’s ready. When we declare ourselves, we’ve still the Americans. The Americans will weigh in with us.”

MacNeill, who’d seemed unstable before, was the one who shook his head. “Not once it’s known we threw in with Germans.”

Connolly waved impatiently. “What Germans? We deny it.”

Curry thought, They haven’t heard me. They don’t know what really happened. He waved his hands and spoke now as if his experience had made him their equal. “You’re not paying attention, Commandant. How do you deny the Aud? The British have the German freighter. I saw the gunboats take it away.”

But Curry was the one who hadn’t heard. Connolly sneered at him. “The Aud sank in a hundred feet of water this afternoon off Cobh. The captain put his crew in lifeboats, then blew his vessel up. The Germans want to deny this thing too, as who wouldn’t?”

MacNeill was still shaking his head. “None of this matters.” He stood. “We can’t send our boys out into the streets to be gunned down. Casement’s right and so is his man here. The Rising’s off.” He started to leave.

“Eoin, wait!” Connolly grabbed his arm. Though the labor leader was a burly man and MacNeill was goose-necked and frail-looking—his collars were always loose—MacNeill shook himself free.

“I’ve opposed this from the beginning. I knew it would come to no good and it has. Now I am ordering the Volunteers to go home.”

“You can’t! I refuse to allow it.”

“You issue an order, Connolly, and see who obeys it. Apart from your Socialist hooligans, no one will. My order will be obeyed by ten thousand men.” MacNeill looked at them all. “You’re the ones with grand strategies and desperate maneuvers and the willingness to shed blood to no purpose. I’m the one with the men.” At that MacNeill left the room. The others listened as the loud clomping of his feet on the stairs faded.

At last Pádraic Pearse stood up. To Curry he seemed strangely detached, a man removed from his own emotions, as he said with eerie calm, “We have set our faces on Jerusalem. It is the will of our Father that we go up.”

Curry waited for the others to protest, but they didn’t. Pearse was like a ghost to Curry, and it shook him to be the one to have to challenge him. “Pádraic, without MacNeill, without the Volunteers . . .”

Pearse looked at Curry as if he were a mulish pupil. “We have Dublin. Our men can take Dublin. And when we do, the Irish nation will rally to us.”

“Pádraic, the British have men in Dublin too. It’s their one stronghold. They’d slaughter us.” Curry stared at Pearse, completely lost. Once this man had seemed possessed by reason itself. This was the man who was going to replace the emotionalism of pub talk with a realistic operation calculated not to purge the ancient feelings, but to succeed. Only the cold logic of his strategies had convinced Curry before. But this was no strategy. This was the blind mysticism of his play. “One man can free a people,” he’d written, “as one Man redeemed the world.”

Curry shuddered as he grasped what they’d come to. These men would free their people by leading them out to die. And then he understood that, despite the elaborate veneer of military planning, of strategic alliance, of practical preparation, the Irish rising was from the beginning fated to be a bloody spasm of mystical hope.

What a fool I’ve been, he thought. Actually to have believed that this date was chosen because of the calendar of the tides. Dies irae, dies illa. He wanted to turn and follow MacNeill from the room. But he was held fast by the burning eyes of Pádraic Pearse.

“Who arrested Casement, Dan?”

And Curry heard the question, as Pearse wanted him to, as, Who is it who has betrayed me? He stepped back as if he’d been hit. He saw it all now, how he’d been used by both sides, how he’d so lacked a will of his own on which to stand that he’d repeatedly embraced the will of whoever he was with. And with what horror did he feel himself now preparing to do it again.

Pearse, before he was a teacher, had been a barrister, and he was staring at Curry not with the schoolmaster’s hauteur, but with the lawyer’s stark accusation.

“Who arrested Casement?” he demanded again.

“It was Tyrrell,” Curry answered miserably. Yes, Tyrrell. The bastard had beaten him and, through him, Ireland.

Pearse nodded. “The woman’s brother.”

“Yes.” Jane, Douglas, and himself, Curry thought. The unholy Trinity.

“And he let you go?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To warn you. To tell you what Casement said.”

“To convince us to call the Rising off.”

“Yes, but—”

“And you, Dan, what are you going to do?” Pearse put the question to him gently. And you, Simon Peter, who do you say that I am?

Thou art the Christ.

There was only one way for Dan Curry to establish his innocence—not of the crime of ambivalence now, but of treason—establish it not only with Pearse and the others, but with himself. Not my will—how easily it came back to him—but Thine.

“I’m with you, Commandant,” he said.