7

The Battle of Dublin II:
the Counterstroke

I find no tendency at present to be afraid of strong action. I have no doubt it will come when we have shot a few people.

Brigadier-General Byrne, 28 April 1916

On Easter Monday morning, the total military force immediately available for action was 400, in the shape of an ‘inlying picquet’ of 100 troops at each of the four principal barracks (Richmond, Marlborough, Royal and Portobello). Surprisingly, perhaps – it would certainly surprise the Royal Commission of Inquiry – no special orders or dispositions had been made for the expected Volunteer manoeuvres on Sunday. The rebel mobilization on Monday was observed by the police, but (as on Sunday) they seem to have reported nothing. Certainly no word came to the military barracks until after midday. While Eamonn Ceannt’s force was occupying the South Dublin Union, they could hear a band playing in Richmond Barracks. ‘They don’t know yet’, Ceannt remarked around 12.15, a moment before the band fell silent. The army’s first stab at an explanation for its surprise was that the ‘Sinn Feiners had collected quietly in Dublin’, possibly in the guise of Bank Holiday trippers.1 The situation was distinctly embarrassing, if not alarming. Dublin Castle was virtually undefended, and the overriding priority was to make it safe. The inlying picquets sallied forth in the direction of the Castle. (Incidentally, apart from the 6th Reserve Cavalry Regiment in Marlborough Barracks, all these units were Irish: the 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment in Richmond, the 10th Royal Dublin Fusiliers in Royal Barracks, and the 3rd Royal Irish Rifles in Portobello.) All soon ran into some kind of resistance.

The most spectacular of these early encounters handed an easy triumph to the rebels. A force of lancers was sent out from Marlborough Barracks to investigate the vague report of rioting in Sackville Street. Diarmuid Lynch suggests that at 1.15 p.m. ‘Glad tidings flashed through the GPO: “The horsemen are coming!” … As they neared Nelson’s Pillar Republican volleys were unloosed. The surviving Lancers hastily retreated. No mere “riot” this, but war!’2 Three were killed and one fatally wounded; for the rest of the week a dead horse lay where it had fallen. Lynch was right to see this little affray as a potent symbolic drama. (In the history of war as well as Anglo-Irish relations, cavalrymen were still reluctant to learn the lesson of their obsolescence in modern battle.)³ The brief fusillade announced that Britain’s Irish policy had failed.

The reconnaissance of the infantry units was less reckless, however. The first 100 men of the RIR from Richmond Barracks, soon joined by another 200, quickly overwhelmed the small group that Ceannt had posted at the western end of the South Dublin Union grounds. Their commander, Colonel Owens, sent forces around both sides of the Union, to the Royal Hospital on the northern side and along the canal to the south. Throughout the afternoon there was fierce fighting as Ceannt’s men, quickly becoming veterans in close-quarter combat, held on to their positions in the main buildings. After nightfall, though, Colonel Kennard, the Dublin garrison commander who joined the Richmond force when he could not get back to his headquarters, took 86 of the RIR to Ship Street Barracks and thence into the Castle. The Dublin Fusiliers picquet from Royal Barracks had already arrived. They had come under fire from the Mendicity Institute as soon as they started to advance down Ellis Quay, but worked their way around and rushed across Queen Street Bridge under cover of machine-gun fire; after that their movement along Watling Street, Thomas Street and High Street was unimpeded. Some 130 of them were in the Castle by 2 o’clock.

At about the same time, 50 men of the picquet from Portobello also arrived. It had taken them about an hour to work their way along Richmond and Camden Streets, after a brisk assault on the rebel outpost at Davy’s pub on Portobello Bridge. They had come under fire from two small outlying posts of MacDonagh’s force, and from Jacob’s factory itself at the junction with Bishop Street. But they seem to have found a way round via New Street, despite the outposts there and in Fumbally Lane. So when Kennard reached the Castle, he had a garrison of around 300, and could go over to offensive action against Connolly’s force in City Hall. On Monday afternoon and evening, a few other defensive movements took place. The troops who ran into the Volunteers of the 2nd Battalion under Weafer and Henderson in Ballybough Road were moving to secure the North Wall and Amiens Street Station. Here, as elsewhere, the rebels, expecting an instant military assault, were puzzled by the disappearance of the troops. As elsewhere, the army’s priorities were different. At St Stephen’s Green, the first aim was to get reinforcements into the Shelbourne, which as we have seen was done on Monday evening.

Trinity College, which was never directly threatened by the rebel forces, had its own small OTC garrison – students with a few hours’ part-time military training, with a sprinkling of regular officers and NCOs. Only eight were in the college at midday; the commanding officer, Major Tate, was on leave in the country and could not get back. It was the college’s Chief Steward who locked the front gates, while Corporal Mein of the OTC closed the Lincoln Place gates, issued a rifle and 50 rounds of ammunition to each member of the guard, and gave orders: should there be ‘an attack in force’, the garrison would retire to its HQ in the pavilion, and take up defensive positions already prepared on the balcony. The closest rebel forces were just over the road in Westland Row Station and on the railway viaduct, which overlooked the college sports field, and there was good reason to anticipate an attack – the college was, as the OTC’s Adjutant pointed out, a key position. ‘Had the rebels taken the College on the first or second days of the rising, it would have been exceedingly difficult to dislodge them,’ since the buildings were ‘of a most substantial character, and heavy artillery would have been required’ to retake them. (This would, as he thoughtfully added, have been ‘a National Calamity’.) The Bank of Ireland would also have been at risk.4 As it was, a trickle of OTC cadets and regular officers on leave drifted into the college during the afternoon; Captain Alton arrived to take command at 3 p.m., and by 7 he had a garrison of 44.

Overnight, the military authorities gradually got their act together. Reinforcements were summoned from the Curragh and Belfast. The first 150 men of the composite battalion sent from Belfast arrived at Amiens Street on Monday night. Colonel Cowan at last called for the artillery from Athlone. Generals began to appear on the scene. The key arrival was Brigadier-General W. H. M. Lowe, commander of the 3rd Reserve Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh. The first trainload of his troops reached Kingsbridge Station at 2.15 a.m. Lowe arrived at 3.45, and the whole Curragh Mobile Column of 1,600 was in Dublin by 5.20. Shortly afterwards it was followed by the 25th Irish Reserve Infantry Brigade of around 1,000. Lowe took over command of the capital from Kennard immediately, and launched the operations that would define the shape of the battle over the next five days: the establishment of a central axis of communication running from Kingsbridge to the North Wall and Trinity College, followed by the cordoning off of the main rebel positions. No copy of his general plan has survived – a curious echo of the situation on the other side – and Lowe may have been improvising. Some contingency plan (in military parlance a ‘defensive scheme’) for Dublin must have been drawn up by the Irish Command staff earlier, but it may well not have anticipated anything like the eventual situation. What is certain is that General Friend, who dashed back by destroyer overnight and arrived at Kingstown around 9 a.m., made no attempt to modify Lowe’s orders.5 Lowe retained operational command until he took the surrender of the rebels at the weekend, although he has remained a somewhat shadowy figure, overshadowed certainly by the new commander-in-chief who was to appear on Friday. (His obscurity was compounded by the fact that the Royal Commission, perhaps surprisingly, did not see fit to call him as a witness.)

But if the military command recovered its poise, the civil authorities were in disarray. Easter Monday did not quite decapitate the Irish government, but it took it apart in an unprecedented way. For several hours, the Under-Secretary – effectively the head of the administration – was cut off in Dublin Castle, and even after he regained his freedom of movement he chose to stay there. The Chief Secretary, of course, was in London. This left the Lord Lieutenant in splendid viceregal isolation in Phoenix Park. Wimborne’s position was an interesting one. His increasingly urgent warnings and exhortations of the last few weeks had been dramatically borne out; after long frustration in his bid for a real governmental role, he was now suddenly presented with an historic challenge. The atmosphere in the Viceregal Lodge was electric; according to Wimborne’s private secretary, ‘his Ex simply swilled brandy the whole time’; in ‘superlatively theatrical’ style he ‘insisted on his poor secretaries using the most melodramatically grandiloquent language down the telephone – standing over them to enforce his dictation: “It is His Excellency’s command … ”’6 But what commands could he usefully issue? Naturally he called for military reinforcements – not for the first time, and not, in the circumstances, extravagantly. He penned a personal letter to the secretary of the War Office asking for a brigade to start at once, with two more to be held in readiness. Things were serious; the wires to the Curragh had been cut, and he hardly overdramatized in saying that ‘the situation is not in hand and we have no news from the provinces’.⁷ Taking no chances, he sent the letter by hand – it arrived in Whitehall just after 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning, about the time that Friend was disembarking at Kingstown.

Wimborne’s next action was less restrained: he declared martial law in Dublin. Did he try to consult the Castle’s law officers before he did this? Or did he, as seems likely, simply assume that he had no alternative? (The Attorney General told the Royal Commission that he did not see either the Lord Lieutenant or the Under-Secretary at any time during the week.)⁸ Civil administration had unquestionably collapsed. After three DMP constables were killed in the first moments of the rebellion, the police were taken off the streets. The Commissioner then ‘had them put in plain clothes’ and sent out ‘scouting; they sent in a stream of information about the movements of the rebels’, but this was hardly a substitute for their normal law-enforcement function.⁹ In effect, the civil law was paralysed. Wimborne’s action probably seemed mere common sense, albeit no doubt quite exhilarating after the frustrations of the preceding weeks. All the same, it was far from unproblematic, and it would cast a long shadow. Martial law was profoundly abhorrent to the English liberal outlook, and it had only ever been used in modern times in distant parts of the empire. Even in Ireland, it had not been declared since the early years of the Union – in the wake of the 1798 rebellion – and a variety of alternative legal powers had been found to deal with the various armed challenges to British rule in the nineteenth century. Where it had been used recently, as during the South African war, it had raised the spectre of militarism and led to serious judicial complications. The legal doctrine of martial law in English jurisprudence was dangerously unclear. And in 1916, of course, the government already had what might have been called a form of statutory martial law in the shape of the Defence of the Realm Act. This gave very large powers to military tribunals to try cases of collusion with the enemy – a charge which the rebels had, by trumpeting in the proclamation of the Republic their ‘gallant allies in Europe’, openly embraced.

There was a real danger that the declaration of martial law would antagonize moderate Irish opinion without delivering any real benefits to the authorities. The danger was clear enough to the Chief Secretary, who took the hated crossing to Dublin for the last time in mid-week, and penned an urgent appeal to the Prime Minister not to extend martial law outside the immediate zone of fighting.10 But Birrell’s influence was shattered, and the Cabinet took the decision to do so in his absence. This was a very serious step, much less easy to explain than the Viceroy’s instinctive action. Whereas Wimborne had been all too conscious for the last year of the limitations of DORA, the Cabinet had no such experience. In normal times, Liberal ministers would have hung on to the principle of legality. But 1916 was a very abnormal time. The war had shifted the balance of power within the executive; if it had not eclipsed the principle of civil supremacy, it had hugely enhanced the mystique of the military authorities. The army’s view, as the incoming Irish Commander-in-Chief was soon to make clear, was that the rebellion had been permitted by the weakness of the civil government. Such weakness would now end. When the Cabinet declared martial law across the whole of Ireland for an indefinite period, and placed Ireland under a military governor, it was sending a deliberate signal. The suppression of the rebellion, by whatever means, was the overriding priority.

On Tuesday, Friend assessed the situation to be ‘that of Civil War’; he estimated the strength of the rebels at 2,000. By 4.20 p.m. the number of troops available had risen to 3,000, but ‘the arrival of the reinforcements from England is anxiously awaited’. His plan was that the Belfast reinforcements would ‘move into the City from the N.E. by Amiens Street’, while the brigade from England would move in from Kingstown by the two roads nearest to the coast, ‘clearing the suburbs as they go’. A battalion was to land directly at North Wall. He noted that ‘in the remainder of Ireland, everything appears to be quiet’. It was also significant that in Dublin ‘the mob did some looting but do not appear to be concerned in the rebellion’.11 This did not lead to the conclusion that countermeasures might be less vigorous, however. Lowe’s orders to the troops arriving from England set the tone of the next phase of operations. The reinforcements were to set out from Kingstown immediately after breakfast on the 26th, their objective being ‘to clear the country of rebels between the sea and the Stillorgan, Donnybrook and Dublin roads’. According to present information, ‘it is improbable that resistance will be met with south of Donnybrook and Ballsbridge, but from these points increasing opposition may be expected’. The orders were explicit on how to deal with such resistance: ‘every road and lane must be traversed by patrols’, machine-guns, ‘which will prove of great value in street fighting, should be carried close to the head of each column’. Crucially, ‘the head of the columns will in no case advance beyond any house from which fire has been opened, until the inhabitants of such house have been destroyed or captured’. Moreover, ‘every man found in any such house whether bearing arms or not, may be considered as a rebel’. The chilling undertone of this order was softened by the information that the rebels formed only ‘a very small proportion of the population’. ‘It must be impressed on all ranks that the householders and inhabitants of this country are with very few exceptions loyal in their support of the Empire.’ A large proportion had friends and relations serving in the army. The houses fortified by the rebels had ‘in every instance been seized by force from their lawful owners, and care should be taken that property be not damaged to a greater extent than is necessary’. But the orders went on to spell out the necessity for the ‘hunting down’ of ‘these outlaws.’¹²

This dramatic, even lurid vocabulary was a symptom of the shock the rebellion had administered to a complacent establishment. The army’s determination to crush the rebels was natural, but it also received the blessing of statesmen who had been wrestling for years with the recalcitrant complexity of the Irish problem. Throughout Tuesday, the situation remained obscure. In one of the week’s many odd developments, the troops who had captured most of the South Dublin Union area on Monday and were preparing to assault the garrison of the main buildings on Tuesday, were pulled back ‘for some extraordinary reason’ (in the view of the regimental history) to Kingsbridge Station, where they were held – despite the protests of their commander, Colonel Owens – until Wednesday. It has been suggested that the reason was simply that the Castle was now safe, but it is clear from military reports that there was a real worry about the security of military headquarters itself. (This persisted through the week. On Wednesday afternoon the 178th Brigade received a message that ‘Irish Command was being heavily attacked and asking for help.’ Even after two reinforcing brigades had been brought to Kilmainham on Thursday, they ‘were nervous lest the place should be rushed at dawn’.)13

The optimism of military reports rose and fell by the hour. In the evening, it was reported that the Bank of Ireland had been taken by the rebels, and earlier reports that the rebels had been cleared from Stephen’s Green and the Corporation Buildings were contradicted. More worryingly, ‘some disquieting rumours from country districts’ came in, with reports of a rising in Galway. ‘Rebels said to hold Gort, Galway road and probably Crusheen Railway Station (Clare).’¹⁴ Some of the small police stations in Meath, Clare and Galway were reported captured. There was relief that the big munitions factory (Kynoch’s) in Arklow was secure and its guard reinforced. But communication between Longford and Dublin was cut off. Friend’s central objective was an attack on the main forces of the rebels in Sackville Street; but ‘this main attack will not be delivered till the English troops arrive on the south side of the Liffey, at Trinity College and Dublin Castle.’ He had wired for the rest of the 59th Division to be sent, not because he thought it would be needed for this attack but ‘military occupation of the disaffected districts and thorough disarmament of the rebels therein will be necessary even after the rebellion in Dublin has been thoroughly crushed’.15

Even before the main military advance could be prepared, two ominous events announced the manner of military repression. By the early evening, four eighteen-pounder field guns had arrived from Athlone and were brought into Trinity College. The OTC garrison was relieved at the same time by troops of the Leinster Regiment with two machine-guns, but six Trinity Cadets went out in mufti to dig gun emplacements in Tara Street ‘under most trying circumstances’, and went on to act as ammunition porters.¹⁶ It proved impossible to remove enough of the densely packed cobblestones to sink proper emplacements for the recoil of the heavy guns, and the local residents were sceptical of the explanation given for the excavations – drain repairs. On Wednesday morning two guns were finally brought out regardless. On the river nearby, HMS Helga, a fishery protection vessel (usually described as a ‘gunboat’, but technically an ‘armed yacht’) currently serving on an anti-submarine patrol duty, had come up from Kingstown on Tuesday afternoon, and sent a few three-inch shells into the republican position at Boland’s.¹⁷ (De Valera reportedly ran around shouting ‘Hurrah! Rotten shot!’ before coming up with the idea of diverting the gunners’ attention to an empty distillery just north of the bakery by hanging a republican tricolour on it.) Early on Wednesday morning, the Helga lay off Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and opened fire on Liberty Hall. The shelling was fairly ineffective at first, but then the eighteen-pounders joined in. ‘At the first report every pane of glass in the street was shattered, and even in Trinity College the solid buildings seemed to quake under those who were lining the parapets.’¹⁸ Liberty Hall was steadily reduced to a burnt-out shell. Whether the army believed it to be garrisoned is not clear – Friend reported that ‘the Headquarters had evidently been previously removed’ – but its prime importance was probably symbolic. The Irish Times pointed out with grim satisfaction, ‘for many years past Liberty Hall had been a thorn in the side of the Dublin Police and the Irish Government. It was the centre of social anarchy, the brain of every riot and disturbance.’ The bombardment itself was also symbolic. Liam O Briain’s comrade in the College of Surgeons, the ICA man Bob de Coeur, regaled him with Connolly’s maxim that if the British were ever compelled to use artillery in ‘the second city of the empire’, they were doomed. O Briain ‘was not in the mood to argue the proposition. But’, as he reflected, ‘was it an absurd one?’ Any attempt by the government to dismiss the rebellion as a minor street affray would henceforth be an uphill task.

The second event overnight was a more tragic demonstration of what martial law might mean. Shortly before 8 p.m., the junior officer in command of the military picquet occupying Davy’s public house at Portobello Bridge, with orders ‘to defend my post, but to avoid a conflict if possible’, saw a small crowd approaching.19 They were following Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, one of Dublin’s best-known eccentrics, some of them shouting his name. Skeffington, a radical pacifist and feminist (who had adopted his wife Hanna Sheehy’s surname, and was something of a trial to her father, a Redmondite MP), had been one of the strongest critics of what he called the ‘militarism’ of the Irish Volunteer movement.²⁰ On Tuesday he had printed some leaflets condemning looting, and was trying to arrange a public anti-looting organization. As usual he attracted a crowd of admirers and detractors, and it was this – in a situation where the police had disappeared and martial law had been proclaimed – that led Lieutenant Morris to arrest him and take him into custody in Portobello Barracks. The situation inside the barracks was disorganized; the commanding officer of the garrison (3rd Royal Irish Rifles) was on sick leave, and his deputy Major Rosborough had (in the words of the commission of inquiry) ‘under his command many officers and men who were unknown to him, but of whose services he was glad to avail himself in the restoration of order’. The three young officers in charge of the guardroom ‘arranged among themselves spells of duty, and it was not clearly established which of them was in actual charge when Mr Sheehy Skeffington was brought in’.

The atmosphere in the barracks was, to say the least, exciting. It was ‘full of refugees from almost every regiment and corps in the British Army, all home on leave for Easter’.²¹ One of these, Monk Gibbon of the Army Service Corps, was in ‘the mood of a boy scout who has been served out a rifle and told that the game he has been rehearsing as a happy recreation is now to be played in real earnest’. The troops were trigger-happy. ‘If someone started a rumour that a sniper was firing into the barracks from a church spire across the canal, half the men in the compound rushed for their rifles and started blazing away …’22 Rumour, inevitably, was rife. ‘Various alarming rumours were current as to an impending attack on the barracks, and both officers and men thought that they were in serious peril, which could only be averted by the taking of strong measures’ – so at least suggested Sir John Simon’s commission of inquiry in its effort to understand what followed.²³ What followed was, however, all but incomprehensible.

Captain J. C. Bowen Colthurst, an Irish Rifles officer with fifteen years’ experience – not one of the Easter week blow-ins to Portobello – decided to lead a raiding party up to Harcourt Road to search the premises owned by Alderman James Kelly (a tobacconist, and a Unionist – whom Colthurst may have confused with Alderman Tom Kelly). As he took his party, a junior officer and forty men, out of the barracks he demanded that Sheehy-Skeffington be taken with them as a hostage. As if his ‘extraordinary and indeed almost meaningless procedure’ was not odd enough, he told Skeffington to say his prayers and, when he refused, Colthurst had his troops remove their hats while he said one of his own devising: ‘O Lord God, if it shall please thee to take away the life of this man forgive him for Christ’s sake.’²⁴ If his men were baffled or even alarmed by this proceeding, they seem to have put it down to the extremity of the situation and the existence of martial law. Just outside the barrack gate, in Rathmines Road, Colthurst challenged a passing youth by the name of Coade: telling him that martial law was in force, he shot him dead without awaiting a reply.²⁵ Again his junior officer and men stood by. He took his party on across Portobello Bridge, leaving Lt Wilson with half the force in charge of Skeffington, with orders to shoot him if Colthurst’s party were ‘knocked out’. The rest went on to Kelly’s shop, which they rushed after throwing in a grenade, and seized two men they found there, Thomas Dickson and Patrick McIntyre. Colthurst then took all three of his prisoners back into the barracks.

According to his own account, Colthurst spent the night scrutinizing the documents he had seized at Kelly’s shop and those that Skeffington had been carrying. He came to the conclusion that ‘these three were all very dangerous characters’. At 9 a.m. he went to interrogate them, and, deciding that the guardroom was not a suitable place, had them taken out into the yard. He told the officer in charge of the guardroom, ‘I am taking these prisoners out and I am going to shoot them as I think it is the right thing to do.’26 Seven troops with loaded rifles followed them out, and Colthurst ordered them to shoot the three prisoners. He gave two explanations of his action. Later on Wednesday, he reported to his commanding officer that ‘the yard was a place from which they might have escaped’ – in fact it was surrounded by high walls – ‘and as I considered that there was a reasonable chance of the prisoners making their escape I called upon the Guard to fire upon them’.²⁷ On 9 May, after he had eventually been placed under arrest, he offered a somewhat different explanation. ‘I was very much exhausted and unstrung after practically a sleepless night, and I took the gloomiest view of the situation and felt that only desperate measures would save the situation.’ Now he described his prisoners as ‘leaders of the rebels’ and ‘desperate men’; ‘I felt I must act quickly, and believing I had the power under martial law, I felt, under the circumstances, that it was clearly my duty to have the three ringleaders shot.’²⁸

Colthurst’s own motives are perhaps not the central issue here. He was certainly ‘half-cracked’, as Monk Gibbon put it, if not clinically insane as he was later found by a court martial. (Though ‘to do him justice’, as one of his puzzled juniors recalled, he ‘seemed completely fearless’.) The real question raised by this gruesome incident is why he was not challenged or restrained sooner. What did Major Rosborough do when Colthurst reported that he had shot three prisoners? Rosborough ordered that Colthurst was ‘only to be employed on the defences of Portobello Barracks, and not outside’.²⁹ But in fact he stayed at large. On Thursday, Hanna Sheehy came to Portobello looking for her husband, accompanied by her sister, the wife of another political celebrity, Tom Kettle MP. (Their brother, incidentally, was a lieutenant in the Dublin Fusiliers.) Colthurst nonetheless roundly accused them both of being Sinn Feiners, and had them bundled unceremoniously out of the barracks. Hanna Sheehy only found out on Friday, through the father of the youth Coade, who got into Portobello through the good offices of a priest and saw Skeffington’s corpse lying beside his son’s, that Skeffington was dead. That evening, Colthurst appeared at her house with an armed raiding party to search for incriminating material. It seems that none of his superior officers was concerned to restrain him, and had it not been for the presence in Portobello of a rather different maverick, Major Sir Francis Vane, no further action might have been taken by the authorities. Vane was establishing an observation post just down the road in the tower of Rathmines Town Hall at the time of the shootings, but as he made his way back to the barracks he was heckled by bystanders with shouts of ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ His awkward inquiries and protests would ensure that Colthurst was court-martialled, and crucially bolster public demands for an inquiry. It was the start of a slow-burning public relations disaster for the army – and indeed for the Union.

The reinforcements summoned from England began their advance into Dublin at 10.35 a.m. on Wednesday. Two infantry brigades were sent, the 176th and 178th, part of the 59th North Midland Division. The four battalions of the 178th arrived at Kingstown from Watford at about 10.30 p.m. on Tuesday night. They had lost one of their four Lewis guns in the process of embarkation at Liverpool, and disembarkation in the dark ‘was a regular nightmare’, as the Brigade Major, Captain Arthur Lee, recorded. They had left all their ‘bombs’ (grenades) back in Watford. Each brigade was made up of two battalions of the Sherwood Foresters, and as Lee noted, ‘most of our “men” were merely boys, Derby Recruits, who had been in uniform about 6 or 8 weeks. They had not fired their musketry course and many had never fired a rifle.’ They had not been issued with rifles until just before they started out, and then, with the army’s characteristic wit, had been given Mark VI ammunition to go with Mark VII rifles. Just before they set off, they were ordered to send a company with two of their remaining Lewis guns down to Arklow ‘where there was trouble.’ In Kingstown itself, though, ‘all the streets were thick with people clapping and cheering us’, apart from the ‘spy element’ which Lee found easily recognizable ‘by their stupidly lowering faces’.

The brigade moved, as ordered, in two columns of two battalions each, along the two roads closest to the coast. It was a fine spring day, and the road took them through ‘a prosperous and beautiful suburb, whose luxuriant and in some parts almost tropical gardens make the chance visitor think of the Riviera’.30 Many of the soldiers, indeed, at first assumed they had been brought to France. The inland force, the 2/5th and 2/6th Battalions, ‘reached Kilmainham and Kingsbridge without opposition’, as Friend reported, but the two battalions on the coastal road, the 2/7th and 2/8th, ‘continuing towards Beggars Bush … were strongly opposed at the Canal crossing’. In fact they had gone past Beggars Bush and were presumably aiming to reach Trinity College by way of Mount Street when they ran into the outposts of the 3rd Battalion in Northumberland Road. They were pressing on into the centre of Dublin after receiving an alarming appeal for help from Irish Command and revised orders not to ‘delay to search houses more than is necessary for their safe progress’. They had already experienced some fire shortly after midday in the vicinity of Carrisbrooke House, but the troops had dispersed quickly and returned fire. The rebels who had been supposed to garrison the house had decided to take up other positions, and eventually went home. (According to Seumas Grace it was ‘prematurely evacuated by 14 men under orders of a Blackrock officer’.)

A certain amount of ‘casual firing’ continued, with ‘stray bullets coming from all directions past the end of St Mary’s Road’. The next combat was very different, however. When Malone and Grace in No. 25 Northumberland Road opened fire, the effect was devastating. The 2/7th Sherwoods were walking up the road in column of fours with their officers out in front. All hit the ground while they tried to locate the source of the firing – very difficult as the sound of gunshots echoed around the neighbouring houses. Malone was ‘the crack shot of the 3rd Battalion with the Mauser automatic’, and his position, in a bathroom at the side of the house, was brilliantly chosen. (Grace remembered Malone calling him in to look at it – ‘one look was sufficient’.)³¹ From there, and also from Clanwilliam House, a substantial Victorian town house block facing across the low hump of Mount Street Bridge with a clear view down Northumberland Road, the soldiers appeared hopelessly confused. As they tried to crawl en masse towards the building they believed to be their objective, the school, they presented an almost absurdly immobile target. Officers, such as Captain Dietrichsen, the Adjutant of the 2/7th (until recently a lawyer in Nottingham), who tried to get the troops to move, were instantly shot down.

A near-unimaginable disaster loomed for the battalion as the little rebel garrisons, soon gaining the confidence of veterans, fired into the khaki mass as fast as they could load their eclectic collection of rifles and pistols. The Martini rifles in Clanwilliam House gave trouble – it became increasingly hard to eject their cartridges.32 Malone’s ‘Peter the Painter’ automatic, on the other hand, was stunningly effective. But why did the British troops not find an alternative route into Dublin? The batallion commander, Colonel Fane, had already reported as early as 2.45 that he was holding Baggot Street Bridge, which was undefended. Yet five hours later his men were still struggling with the rebel posts in Northumberland Road. Instead of moving on into Dublin, the brigade received direct orders from Lowe to overwhelm the posts around Mount Street Bridge. The brigade commander, Colonel Maconchy, who had come forward to assess the problem, walked back to his headquarters in Ballsbridge – ‘not a very nice walk’ as he recorded – and explained to Lowe by telephone that this could not be done without significant casualties. He deliberately asked whether the situation was serious enough to require that the position be taken at any cost; the reply was ‘to come through at all costs’.³³ The persistent shortage of grenades was eventually remedied around 5 o’clock. No. 25 and the schools were finally rushed and carried by grenade assaults (notably the so-called ‘hair brush bomb’ – Hand Grenade No. 12, one of the early mechanical grenades, with a throwing handle shaped like a hairbrush) and a supply of fresh troops, the 2/8th Battalion, which was brought through to relieve the exhausted and demoralized 2/7th.

Malone was killed some time after 5 p.m., but even in the thick of a full-scale attack, Grace was able to make his escape from the back of No. 25, where British troops had supposedly been working their way around the rebel positions for several hours. (He was eventually captured on Thursday in an outhouse in Haddington Road, after the owner informed the army.) The schools were taken around 8 p.m., shortly after 178th Brigade had sent an urgent request for another battalion ‘at least’ to be sent up from Kingstown. The Clanwilliam House garrison continued to fire across the bridge, but as troops concentrated along the canal side the balance of firepower inexorably shifted. The troops were firing from most of the houses in Percy Place, and James Doyle ‘could see the soldiers coming from the Baggot Street direction crawling along the ground behind the stonework of the railings along the canal’.34 By dusk, when a final assault across the bridge was ordered, Clanwilliam House had become a ‘perfect inferno’, its curtains shredded, mirrors, chandeliers and ornaments shattered, plaster fallen in ‘and almost every square foot of the walls inside was studded with bullets’. Most dangerously for the garrison, the stairways began to collapse. The ‘wild cries of assault outside, combined with the unceasing rattle of the musketry, made an incredible din’. A mile away, at the other end of the battleground, Captain Lee thought he heard cheering as the final assault went in, led personally by Colonel Oates. But Maconchy told him it was the cries of wounded men – ‘the first time I heard it – a horrible sound – something between a “wail” and a “shout” or “cheer”’.

Did Lowe insist on a frontal assault because he had not understood the nature of the combat? Or was there some idea that in any case military honour had to be satisfied? Why would this take precedence over the need to get forces into the centre of the city as rapidly as possible? It is impossible to say.³⁵ What is certain is that the Sherwoods’ casualties were potentially catastrophic. The 178th Brigade had to be withdrawn and sent around next day via the South Circular Road to Kilmainham. In the process the whole column nearly bolted when some random rifle fire broke out. ‘It was tragic’, one of the brigade officers wrote of the Mount Street fight.

You must remember all their officers and men came from Nottingham and the Retford–Newark–Worksop district, and they all knew each other and each other’s parents and relations, and to see their lifelong pals shot down beside them by their own countrymen (as Irish men were then considered) was a shock.

They were ‘completely flummoxed’ by the whole situation and disoriented by being pitched into a civil war.³⁶ Had they, in the end, won a victory, however costly? Maconchy walked up into Mount Street with Lee to survey the captured territory, and found the streets crowded with people ‘all of a good class’, clapping and cheering. Lee only saw one prisoner, with a nasty bayonet wound in the neck, but he became convinced that he was not an Irishman. ‘I don’t think we killed less than 500 of them’, he wrote later, ‘and I don’t think they were genuine Irishmen at all. I think they were paid mercenaries, the scum of the earth, gaol birds and hired for the job.’ Though he added reasonably, ‘I may be wrong.’37

If the army’s tactics of reinforcing failure in the struggle for Mount Street Bridge were strange, the failure of the rebels to reinforce their successful outposts may seem equally difficult to understand. The headquarters and main force position of the 3rd Battalion was barely 200 metres away from this ferocious fight. The trenches dug by A Company around the railway bridges over South Lotts Road and Bath Avenue overlooked Haddington Road and the murderous junction with Northumberland Road. But de Valera seems to have made no attempt to intervene in support of his outposts, or to adjust their dispositions. Malone himself decided to send home two of his three comrades, who were ‘just boys’, before the fighting broke out; but he got no reinforcements. The substantial force in Carrisbrooke House melted away without any apparent reaction at headquarters. Donnelly sent four men (including Tom and James Walsh) to reinforce Clanwilliam House in response to an urgent request from George Reynolds during the afternoon. But at 5.30, while the outposts other than No. 25 were still fighting on, Donnelly ordered the group he had placed in Roberts’ builders yard to fall back to Boland’s bakery.³⁸ Clearly de Valera – like all the rebel commandants – was expecting an assault on his main position, and a couple of stray encounters close to the bakery with troops trying to work their way round Beggars Bush to outflank the Mount Street Bridge positions probably convinced him that it was imminent. His misreading of the situation was not surprising, though it showed how hard it was for many inexperienced commanders to adapt their plans in face of reality.

De Valera’s political reputation was made by his status as the sole surviving battalion commander of Easter week, and by the reflected glory of ‘the Irish Thermopylae’. The nature of his subsequent career – excoriated by many as the cause of the bitter civil war in 1922 – made it likely that his performance here would be controversial. In fact, criticism was surprisingly muted until the 1960s, when Max Caulfield’s vividly detailed account of the rebellion included testimony from members of the 3rd Battalion indicating that the Commandant showed increasing symptoms of strain during the week. Caulfield’s picture – as interpreted by one of de Valera’s less sympathetic biographers – was of

a man on, or over, the threshold of nervous breakdown. Eyewitnesses recalled seeing a tall, gangling figure in green Volunteer uniform and red socks running around day and night, without sleep, getting trenches dug, giving contradictory orders, and forgetting the password so that he nearly got himself shot.39

This image brought an indignant rebuttal by Simon Donnelly, who went as far as to accuse Caulfield of misrepresenting his own testimony. In Donnelly’s view Caulfield’s ‘account of events in the sector with which I was concerned is so distorted that it is almost impossible to know where to start in pointing out the errors’. He repudiated in particular the suggestion that de Valera had not trusted his own men.⁴⁰ He argued that men could not have been spared from Boland’s bakery to reinforce the Mount Street Bridge outposts without unduly weakening the other positions, and pointed out that there had in fact been supporting fire from the railway workshops. He suggested that Caulfield’s witnesses were either political opponents of de Valera, or men who had not been able to understand the whole situation.

Yet Donnelly’s own account of Easter week, defiantly entitled ‘Thou Shalt Not Pass’, showed that he himself had been puzzled and anxious about some of his commander’s decisions. At midnight on Monday de Valera had ordered him to take a party of four or five men down the railway line to ‘scout towards’ Kingstown, a job that Donnelly ‘didn’t altogether like as I knew it was rather ticklish and the men fairly nervy’. But he got his force together, ‘and we were just about to start when the Commandant changed his mind, much to the relief of those going on the expedition’. Donnelly himself drew a picture of de Valera as hyperactive – ‘a real live wire from the first moment we entered our position: he was forever on the move, ignoring danger, and to my mind taking unnecessary risks’. By Friday he was clearly worn out, but refused to rest until ‘he was prevailed on eventually’ (a faint suggestion of physical pressure?) and ‘retired to an office he was using in the Dispensary’. But ‘after a few hours he was on the move again, anxious about a hundred and one different things’.41 One of the guards Donnelly posted outside the office, Sam Irwin, put this rather differently. When de Valera awoke, ‘it took a number of officers to restrain him, I don’t know what he wanted to do but I recall he was gesticulating and talking nonsense. I was only a boy of 18 then, and the whole incident wasn’t very reassuring.’⁴²

Donnelly’s account also bears out one of Caulfield’s most controversial revelations – the effect on the Boland’s garrison of de Valera’s unexplained decision on Friday night (‘for some reason known to himself’) to take them all up on the railway embankment. For the first time they could see the fires engulfing the centre of the city. A ‘great number’ of them were unnerved, and one officer ‘lost his head and fired at a Volunteer standing near me’, and had to be clubbed to the ground (by Donnelly himself) with a revolver butt. Donnelly did not understand why de Valera had issued his original order, since the railway was hardly a strong position (it was only fifteen feet above the level of the bakery itself). Then, ‘after some time the Commandant apparently altered his plans and we were ordered to reoccupy the Bakery’. This was a fairly hazardous course by that stage, since the troops might well have moved in. The whole incident spread bafflement throughout the battalion.

De Valera’s hyperactivity may have been a personal trait, but his inexperience was common to all the senior Volunteer commanders. Indecisiveness was often a result, as they tried to grasp the real nature of the battle they had so often fought in their imaginations. The nearest kin to de Valera in this respect was perhaps his neighbouring Commandant, Thomas MacDonagh. One of his students had heard him say that ‘the most romantic experience of his life was marching along the Dublin road carrying a rifle after the gun-running at Howth’. Now, immured – for reasons still unclear – in the gloomy pile of Jacob’s factory, he faced a daunting task in keeping up the morale of his beleaguered garrison. There were spasmodic dramas, as when the British troops tried to set up a machine-gun post in Digges Street and were ‘literally blown out of it’ (‘a dozen Howth Mausers could always do that’, Peadar Kearney recorded).

But most of the time, the British sniped, day and night, and often ‘raced up and down Aungier Street in improvised armoured cars’, creating the maximum psychological disturbance. Sleeplessness was aggravated by hunger. Jacob’s was packed with biscuit and cake, a treat which soon palled: ‘a couple of meals of Jacobs best gave the sweetest toothed member of the section a feeling of nausea when they saw an “Oxford lunch”’. Soon Kearney ‘began to notice that aching void which compels the mind to dwell on bacon and eggs and such things …’. There was ‘absolutely no authentic news’ to be had; just rumours of German invasion, rumours of provincial Volunteers flocking to Dublin, rumours of annihilation, ‘each rumour more fantastic than the last’.43 MacDonagh moved around the vast spaces of the factory in his immaculate uniform, trying to encourage his men; but most of his interventions were more demoralizing, as he persistently sent out small parties on missions to the neighbouring garrison in Stephen’s Green, often picking tired men at a moment’s notice.

In the end, nothing could disguise from the garrison the fact that it was unable to affect the battle raging around it. The high towers of the factory, from which ‘most of the city could be seen through field glasses’, seemed to offer a commanding position to Volunteer snipers, who could ‘pick off soldiers moving about in Portobello Barracks beyond the Grand Canal’.⁴⁴ But as the week went on they also offered a dispiriting view of the growing inferno north of the river. Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, in charge of the garrison’s small Cumann na mBan group, was up there on Friday evening, watching the GPO and its surrounding streets ‘blazing fiercely’. ‘There were huge columns of smoke’ and ‘all around, through the darkness, bombed-out buildings burned … the whole city seemed to be on fire. The noise of artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire was deafening.⁴⁵ None of that artillery fire was directed at Jacob’s itself, however – uniquely among the main rebel posts; it was not enough of a nuisance.

Most of the garrison commanders had to deal with the fact that, instead of the immediate assault at bayonet point that they first expected, they had to sit immobile while the British troops gradually tightened the cordons around their strongholds, deluging them with machine-gun and artillery fire. The experience of the 4th Battalion in the South Dublin Union and Jameson’s Distillery, however, was more dramatic. After the troops of the Royal Irish Regiment who had put in the initial attack were inexplicably withdrawn to Kingsbridge, there was a period of calm. But on Thursday, when the reinforcements from Kingstown had come across to the western side of the city, the attack intensified again. The fighting, at very close range, was grim enough to satisfy the goriest Fenian fantasies of hand-to-hand combat. The comparatively small garrison of the Union was energized by the leadership style of Ceannt and his Vice-Commandant, Cathal Brugha. One of the garrison remembered Ceannt as ‘always cool and cheerful’, while Brugha was the most silent member of the garrison, sitting for hours cleaning his automatic pistol during the quieter periods, but ‘always composed and contented’. One of their officers, Douglas Ffrench- Mullen, displayed the classical soldierly (and Anglo-Irish) virtues when he was wounded, saying ‘Do you know, I believe I’ve been hit – I feel very hot about the leg.’ And ‘he smiled as if he was very happy’, James Coughlan of C Company thought.46 The close-quarter fighting produced more ghastly results; one of the garrison slowly went insane as he obsessed over his guilt in causing the death of a comrade by offering him a light across a window. Brugha himself, who made a point of being in the front of every action, had to be taken out of the Union by some of its medical staff on Friday with a mass of wounds, wenty-five in all. Still, the position held, and the marksmen in the distillery were able to fire effectively on the attacking troops as they tried o work their way up from the Rialto direction. Bobby Holland had a strong sense that they were winning. The ‘odd stragglers’ who came into the distillery during the week told them that all the troops that landed at Kingstown had been eliminated, and they were only ‘mopping up the crowd that came down from Belfast’. Holland’s group believed this, because the soldiers they had killed belonged to many different regiments:

We have seen their cap and collar badges. The Notts, the Derbyshires [actually both part of the Sherwood Foresters], the West Kents, the Berks, the Wiltshires, the Royal Irish Rifles, the Dublin Fusiliers, the 4th and 5th Hussars, the 17th Lancers, South Irish Horse, Iniskilling Fusiliers, Liverpool Rifles, and several others, so we thought there could not be many more left.

The reasoning was attractive, if flawed.

In fact, the main concentration of troops was employed from Tuesday onwards north of the river, establishing the cordon from Kingsbridge to Amiens Street Station and the North Wall. The outer cordon around the North Circular Road was completed by Tuesday evening. The only resistance was met at the Cabra Road railway bridge, and quite swiftly dispersed. Indeed one military train was sent early on Tuesday by the Loopline to the North Wall, ‘passing by Old Cabra Road to Glasnevin, then along by Royal Canal … Clarke’s Bridge at Summerhill, under the Great Northern Railway, without attracting the attention of the Volunteers’.47 The eastern military HQ was set up at Amiens Street Station, barely 800 yards from the GPO. In the process, the Volunteer 2nd Battalion outpost commanded by Frank Henderson came under increasing pressure from these military movements, and during the evening Connolly ordered it to come into the Sackville Street area (where its first experience of action was to be fired on by the trigger-happy garrison of the Imperial Hotel; two men were wounded before Connolly himself ran out into the street to stop the firing).⁴⁸

In the end, as one military historian has stressed, ‘the fact that there was no strong insurgent post in the north-eastern part of the city would have momentous consequences’.⁴⁹ For the time being, however, an intermediate strategic stage remained to be completed, and the military attempt to establish an inner cordon was more dramatically contested. Moving around to the north of the GPO along Parnell Street, troops were quickly in control of Capel Street, but only slowly became aware of the defensive positions of the 1st Battalion. This proved to be the most vital, strategically, of all the republican positions, and in the course of the fighting Ned Daly emerged as perhaps the shrewdest tactician among the rebel commandants.

The 1st Battalion’s outpost at the Mendicity Institute had not, of course, been positioned by Daly, and seems not to have been in contact with him as the British assault intensified on Wednesday. ‘Clearly Heuston regarded his connection with Daly’s battalion as severed and looked to Connolly as his superior officer.’⁵⁰ Connolly sent Heuston a reinforcement of twelve men direct from the GPO on Tuesday – easily the most substantial attempt to redeploy republican forces made anywhere in the course of the battle. Still, it is (as Hayes-McCoy sagely observed) ‘not clear what Connolly hoped ultimately to accomplish at the Institution’.51 He was only loosely in touch with Ceannt’s forces further west; his reference to their occupation of Guinness’s brewery in his famous Friday general order seems to have been a genuine misconception. (Guinness’s had become a key British post.) His grasp of the military advance from the west may have been equally imprecise, and he seems to have been surprised that Heuston managed to hold out until Wednesday. His short stand became one of the scattered mini-epics of Easter week. As the military fire intensified, Heuston believed that some 400 troops were surrounding the Institute, some working their way to within twenty feet of its windows. The messengers he sent to Connolly found that the GPO was already cut off, and with his garrison ‘weary, without food and short of ammunition’ he decided to surrender. As in other posts at the end of the week, this decision was contested by some of his men, and it is possible that he might have fought on. His post was not one that the troops had to capture at any cost, and they never tried a direct assault.

The 1st Battalion positions north of the river remained fairly comfortable until Thursday. Jack Shouldice, in command at Reilly’s, noted that ‘the fighting in the early part of the week mostly consisted of sniping from elevated posts like the top of the Malthouse, the roofs of Reilly’s and adjoining houses’.⁵² Indeed the worst threat they faced was of their own creation. On Wednesday Daly was casting about for ways to strengthen his position. A belated attempt to seize Broadstone Station to the north was abortive, but the near-empty Linenhall Barracks (held by forty unarmed men of the Army Pay Corps) just north of King Street were successfully taken over. So was the nearby police Bridewell. But full occupation was impossible, and ‘to prevent its reoccupation’ Linenhall Barracks was set on fire. (It is not clear if this was Daly’s decision or a spontaneous initiative.) The result was uncomfortably spectacular. ‘During Wednesday night it lighted up the streets with a murky glow’, and it steadily spread into Bolton Street, where ‘large barrels of oil were tossed into the air and exploded, and a cloud of stifling smoke shrouded the district’.⁵³ The brightness of the streets seems to have persuaded Daly to abandon a plan to attack the troops gathering in Capel Street, and the fires were still burning so brightly on Thursday night that Daly was able to convene an open-air meeting of his battalion officers at the junction of Church Street and King Street to discuss their increasing isolation. The military cordon along Capel Street had cut Daly’s force off from the GPO, and he was in effect surrounded. Like the rest of the battalion commanders he had run out of options other than preparing more buildings for defence and strengthening barricades.

The long-awaited attack finally materialized early next morning as one of the improvised British armoured trucks rumbled into Bolton Street to deposit troops of the South Staffordshire regiment near the junction with North King Street. They had a short dash to seize the municipal technical school. The difficulty of attacking an occupied street, with many mutually supporting posts, had led to a primitive technical evolution.

A couple of motor lorries were obtained from Guinness’s brewery; the engines were covered with iron plates, and old boilers were placed on the lorries. The lorries backed up to a house at a street corner. The men from the boilers crashed open the door with crowbars, rushed in and upstairs to the windows, from which they got command of the street.54

The intention was to throw another cordon out along King Street to envelop the Four Courts, where the main positions of the 1st Battalion were thought to be. In fact, King Street was so strongly held that even with the aid of armoured vehicles, progress had to be disputed yard by yard and from house to house in fighting of unprecedented intensity. In the end, the troops could only get forward by using the same methods as the defenders, boring through the inside walls from house to house. In the process, a number of occupants died, and were buried in their own cellars: victims of random gunfire, according to the troops, shot deliberately by the soldiers according to their relatives.⁵⁵

As the positions in King Street became untenable during the day, Daly decided to pull back his headquarters to the Four Courts on Friday evening. He may have left this move dangerously late, since it was by then a daunting task to move his men back down Church Street – a task made more difficult and dangerous by Daly’s own barricades. From this point, things could only get worse. The atmosphere inside the vast building was not cheerful; three days of watching the city burn had a traumatic effect, and at least one member of the garrison went mad and had to be handcuffed to a bed.56 Daly was effectively cut off from his men who held out in the shrinking King Street battleground. Reilly’s, its garrison reduced to seven or eight ‘weariedout and almost stupefied’ men, was evacuated early on Saturday morning, and ‘the whole of the fighting became concentrated along fifty yards of Upper Church Street’.⁵⁷

The killing of civilians in North King Street was perhaps inevitable in fighting of such claustrophobic intensity. The incoming British commander-in-chief, General Sir John Maxwell, had some justification for his later assertion that ‘the number of such incidents is less than I expected, considering the magnitude of the task’.⁵⁸ But it seems impossible that the troops were unaffected by their original orders, and he himself stoked up the atmosphere of retribution soon after his arrival in Dublin on Friday. This may, indeed, have been his principal contribution, since he arrived too late to influence the course of the fighting, and in any case General Lowe was specifically left in operational control after Maxwell’s arrival.⁵⁹ Maxwell’s appointment was above all a loud announcement of the government’s attitude to the sup pression of the rebellion. Ireland certainly needed a formal commander-in-chief – Friend had been arguing this for a long time – and Friend had probably ruled himself out by his unfortunately timed absence. But it was a significant step from this to the appointment of a military governor. This was clearly intended as a signal that the most resolute steps would be taken, though it also signalled the eclipse of civil government and ‘politics’ generally.

Much would hinge on the quality of the officer chosen for this highly charged role, and the choice was constricted by the demands of the ‘real’ war on the Western Front and in the Middle East. The first general considered, for example, was Sir Ian Hamilton, tainted by the failure of the Gallipoli operation. He was ruled out (regrettably, since he was notably intelligent – maybe too intelligent to be a field commander) because the Prime Minister thought that damaging Irish memories of Suvla Bay would be revived. Maxwell was another general in enforced semi-retirement after a period in Egypt, and it seems that his main qualification for the job was his complete lack of any previous contact with Ireland – ‘no past record’, as Asquith characteristically put it. (It is clear, though, that Kitchener thought highly of his efficiency, and possibly also of what his biographer called his ‘insight into and sympathy with racial characteristics’, his ‘strong common sense’, and his ‘imperturbable good humour’.) Maxwell’s orders were to ‘take such measures as may in your opinion be necessary for the prompt suppression of the insurrection’, and his first act was to issue a proclamation asserting that ‘I shall not hesitate to destroy all buildings within any area occupied by rebels.’ Interestingly, this phrase stuck in one officer’s memory as ‘to raze Dublin to the ground’.60

Though one officer with the troops in the western part of the city thought that ‘the rebels were really little other than fugitives even on the 28th April’, the situation was still somewhat uncertain. One of the officers who arrived with Maxwell at the North Wall around 2 a.m. on Friday ‘found Dublin like a “blazing furnace” – the whole of Sackville Street was on fire & the buildings along & at the back of Eden Quay – there was vigorous musketry fire going on on both flanks, fortunately not directed at us!’ He added, ‘it did not look as if the situation was “well in hand”!’⁶¹ There was nobody to meet them, moreover, though eventually Cowan ‘turned up – very uneasy – did not know what to do with us’. After a makeshift night at the Royal Hospital, Maxwell went over to the Headquarters at Parkgate and thence to the Viceregal Lodge where he found Wimborne and Birrell. ‘The former seemed rather disconsolate at having his power taken away’; more surprisingly, the latter seemed ‘quite prepared for vigorous action’. Maxwell’s Deputy Adjutant General, who drafted the proclamation, found ‘no tendency at present to be afraid of strong action’, though he grimly added, ‘I have no doubt it will come when we have shot a few people.’

Maxwell’s crucial operational decision was to refuse any negotiations short of unconditional surrender. This had a vital effect as the army closed with the main republican positions in Sackville Street from Wednesday onwards. Late on Wednesday afternoon the 3rd RIR, which had been brought across from Kingsbridge via Trinity College, was reconnoitring Upper Sackville Street using the first of the improvised armoured trucks. Henry Street, the northernmost rebel position, was swept by fire from the west, and the men on the roof of the GPO came under fire from a machine-gun on the roof of Jervis Street Hospital. From this point movement between the GPO and its outposts became difficult. Connolly had taken considerable trouble in establishing and inspecting these posts, though his exact idea of their role remains unclear. All their garrisons followed the same instructions to fortify windows, make loopholes in external walls, and break communicating holes through the internal walls. When Connolly went over on Wednesday afternoon to inspect the garrison in the block running from Prince’s Street to Abbey Street (including the Metropole Hotel and Eason’s bookshop), under the command of Oscar Traynor, he struggled to get through one of the holes, and grumbled ‘I wouldn’t like to be getting through that hole if the enemy were following me with bayonets.’ Traynor stiffly ‘reminded him that these holes were built according to instructions issued by him in the course of his lectures’.62 Across Sackville Street in the post between North Earl Street and the Imperial Hotel, Captain Brennan-Whitmore (a Wexford IV officer) complained that the ICA men were the worst instructed in loopholing – they had made the outer side of their holes wider than the inner, and had to rebuild them all.⁶³

All accounts testify to the heavy labour involved in the effort to fortify these posts. Different floor levels and wall thicknesses made the job of breaking through arduous and frustrating – ‘really heartbreaking work’, Brennan-Whitmore called it. The garrisons were exhausted and often hungry by the time the artillery bombardment began. This certainly compromised their military effectiveness. For instance, Frank Henderson – who was fortunate enough to have half a dozen skilled builders to cut through the walls of his post in Henry Street – found one of his sentries in the Coliseum early on Thursday morning, ‘standing in the window with his head resting on the outer sill, fast asleep’.⁶⁴ The anticipated infantry assault never materialized. Connolly seems really to have believed that the authorities would rather sacrifice the lives of their soldiers than destroy property – a reading of British culture in which modern socialist thinking was compounded by traditional Irish nationalist assumptions.

As the barrage intensified, the outposts were gradually withdrawn. In the most exposed of them, ‘Kelly’s Fort’ overlooking O’Connell Bridge, the garrison had ‘had plenty of chocolate to eat, but little else’ when firing began on Wednesday. (Not a shot had been fired at them until that morning.) Most of them, like Joe Good, were Londoners from the ‘Kimmage Garrison’, a group the Plunketts had taken under their wing and given facilities at their Kimmage house. (Michael Collins, a Corkman-cum-Londoner who had become Joe Plunkett’s aide-de-camp, called them ‘the refugees’ – i.e. from conscription.) They were armed only with shotguns, and their attempts to reply to the growing crescendo of fire – including ‘what seemed to be a pom-pom’ – were ineffective.65 ‘Also, with every blast from a shell our views were obscured, even from each other, by clouds of dust and falling plaster.’⁶⁶ They had no idea whether the outpost over the road in Hopkins and Hopkins was still there (in fact it was), and Good volunteered to dash back to the GPO for instructions. As a stranger to Dublin, he had only a hazy idea how to get there. In Abbey Street, however, ‘which was – amazingly – deserted’, he got directions at a pub, where ‘there were men still drinking pints’. (They sagely warned him to beware of ‘them milithary in Capel Street’.) When he finally got to the GPO he found the rest of his group already there, only to be told by their commander, George Plunkett, that they should not have evacuated their post. They made an effort to return, but gave up in face of withering fire.

Back inside the GPO, Good found the garrison ‘to my mind unduly optimistic’. They were buoyed up by repeated rumours that provincial Volunteers were coming to relieve the capital. Good, who was ‘desperately hungry, not having had a real meal since Sunday’, found the attitude of Desmond FitzGerald, in charge of rationing supplies, infuriating. Since he ‘only had supplies for ten days or thereabouts’, FitzGerald was very stingy with them.⁶⁷ (He allowed himself, however, to be overruled by one or two officers he respected – notably Michael Collins, ‘the most active and efficient officer in the place’.)⁶⁸ To Good – and, to be fair, to FitzGerald himself, who was sceptical of his leaders’ optimism and acutely aware of his unpopularity – the ten days were a fantasy: ‘I was bemused by the general attitude of security.’ Only the steadily encroaching fires eroded it. Frank Henderson went up on the GPO roof on Thursday evening, after delivering his routine report to Connolly, ‘and found that we were practically surrounded by fires’. Shortly afterwards, even the Henry Street garrison was withdrawn into the GPO. By Thursday night the whole of Sackville Street seemed to be blazing. Everyone who witnessed the growing inferno was awestruck by its terrifying beauty. Returning to duty after tea on Thursday, Dick Humphreys was ‘appalled at the stupendous increase the fire has made. The interior of our room is as bright as day … Reis’s jewellers shop is a mass of leaping scarlet tongues of light … A roaring as of a gigantic waterfall re-echoes from the walls.’69 ‘The roaring of the flames, the noise of breaking glass and collapsing walls was terrific’, Henderson recorded. ‘The flames from the Imperial Hotel and from Hoyte’s drug and oil stores at the corner of Sackville Place were so fierce that they almost touched the walls of the GPO, and we could feel the heat of them.’ The heat was ‘so great that men had to be employed to keep the window fortifications drenched with water to prevent the sandbags and sacks going on fire’.⁷⁰ When an oil-works in Abbey Street caught fire,

a solid sheet of blinding death-white flame rushes hundreds of feet into the air with a thunderous explosion that shakes the walls … Followed by a thunderous bombardment as hundreds of oil drums explode … millions of sparks are floating in an impenetrable mass for hundreds of yards around.

The morning after was more dispiriting, however: ‘all the barbaric splendour that night had lent the scene has faded away, and the pitiless sun illuminates the squalidness and horror of the destruction.’⁷¹

On Friday morning, the women of the Cumann na mBan were ordered out of the GPO. They did not go quietly. In fact Pearse had to quell a near-riot, and looked so nonplussed that Seán MacDermott had to back him up. But the message to the rest of the garrison was unambiguous: the end was near. Nothing was left but an exhausting and increasingly desperate struggle to contain the fire spreading through the building. The GPO was not directly hit by a shell until about noon, and serious fires did not begin until about 3 p.m. But they then spread with overpowering velocity; ‘when one fire was nearly subdued a fresh shell would start another at a different point’, wrote the Headquarters Battalion quartermaster.⁷² Combustible stores and ammunition were taken out into the courtyard. (‘Everyone seems to consider it his duty to give orders at the top of his voice’, Humphreys irritably noted.) Military options had run out. This was dramatically symbolized when Connolly was carried in on Thursday afternoon with wounds in his left arm and left leg. ‘The leg wound is serious as it caused a compound fracture of the shin bone’, Joe Plunkett carefully noted in his field pocket-book.73 All week Connolly had been ubiquitous: inspecting posts and barricades, dictating orders to his imperturbable secretary Winifred Carney (‘calmly click-clacking away, as though accustomed to working in this martial atmosphere all her life’), chivvying the garrisons and leading sorties in person. This recklessness surely reflected the frustration of his expectations about the nature of the battle. His ghastly wound came not from a direct shot but a ricochet, one of the commonest and most disorienting effects of street fighting.

With Connolly crippled and fires spreading down through the GPO itself from the roof, Pearse took the decision to abandon the building. But what was to happen next? Nobody seems to have had any idea (O’Connell’s strictures on preparing a line of retreat had clearly cut no ice here). Eamonn Bulfin thought that ‘nobody seemed to be in charge once we left the GPO; it was every man for himself’.⁷⁴ ‘One wondered at the plans’, Joe Good mused as they stumbled out into Henry Place and O’Rahilly called for ‘twenty men to follow him in a charge with rifles and bayonets’. They were under fire from their own men in a whitewashed house nearby, and ‘who or what he was going to charge was not clear’. Eventually O’Rahilly drummed up some followers and led them across Henry Street into Moore Street. ‘I heard the burst of fire, then the sound of running feet, then the sound of one man’s feet, then silence.’⁷⁵ O’Rahilly, moving spirit of the Volunteers, who had spent the week fretting over his suspicion that the rebel leaders thought he had tried to stop the rebellion to save his own life, and who still ‘could not be satisfied that a real justification existed for leading those young men out to die’, was mortally wounded.⁷⁶ The intermittent narrative of Plunkett’s pencil-written diary petered out in staccato notes.

Signal to Imperial

Cut way to Liffey St

Food to Arnotts

Order to remain all posts unless surrounded

Barricades in front

Henry St

Food77

Next day his pocket-book was found lying in the street by a waiter from the Metropole Hotel.