*
After the battle of Mount Street Bridge, the Sherwood Foresters were replaced by the 2/8th Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment, part of the 176th recently arrived. Their orders were to proceed that afternoon under Colonel Oates to the Royal Hospital, guarding a convoy of ammunition.
They were nearly there, at the Rialto Bridge, when they ran into heavy fire from Kent’s men in Marrowbone Lane Distillery and the South Dublin Union. Not wanting a repeat of the day before, Colonel Maconchy asked Portobello Barracks for help.
Major Vane gathered together fifty men with experience under fire, including six officers. On arrival, he found Oates’s unit was under pressure in front and on both flanks. Taking charge, he advanced with his own men and two companies of the 2/8th.
Fighting was fierce as they entered the South Dublin Union. They broke into the main buildings, running through maternity wards and causing some pregnant women to go into premature labour.
On the ground floor of the Nurses’ Home, half a company of Crown forces clashed with twenty-seven rebels. At point blank range, they fired on each other with rifles and revolvers, and the troops tossed grenades.
As the assault began, Kent gave orders for the sixteen-strong James’s Street garrison to be withdrawn in order to help. Most of his men in the Union were half-dead from lack of sleep. In the din of battle, they thought he meant they were to evacuate their HQ in the Nurses’ Home. The result was, both garrisons started to withdraw at the same time. They met in a ground-floor dormitory between their positions at about 4 p.m.
Fortunately, one man remained in the Nurses’ Home. Cathal Brugha was behind a barricade in the hallway just as British troops entered it via a tunnel. He exchanged fire with them before they tried to flush him out with grenades.
He was hit by five bullets and several large bomb splinters but managed to drag himself through the open door of the kitchen into a small yard at the rear. There he had a view of the back door as well as the door to the kitchen.
He had an automatic pistol fitted with a wooden stock. He sat on the ground, propped himself up against the wall and refused to allow the British to cross the barricade.
The rebels had heard the tremendous barrage and took it for granted that Brugha was dead.
Kent grouped his forty or so men and posted two snipers in the only places where they could see the enemy approaching. Believing that they would soon all be wiped out, he thanked them for their loyalty. They shared their last cigarettes and then recited a decade of the rosary. Now they were prepared for the final British assault.
It did not come. They were trying to work out why not when they heard someone singing:
God save Ireland, say we proudly
God save Ireland, say we all,
Whether on the scaffold high
Or the battlefield we die.
That voice, though weak, was unmistakable: it was Brugha’s.
A scout, sent back to reconnoitre, peeped through the tunnel into the yard. There he was, his gun at the ready, his blood around him in an ever-widening circle. He paused from time to time in his singing to fire another round to warn the British off.
‘Come on out,’ he called pipingly. ‘Let’s see if there’s a British officer to match an officer of the Irish Volunteers!’
The British had already left. Brugha had held the pass for two hours.
The scout went back to tell Kent. For the first and only time, the Commandant showed emotion. He went and knelt speechless beside his comrade whose eyes were clouding over from exhaustion and loss of blood.
Brugha had just enough strength to ask his comrades to join with him in singing before he died ‘God save Ireland’, then, he said, ‘Go back to fighting the British for me.’
Before the song was over, he collapsed. When his comrades cut his clothing away, they found he was wounded in twenty-five places. Some of the bullets had severed arteries. They gave him emergency treatment until they were able to move him to the Union Hospital.
‘It’s obvious,’ Kent sighed, as they retrieved their HQ in the Nurses’ Home, ‘he’s not going to make it.’
It was not obvious to Brugha.
Daly’s men were on the drum beneath the great dome of the Four Courts. They fired on the Crown troops but could not prevent them crossing the river and erecting more barricades in Upper Abbey Street.
That left the GPO even more isolated, especially as the armoured lorries were now transporting men and sandbags for barricades and towing field-guns into position more or less at will.
He sent a message to MacDonagh in Jacob’s, saying that he had food but little ammunition left and a frontal attack was expected soon.
MacDonagh sent fifteen men armed with Howth Mausers on bicycles to try and relieve the pressure at Merrion Square. On the west side of the Green, one of the fifteen, John O’Grady, was hit in the stomach and flew over the handlebars. His comrades picked him up, put him on the saddle and wheeled him back to base.
‘Easy, John,’ someone said, ‘we’ll have you back at HQ in no time.’ But they all knew he was dying.
When this relief effort failed, de Valera discussed with his Vice-Commandant the possibility of retreating to the Dublin mountains. Failing that, they would have to choose where to make their last stand.
The best place seemed to be Guinness’s granary which had its back to the canal and was that much easier to defend.
One very fat old lady had an orange box under one arm and her clothes so weighed down with pickings she could scarcely move. A big bundle kept slipping under her shawl, so she had to stop and hitch it up. Finally, it escaped and numerous cans of fruit went rolling away from her.
‘God and all His holy angels help me,’ she screamed, as black-faced boys, more like little devils, rushed to help themselves.
Mrs Norway saw a woman dropping clothes from an upstairs window when a shot rang out from the direction of Trinity College.
The woman froze before falling head-first to the pavement below.
It caught fire at once. Flames spouted through every window. The noise was deafening. Glass shattered in the heat, beams crashed down, walls rumbled and collapsed. The five rebels inside had no choice but to leave and cross the boulevard to the Post Office.
In the red air, they ran like bats out of hell across the broad stretch of O’Connell Street with machine-guns threshing away at them from every tall building around.
Four made it, one fell.
The rebels were all praying for his soul when he jumped to his feet and sped on to the GPO.
‘Didn’t I slip on pieces of glass?’ he puffed.
At 10, Hoyte’s oil works burst into flame. Soon there was an explosion that rocked the Post Office walls. Hundreds of oil drums rose in the air and rained down fiery emulsion on the street. The air changed from red to an unbearable diamond-white that blistered the eyes. The heat hit the men in the GPO like a whip. The smoke swirling across the road nearly choked them.
Urged on by Clarke and McDermott, they tried to cool everything down with hoses.
Even Joe Plunkett rose from his sickbed, a bizarre figure, with creased uniform, rings on his fingers, a bangle on his wrist, a spur on one boot. Forgetting Paris in 1871, he mumbled, in between coughs, ‘This is the first time a capital city has burned since Moscow in 1814.’
Night turned to day. Buildings over several acres were ablaze. Burning timber crackled before collapsing in huge waterfalls of fire. Flames leaped one hundred feet high and sparks soared like stars shooting up to a pumpkin-coloured moon.
On his Pillar, Nelson surveyed it all serenely, as though he were lit up by a thousand lamps.
Everyone saw the holocaust.
On the top floor of the Post Office, The O’Rahilly said to a youngster, ‘Know why the British are doing this?’
Jimmy O’Byrne replied, ‘So they can get a good pot-shot at us, I suppose.’
‘No. It’s to show us exactly what they think of poor old Ireland.’
In the foyer, even in his pain, Connolly was pleased. This was the guarantee that the Easter Rising would never be forgotten.
The Countess on the roof of the College of Surgeons pinched herself in disbelief. This was not Rome but Dublin burning.
In the Viceregal Lodge, Birrell, seeing the distant orange glow, yielded to despair at this final symbol of the failure of his life’s work.
In the suburbs, as far as the hill of Killiney on Sea nine miles away, people gaped incredulously at the great fire and pointed out to their children, Nelson, whom they had never before seen at night, not even under a full moon.
The GPO outposts were all abandoned, save for the Metropole next door. Daly’s 1st Battalion at the Four Courts, their nearest allies, was still fighting the fire at Linenhall Barracks that rivalled anything in O’Connell Street.
Inside HQ, the fumes were suffocating, mingling with the stench of dead horse flesh to make an odour worse than potato blight. A river of molten glass moved towards them across the street like lava from a volcano.
The sacking on the barricades was beginning to singe; as they hosed it down the water turned to steam.
Pearse ordered all explosives to be taken down to the cellars. ‘Hurry before we are blown sky-high.’
They were sweating, their faces tanned by the heat. Their hair and eyebrows curled up, their eyes were blood-shot and their tongues parched.
Things were so desperate, Pearse ordered a group to try and tunnel under Henry Street. They struggled manfully, only to have to give it up as a lost cause.
Michael Collins felt they were paying the penalty for being holed up without emergency plans.
The leaders conferred and decided they would have to make a break for it next day.
That night, though the big guns were silent, Connolly could not sleep for the pain, the stench, the heat. Once, he peeped over the edge of his bed. Captain Mahoney was lying on a mattress below.
‘Do y’know,’ Connolly said, ‘you’re the best thing we’ve captured this week.’
Pearse asked Jim Ryan for a sleeping draught. ‘I haven’t slept a wink since we came in here.’
Ryan was astonished. They were into their fourth day.
Drugged, Pearse settled down to sleep. He was just dozing off when the fire alarm rang and he was as wide awake as ever. Restless, he rose during the night and looked out of the window. He judged from the slant of the flames that the wind had changed direction. It was blowing from the mountains to the south-east. The immediate danger had passed.
He heard Connolly twisting and turning and occasionally groaning, ‘Oh, God, did ever a man suffer more for his country?’
FRIDAY
At 2 a.m. on Friday, General Sir John Grenfell Maxwell sailed up the Liffey.
The fifty-six-year-old Commander-in-Chief was on deck, peering through tadpole eyes into the chalky distance. Muffled up against the cold of an Irish spring morning, he saw what looked like an entire city ablaze.
On his right was General Hutchinson, his Chief Staff-Officer, and on his left, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, his ADC. They liked working with him; he was relaxed, did not get things out of proportion.
Maxwell did not relish the job. To start with, his wife was about to undergo major surgery. Then he felt he deserved better of petty politicians who seemed bent on humbling him. He had worked wonders, he thought, in Egypt, checking the advance of the Turks. And they loved their ‘Maxaweel’, as they called him, and followed him blindly.
If Kitchener hadn’t picked him personally, he might have turned this job down. But it was his only chance of getting back east, provided he brought the rebellion to a speedy end with a minimum of casualties to his own boys.
He knew Dublin, which made his task easier. Fourteen years before, he had been Chief Staff-Officer to the Duke of Connaught, C-in-C in Ireland. A brief posting, thank an Anglo-Saxon God.
He lit another cigarette from the one in his mouth. He had fought a long, hard campaign against nicotine and been routed. His moustache, teeth, fingers, were yellow, and his eyes were creased perpetually against cigarette smoke. Coughing was almost a full-time occupation and he had to clear his throat whenever he wanted to speak. Still, cigarettes kept him off food. If only they did the same for the drink.
From the North Wall on, he took in the fact that Sackville Street was burning. Not as bad as it looked a few miles out to sea. Still, bad enough.
Bullets were flying. His big nose, which had earned him the nickname of Conky, sniffed the most wonderful smell in all the world: cordite, with the added aroma of yeast from the many breweries of this most liquid of cities.
When he disembarked, three cars whisked him and his staff to his HQ at Kilmainham. Within minutes, they approached the imposing Royal Hospital, temporary billet of over two thousand troops added to the usual hundred or so Irish veterans.
As they went up the drive towards the famous tower, he felt not the slightest pang of nostalgia. It was not in his nature. Besides, he preferred hot sun to belting rain, and browns to greens.
As soon as he was settled in his quarters, he had himself briefed by Friend and Lowe. He was appalled at the mess the politicians had landed the Army in. He could hardly believe reports of the Administration allowing para-military parades with rifles, bayonets and live ammunition.
That the Irish were capable of vile things he did not doubt. His mind went back to 1884 when he was a mere subaltern of twenty-five. In Cairo, it had been his privilege to see General Gordon on his way to meet his destiny in Khartoum. He rememberd those curiously detached eyes and the way he bit on his words like bullets before expelling them. Later, when Lord Wolsely sent Colonel Stewart to rescue Gordon, the entire party was massacred by a Monasir Sheikh. When Wolsely heard, he uttered a lament that Maxwell was never to forget:
‘If only Stewart had died in battle instead of being murdered like an Irish landlord by a cowardly sulking reptile such as this country and Ireland produce in large numbers.’
Maxwell was told he had 12,000 men under his command. He promptly approved Lowe’s strategy of strangling the rebels’ HQ. In fact, the battle was almost over, he saw; this would be a mere mopping up operation, though it might be bloody.
He confirmed Lowe as head of Dublin Command and, within hours, set his personal stamp upon the campaign.
Firstly, he had a Proclamation posted throughout the city. He threatened to destroy all buildings within any area occupied by the rebels. Firmness, yes. Threats, intimidation, no question about it. He did not intend shilly-shallying with the bloody Irish. Rebels, that’s what he was dealing with, not soldiers of a so-called Republic.
Secondly, he ordered a pit to be dug in Arbour Hill Detention Centre, big enough for a hundred corpses. It measured 29 feet by 9 feet. On the edge of the pit was a mound of quicklime. Not one fragment of any so-called patriot’s corpse would remain for veneration.
He knew just enough of Ireland to realize that the body of an Irish felon constituted a danger to the Empire.
Already, The O’Rahilly had sent spare bombs and grenades from the top floors to a place of safety below. Each night, Fitzgerald had pulled his leg about the battle lasting longer than he anticipated, but now the end was undeniably near.
With first light, firing recommenced. Two 18-pounders opened up on the GPO but intermittently, suggesting the artillery had still not solved their problems. Machine-gun fire never stopped.
Connolly insisted on being put on a bed with castors so he could be wheeled to action-stations to encourage the men. Satisfied that they were prepared, he dictated the day’s orders to Winifred Carney who typed them on her battered old typewriter. That done, he tried to read a detective story.
‘A book,’ he said, through gritted teeth, ‘plenty of rest and an insurrection all at the same time. Not bad, eh?’
She would collect Ina and they’d travel to Dublin together.
Unfortunately, the path to Clogher was empty and mountainy; and there were no signposts.
Birrell sat down and wrote to Asquith. All his work for Ireland had been smashed by ‘a supreme act of criminal folly’. The rising, he said, was little more than a street brawl stirred up by a handful of violent men, Connolly’s socialists and hot-heads from the National University which he himself had fathered on the Irish people.
‘Of course, all this shatters me. The Thing that has happened swallows up the things that might have happened had I otherwise acted.’
He suggested that martial law over all Ireland would only increase antagonism towards the military. But he knew his advice was unlikely to be heeded, especially as his other forecasts had turned out so disastrously wrong.
Later, Maxwell interviewed him and Wimborne. His Excellency kept muttering, ‘I did my best to convince them but they paid no heed. They knew best.’
The General judged the one a total incompetent and the other a windbag. He heard them out without listening. Only he, an outsider, a professional soldier, could be objective. At least he could not possibly foul things up as they had done.
He told them he welcomed their co-operation in clearing Sinn Feiners first out of Dublin, then out of the rest of the country which was presently quiet. Meanwhile troops were infiltrating the warren of streets around the GPO and building barricades.
‘I’m going to get them,’ he promised. ‘Every one.’
‘To Soldiers’ was a heady account of the way things were progressing, contrary to all known facts. There were risings in Galway, Wexford, Wicklow, Cork and Kerry. Vague references were thrown in to German allies and the USA straining every nerve to help them.
‘For the first time in 700 years the flag of a free Ireland floats triumphantly in Dublin City.
‘The British army are afraid to storm any positions held by our forces. The slaughter they suffered in the first few days has totally unnerved them.
‘Courage, boys, we are winning, and in the hour of our victory let us not forget the splendid women who have everywhere stood by us and cheered us on. Never had man or woman a grander cause, never was a cause more grandly served.’
His rosy face was aglow and Winifred Carney could hardly see through her tears. She went away to type copies and brought them back for him to sign.
Connolly asked The O’Rahilly to read it to the men in the foyer, which he did in ringing tones.
Pearse was more candid than Connolly in his despatch. He admitted that communications with outlying posts had ceased. Enemy snipers were growing more numerous.
‘I desire now to pay homage to the gallantry of the soldiers of Irish freedom who have during the past four days been writing with fire and steel the most glorious chapter in the later history of Ireland.
‘If I were to mention the names of individuals, my list would be a long one.’
He happened to glance at where Connolly was trying to inspire his men from his bed, and his heart missed a beat.
‘I will name only that of Commandant-General James Connolly, commanding the Dublin Division. He lies wounded but is still the guiding brain of our resistance.
‘I am satisfied that we should have accomplished the task of enthroning, as well as proclaiming the Irish Republic as a Sovereign State, had our arrangements for a simultaneous rising of the whole country, with a combined plan as sound as the Dublin plan has proved to be, been allowed to go through on Easter Sunday.’
He paused, pondering on what might have been. If only MacNeill.… He wanted to be fair to the man who had fostered the Volunteer movement and who would be needed in the years ahead. Besides, the loss of German arms on which the rebellion in the provinces had depended was not MacNeill’s fault.
‘Of the fatal countermanding order which prevented these plans being carried out, I shall not speak further. Both Eoin MacNeill and we have acted in the best interests of Ireland.
‘For my part, as to anything I have done in this, I am not afraid to face the judgement of God, or the judgement of posterity.’
Back home at Drumcondra, Christy told his stepmother he was tired. None of them had slept much since Monday.
‘Go to bed, my dear,’ she said.
After reading for a while, he went to sleep with his right hand outside the sheet. He awoke screaming in pain. His mother rushed in to find a bullet had gone through his wrist. She closed the window and bandaged his wound.
Hearing soldiers outside, his father picked him up and carried him for safety to his own bedroom. He had no sooner laid him on the bed than he felt a bullet graze his cheek. Others followed, hitting Christy several times in the head.
His father, with blood streaming down his cheek, went across to his only son and tenderly picked him up. ‘Christy,’ he moaned. ‘Christy.’
Soldiers burst into the house through doors and windows. They grabbed the still warm lad and tossed him on the floor. Pinioning the father’s arms, they took him to nearby Mountjoy Jail.
Indicating the boy, an irate NCO said to Mrs Whelan, ‘That’s what happens, missis, to bleedin’ snipers.’
The O’Rahilly, still concerned for the prisoners, fed them and removed them to the cellar.
‘I give you my word,’ he told them, ‘you will get out of here with your lives.’
The snipers on the roof were under fire from the Gresham Hotel and several had been hit by shrapnel. The men in outposts which they could no longer hold were retreating to Headquarters.
Pearse and Connolly decided that, apart from a few Red Cross nurses, the twenty girls had to leave.
When they were assembled, Pearse told them:
‘When the history of this week is written, the highest honours will be paid you. You have taken part in the greatest armed attempt at liberating Ireland since 1798. You obeyed the order to come here. Now I ask you to obey a more difficult order.…’
‘No, sir,’ the girls cried.
One said, ‘What was all that stuff about equality?’
Pearse held up his hand for silence. ‘I am not asking you but telling you to leave. It won’t be easy. Some of you may be shot. But you showed your readiness for that when you came here. Now go, and God go with you.’
McDermott went up to Pearse and hissed, ‘It’s a mistake, man. You might be sending them to their deaths.’
Fitzgerald’s voice rose above the girls’ objections. ‘You heard the order,’ and Pearse, firm-lipped, confirmed it.
They finally agreed, believing they might be in the way if the men had to leave the GPO in a hurry.
Winifred Carney told Connolly that she was staying whatever happened.
He grinned. ‘You surprise me.’
With one of them waving aloft a Red Cross flag, the girls left. Everyone remaining, including Julia Grenan and Elizabeth More O’Farrell, held their breath until the firing in the street ceased.
‘Now,’ Fitzgerald said to Louise Gavan Duffy, ‘we shall serve a chicken lunch.’
One of the men turned sharply from the window, where he had just brought down a British sniper.
‘Chicken?’ He was horrified. ‘But ’tis Friday.’
When it was served in the messroom, no one would eat it.
‘Wait’ll we see what Father does,’ whispered young Tommy Murphy.
There was a solemn silence as he put a plate of chicken before Fr O’Flanagan. The priest eyed it keenly for a moment, before spearing a piece with his fork and putting it into his mouth.
There was a tremendous cheer and all the men began to eat.
When Colthurst heard, he conducted a mock trial to scare them.
‘Guilty as charged,’ he said. ‘In this Barracks, we have never had anything to do with that traitor, Skeffington. This time, I’ll be lenient. The sooner you two bitches get out, the better for you. And not one word till you’re outside.’
Their visit, nonetheless, had disturbed him. Something had to be done about this business before it got out of hand.
On the GPO side, the Metropole was now in flames, as was Middle Abbey Street, including the Freeman’s Journal, the offices of the Evening Telegraph and Eason’s.
Howitzers in the Rotunda were finally getting the range of the Post Office. The first incendiary to cause alarm half-penetrated the roof above the portico. Some of the men threw their rifles aside and grabbed extinguishers. Others, kneeling to avoid being shot, formed a chain to provide buckets of water.
More and more incendiary shells rained on the building causing fires everywhere. Hoses were hauled up to the roof but most were old and rotten and some had been pierced by bullets. The top floor and the roof flooded and the sheer weight of water threatened their collapse.
Captain Michael O’Reilly edged his way along the steel struts of the glass dome to direct a hose on to the fire, but water only seemed to feed the flames.
Pearse went up on the roof and twice a bullet missed his head by inches. With him and Plunkett screaming orders ineffectually, The O’Rahilly took over. His main concern was to keep flames away from the ventilation shaft. If he failed, the whoosh of air would drive the fire down the centre of the building to the cellars where explosives were stored.
In the lobby, marksmen, kneeling in a black ooze of water, still manned the windows with plaster from the ceiling falling on their heads. From his bed, Connolly shouted that the British were at last about to make their frontal assault.
McDermott and Clarke helped organize the hoses as men slithered around in the filth.
Jim Ryan and Father O’Flanagan were attending the wounded.
The women who had stayed were told to take refuge in the crypt or at the back of the building in a ferro-concrete room.
The O’Rahilly soon saw it was pointless fighting the fire from above. When he and Michael Collins had cleared the roof and top storey, they made the floors as safe as possible by putting sand at the edges and cracks in the doors and then hosing them down.
In the lobby, The O’Rahilly found total confusion. It took all his voice and moral strength to make the men see that the shaft was more important than any of the small fires that kept breaking out. All hoses were directed up the shaft.
By six thirty, it was plain that the GPO was doomed. Fire had taken a grip in the lift shaft and the draught of its rampant flames sounded like a tornado as it whistled down into the heart of the building.
Still the incendiary shells kept coming.
The O’Rahilly and Liam Cullen had spent time at the rear under the glass roof, playing large hoses. Others had used smaller hoses or formed chains with buckets of water. At best, this was a holding operation.
The O’Rahilly, with frizzled hair and scorched eyebrows, interrupted his work to confer with the other leaders around Connolly’s bed in the hall. All their faces were black as coal miners’. The ceiling was smouldering and fiery fragments kept falling off. Pillars groaned and threatened to collapse.
Short of raising the white flag, which Clarke and McDermott would not hear of, their only chance was to break out. At this ludicrously late hour, men were sent down to the sewers to look for a way out. They returned, fetid and filthy, shaking their heads. They would have to leave by the street.
But where to head for?
On Great Britain Street there was a soap and sweet factory built like a fortress called Williams and Wood. To reach it, though, they would have to break through the British barricades at the end of Moore Street.
The O’Rahilly said, almost casually, ‘Let me know when you want to start and I’ll lead the first wave out of here,’ and went back to fighting the fire.
With sparks flying down the ventilation shaft, the ammunition in the cellar was no longer safe. It had to be brought up and put in the concrete room at the back.
The O’Rahilly asked for twenty volunteers. Under Dermot Lynch, they manhandled the explosives up narrow winding steps lit by naked candles. Sean MacLoughlain had just picked up an armful of bombs when The O’Rahilly lost momentary control of the hose and the youngster was hit full in the chest. Fortunately, he fell on his back, cushioning the explosives on his chest.
By now, nowhere was safe. Not the cellar, and certainly not the hall. The water pressure dipped, the stream got weaker, dribbled and stopped altogether. The O’Rahilly tossed his hose away in disgust.
Most of the men gathered in the large rear sorting-rooms and the covered courtyard whose glass cracked and sent down splinters and molten streams.
The retreat had to be well organized, for there were now 400 men in the GPO. Beams were burning and ceilings collapsing in blinding, choking smoke and showers of sparks. There was the constant zip-zipping of machine-guns and their own abandoned small-arms ammunition was going off like fire-crackers on the upper floors.
McDermott told Jim Ryan and his women assistants to prepare the wounded for transfer to Jervis Street Hospital. Mattresses and blankets would serve as stretchers. Louise Gavan Duffy, who had scarcely been off her feet during the entire week, was put in charge of the women.
Captain Mahoney, who was going with the wounded, said to Connolly, ‘I’ll just prepare you for the journey.’
‘I am not leaving with the wounded, Captain.’
‘If you don’t get hospital treatment soon,’ Mahoney warned, ‘gangrene will set in and you’ll be no damn use to anyone.’
Connolly was not in a listening mood.
Winifred Carney was not leaving her boss and Elizabeth O’Farrell and Julia Grenan were staying with the main party to nurse any fresh casualties in the retreat.
Jim Ryan stood with Father O’Flanagan and the few women auxiliaries next to the stretcher cases, comforting them, offering them cigarettes, readying them to go as soon as Pearse gave the word.
Mrs Hickey, a store-keeper who lived at No 168, had just crossed to the dairy when one of Daly’s men came running.
‘Get off the street.’
She rushed into the nearest house which was opposite her own.
‘Stay here, dear,’ the Corcorans said, ‘till it quietens down.’
Her husband, Tom, was still at home, chatting with a neighbour Pete Connolly, the father of eight. Hickey pointed to a couple of mirrors. ‘Help me shift those, will you?’
Suddenly objects in the houses began to rock and tremble at the tramp of soldiers.
‘Yes, Ma’am,’ he said brokenly, ‘I did see your man in the mortuary and several others.’
‘You’re certain it was—?’
He nodded. ‘I heard him on his soap-box many a time.’
At last Hanna had confirmation that her darling, fearless, talkative man had been silenced for ever. She had walked home, determined to be brave for the boy’s sake, and immersed herself in household chores.
Around 7 p.m., as the maid was getting little Owen into his green pyjamas, a fresh nightmare began. The girl saw soldiers lining up in the street. To protect the boy, she grabbed him, and dashed out the back door. Hanna, realizing soldiers would be out there, too, rushed to a window and screamed, ‘Come back, you’ll both be shot.’
She ran downstairs just as rifle fire shattered the windows. Next moment, soldiers were smashing their way in with rifle butts, forty of them screaming like wild wounded animals.
In command was Colonel Allatt. With him were a junior officer, Lieutenant Brown, and Captain Colthurst.
Some soldiers thundered upstairs and up on to the roof.
Colthurst, commanding a squad with fixed bayonets, stood over Hanna, Owen and the maid, and shouted, ‘Hands up.’
As Owen pressed up against her, Hanna put her arms around him, saying, ‘Don’t worry, my son, these are the defenders of women and children.’
He shook the hands of each. ‘We shall probably never meet again. Goodbye and good luck.’
He gave their leader, Lieutenant Chalmers, a big white flag.
From the Henry Street exit, they made their way to Moore Lane where they ran into fire from their own Sherwood Foresters at the barricade. One man fell with a bullet in the head, Chalmers was hit in the thigh. A sergeant helped him over a wall and into the safety of a cellar.
The O’Rahilly gathered his advance party of thirty or so men around him. ‘So, boys,’ he said, ‘ ’twill either be a glorious victory or a glorious death.’
Louise Gavan Duffy had piled the food in the centre of the foyer. Men kept taking evasive action from falling timber as they filled their knapsacks with tea, cakes, sugar, hams. There was enough food for a month. Desmond Fitzgerald, having put them on economy rations for days, found this abundance embarrassing.
In the mêlée, two men carrying hair-trigger shot-guns shot themselves in the foot. Fitzgerald cut their shoes off and bandaged their feet and Pearse ordered them to unload.
The O’Rahilly went for a last word with Fitzgerald, who was to stay with the wounded. He was still hurt that comrades like Pearse and Plunkett had not trusted him. Not that he bore them any malice.
‘Goodbye, Desmond. This is the end for certain now.’
‘It seems so, Michael.’
‘I thought we’d only hold out a day. The only thing that grieves me,’ he said, with that ringing laugh of his, ‘is that so many of my lads are good Gaelic speakers.’ He put his haversack on his back. ‘Never mind, when it comes to the end I’ll say, “English-speakers to the fore, Irish-speakers to the rear. Charge!” ’
Fitzgerald knew this was untrue. When the charge came, Michael Joseph O’Rahilly himself would be in front with nothing between him and enemy bullets save the mercy of God.
‘Wouldn’t it be odd,’ was his friend’s parting quip, ‘if I had missed this and then caught my death of cold running for a train?’
Having embraced Fitzgerald, he paused for a last word with Fr O’Flanagan. He went on his knees and, with head bowed, asked for a last absolution and blessing.
He rose, saying, ‘Father, we shall never meet again in this world.’
The rebels remaining prayed frantically as The O’Rahilly took his place at the head of his men at the Henry Street gate.
‘Fix bayonets.’ He took out his Mauser pistol and included everyone in a big round ‘Cheerio’.
Pearse gave him a final meaningful handshake before shouting, ‘Now!’ and The O’Rahilly’s men went out with Sean McDermott roaring them on.
They went from Henry Street up Henry Lane. In Moore Street, they came to their own barricade and gingerly parted it. Directly ahead was the enemy barricade. Though the entire street was eerily silent, they knew the British were peering at them down the barrels of their guns.
The O’Rahilly divided his men into two. He was to head one party up the left side of the street.
After a great gulp of air, ‘This is it, lads,’ and with a yell he led off, running.
In narrow streets devoid of cover, the fire from the British rifles was deafening. Of the thirty rebels, twenty-one fell.
The O’Rahilly was hit in the stomach.
He felt the bullet less as an implosion than as some vital organ exploding in a bloody flux. He dropped to one knee, doubled up in pain.
Comrades had fallen around him. The few who were unhurt joined him. Hugging the side of the street, one hand to his wound, the other grasping his Mauser, he led a second assault.
To draw fire from his men, he went on a zigzag course across the street. He was not hit again until he was near the barricade at the corner of Sackville Place. He barely had strength to pitch himself round the corner and drag himself into a doorway.
He knew he was done for. With an effort, he drew from his breast pocket a note from his son Aodghan. It had a bullet through it. On the back, in the fierce light from the burning GPO, he pencilled a few words with a remarkably steady hand.
He told his wife he had been wounded leading a charge. ‘I got more than one bullet, I think.’ A few words of love. He folded the paper and wrote, ‘Please deliver this to Nancie O’Rahilly, 40 Herbert Park.’
With the last of this strength, he replaced the note in his pocket.
Tom Clarke took Lesley Price by the hand.
‘If you happen to see my wife—’ He blinked. ‘Tell her the men were wonderful to the—’
It took half an hour for Fitzgerald to get the wounded through the walls of intervening houses, across a roof, up a ladder and into the bar of the Coliseum Theatre. Jim Ryan went behind the bar and said, for a joke, ‘Last drinks, gentlemen.’
The priest was impressed that, with oceans of liquor at their disposal, no one touched a drop.
Captain Mahoney was called back to the GPO to fix the cage over Connolly’s leg which someone had tripped over. By then the place was a complete inferno. The two men eyed each other as Connolly squeezed his hand in gratitude.
Mahoney returned to the Coliseum to find the wounded had been laid on a thick-pile carpet. The electricity was off so they had only lamps to see by.
They wanted to run up a Red Cross flag from the pole on the roof but, by the rules of war, they had to get rid of their arms and ammunition first. Fitzgerald and Fr O’Flanagan offered to take them back through the tunnels and dump them.
On the way, they ran into a sea of fire. To avoid being cremated, they climbed down into a yard and up on to the next roof. The priest failed to see an overhead telegraph wire and nearly decapitated himself.
Back in the Coliseum, they hoisted the Red Cross flag. But it was now clear that the wall tunnels had turned into channels of fire. It was only a matter of time before the Coliseum met the fate of the GPO.
They kept quiet about this and persuaded everyone to try and sleep. It was not possible to lower the safety-curtain since it operated electrically, but they all settled down in the plushest seats in the Dress Circle.
It was vital to get some evidence against Skeffy. This house, he was sure, would provide plenty of that.
Hanna, Owen and the maid were taken to a front room where soldiers with fixed bayonets watched over them.
‘If they move,’ Colthurst ordered, ‘shoot them.’
With the key he had taken from Skeffy’s body he unlocked the study. Over the desk was a picture of the Kaiser. Colthurst took it down. A promising start.
He went through Skeffy’s papers. There were masses of articles, manuscripts of plays, innumerable rejection slips from publishers. Also his love-letters to his wife before they were married, tied in blue ribbon.
Hanna felt their whole world was in that study and this monster was taking it apart. She heard him reading aloud from their letters in what sounded an obscene parody of love.
A soldier came down the stairs, triumphantly waving a sheet of paper. It was Owen’s drawing of a Zeppelin pasted on his bedroom wall.
Michael Collins was in charge. He had made up his mind that if he got out of this alive, never again would he be a duck in a British duck-shoot.
Once in the open, they ran single-file. They, too, came under heavy fire in Moore Street. Those who survived fled into alley ways or burst into houses and barricaded themselves in.
The second group followed the same route and met the same fate.
Pearse, like the skipper of a ship, toured the GPO to make sure no one was left behind. He came back, covered with grime, his iodine-coloured eyes swollen with the heat.
With pride, he took a last look round. They had lasted far longer than he had dared to hope.
Connolly was in the final party. It moved him to see one of his stretcher-bearers, a mere lad, shielding him with his body.
As they tried to break into a stable, one man shot himself. Connolly grabbed the rifle from Richard Grogan and said, ‘Help him.’
Inside, they found a family that had been trapped there for the whole week. They were half-crazy with hunger and with fear of the fire that was moving relentlessly in their direction.
‘For God’s sake,’ Connolly yelled, ‘get me out of this hole.’
Elizabeth O’Farrell and Julia Grenan were in McDermott’s group. Some rebels had taken refuge in a house in Henry Place and McDermott yelled for them to move out and Joe Plunkett, waving his sword, cried weakly, ‘Come out, ye cowardly curs!’
With bullets whizzing from every side, they rushed into Moore Lane. Elizabeth stumbled and fell. Sean McGarry rushed out of a house and picked her up and took her into the parlour of Cogan’s on the corner of Henry Lane and Moore Street.
It was mere chance that the Provisional government came together in one spot. They were joined by Jim Ryan who had made his way back from the Coliseum over the rooftops. He had no medicines though several had just been wounded.
Behind Cogan’s was the yard of a small workman’s cottage belonging to the McKane family. The parents and their fourteen children had been holed up for two days without food, saying their rosary. Desperate to get in, a rebel broke the glass panel on the door. As he did so, his gun went off.
Tom McKane, about to open the door, fell, a bawling baby clutched in his arms. The bullet had passed through his shoulder and hit his sixteen-year-old daughter Bridget in the right temple.
The party burst in as Mrs McKane screamed, ‘O God, where’s Daddy?’
Ryan saw that the girl was dead but he might be able to save the father.
He ordered, ‘Get me all the linen you have.’
The wife, in shock, was crying, ‘O me darlin’ man is dying. I must fetch a priest.’
‘He’ll be fine,’ Ryan said, ‘just get me an old sheet for bandages.’
Mrs McKane, wrapping her shawl around her, was soon at the door, with a sheet for a flag.
Someone pleaded, ‘Don’t go, missis, it’s rainin’ bullets out there.’
She took no notice and, remarkably, returned in a few minutes with a Fr McInerney who anointed her husband and several others of the wounded.
Connolly had arrived with his secretary and was being served beef tea. He called out to Mrs McKane, ‘You are a very brave woman, ma’am.’
Elizabeth O’Farrell asked him how he felt.
His gruff reply was, ‘Bad. The soldier who plugged me did a good day’s work for the British.’
On Moore Street, Sean MacLoughlain was now in charge of building a barricade across the street.
George Plunkett heard an Irishman crying out for water in a side street. He zigzagged his way across Moore Lane, only to find the man was in khaki. He lifted him on his shoulder and ran back across the road. The British, realizing this was an act of mercy, held their fire. The wounded man was taken to Cogan’s where he spent the night in rebel company.
The injured were made comfortable on mattresses at the front of the McKane cottage and Elizabeth spent the night nursing them. It was very noisy as Pearse had ordered the able-bodied men to start burrowing from house to house towards the top of Moore Street.
With The O’Rahilly gone, Connolly proposed that MacLoughlain should take over. ‘Let him have my rank.’
Thus the rising ended with a fifteen-year-old as Commandant of the Dublin Division.
Pearse and Willie went upstairs and lay side by side on a table. But sleep still eluded Pearse. After twisting and turning for an hour, he went down to see how the tunnelling was progressing.
On the way, he passed men who were snoring and others who were quietly saying the rosary.
He was mumbling in Irish, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’
In three hours, the soldiers tore the house to bits. They removed books, pictures, toys, linen and household goods. As they opened the drawers upstairs and found Hanna’s underclothes, she could hear them jeering.
One of the soldiers guarding them, muttered in a Belfast accent, ‘I didn’t enlist for this. They’re taking the whole bloomin’ house with them.’
Outside, they commandeered a car and ordered the women in it to take the confiscated goods to the Barracks. They followed at a distance in case of snipers, leaving an armed guard on the house all night.
Colthurst was very pleased with how things had gone.
Back at Portobello, he filed some of Skeffy’s papers which he classified as incriminating and which he booked in as having been found on him when he was captured.
Major Price said, ‘Some of us think it was a good thing Sheehy-Skeffington was put out of the way, anyhow.’
Ina said, ‘We can’t go on tonight. Better wait till the morning, then we’ll head for Dundalk.’
When they tried the doors, they found them all padlocked. Luckily, they were able to force one. It gave access to a passage leading into Prince’s Street from where they got into Middle Abbey Street.
So bright were the flames, British troops saw the Red Cross flag and held their fire. But they suspected a trap. It was five minutes before a Captain Orr called out: ‘Two men advance and be recognized.’
Father O’Flanagan went with Captain Mahoney. Still the troops were not convinced. Both had brogues; they might be rebels in disguise.
The priest said, ‘Please, we are trying to get the wounded to Jervis Street Hospital.’
A monocled Major fetched a couple of medical students from Jervis Street who vouched for Father O’Flanagan. The rebel group was then allowed to proceed to the hospital where nurses and nuns gave them a warm welcome.
Led by Louise Gavan Duffy, the girls were marched to Broadstone Station for questioning. On the way, Louise told them to say they were students from the nursing school; they had been walking down O’Connell Street when they were forced into the Post Office.
‘I believe you,’ the interrogating officer said. ‘Might I suggest you go straight back to school.’
Where was it coming from? Not only from a pub a couple of hundred yards to the west. Every roof, every window seemed to be harbouring a sniper. When they tried to dismantle the barricades they were picked off one by one. Had they been without armoured lorries to drop men off in houses along the street, they would have been massacred. Rebel bullets pinged against the armour-plating of the lorries, deafening the troops inside.
Owing to the incessant firing, Mrs Hickey had not been able to cross the road home. The Corcorans invited her to spend the night with them.
Opposite, her husband, Tom, persuaded Pete Connolly to stay on. Also in the house were the Hickeys’ son, Christy, and Mrs Kate Kelly, their maid. Tom and Christy were to sleep on a mattress on the floor while Kate Kelly took over the bedroom next door.
All that night, while the rebels were tunnelling through the houses in Moore Street, frightened Staffordshires under their small pompous CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Taylor, were doing the same not far away in North King Street.
It had taken them hours to travel a few hundred yards, and at a cost. Before daylight, eleven NCOs and men were dead. Thirty-three men were wounded, including five officers. Of the rest, some went berserk.
For the inhabitants of North King Street, it was to become a night of terror.
SATURDAY
No 172 North King Street was the home of Mick and Sally Hughes. On the top floor lived a blind old man named Davis.
Among the refugees they were hosting were a young couple, John and Nellie Walsh, as well as several women and children. They were all trying to sleep in the ground-floor drawing-room at the rear of the house against a background of street fighting and an armoured car growling nearby.
About 2 a.m., there was a banging on the front door.
Mick Hughes hissed, ‘Don’t open it, Sal, they’ll kill us.’ But the banging got so loud, Sally shrugged and went to unlock it.
Several soldiers burst in, one yelling, ‘Bloody idiot, we were just gonna blow you up.’
Another demanded, ‘Any men in this house?’
Angry and panic-stricken, they searched the place and took away two twenty-year-old men.
In the drawing-room, not one word was spoken. Mick Hughes and John Walsh stood motionless and even the four small children were shocked into silence as the soldiers thrust bayonets into the sofas in the search for arms.
Mick said, ‘I swear to God there’s been no firing from this house.’
‘That so?’ The corporal pointed with a shaky finger to a rip in his hat. ‘Look what a bloody bullet did. Nearly finished me off.’ He turned to his men. ‘Search ’em.’
They went through the men’s pockets. Besides a penknife, Walsh had on him a cylindrical metal case, like a cartridge.
‘Aha,’ the corporal said, ‘what have we here?’
He opened it to find a miniature statue of St Anthony.
From Hughes’s pockets they took two watches, a gold bracelet and some articles belonging to his wife. The soldiers kept them, as well as seven gold rings belonging to Sally which they found in a drawer.
After locking the women and children in the downstairs kitchen, they left young Walsh in the drawing-room while they took Hughes up to the top floor.
Walsh was heard crying out, ‘What are you doing that for? Don’t put that on me,’ as if he were being blindfolded.
Above the drawing-room old Davis had his ear to the floor. He heard Walsh say, in a soft voice, ‘O Nellie, Nellie, jewel.’ Then there was a thud like furniture falling.
Minutes later, a soldier was carried into the house and down to the kitchen.
‘Sergeant Banks,’ an NCO said, ‘he’s copped it.’
Sally Hughes, a kind-hearted soul, did her best for him. ‘Poor man,’ she said over and over.
An Army doctor came and gave him an anaesthetic while the ladies made them tea.
Afterwards, Sally tore down curtains for bandages. ‘There’s sheets upstairs,’ she said. ‘And a nice sofa for the Sergeant. I’ll get them if you like.’
‘Stay where you are, missis,’ the NCO said, ‘we’ll get them ourselves.’
She screamed, ‘Someone’s breaking into the house.’
Tom Hickey got up from his mattress just in time to see the wall cave in and soldiers pushing into the room. Tired and tense, they carried bayonets, crowbars and pickaxes.
One of them yelled, ‘Hands up.’
Tom Hickey, his son, Christy and Pete Connolly raised them high.
A sergeant poked a frenzied-looking head through the hole. His eyes were bloodshot, veins stood out like blue rope on his forehead and neck. ‘How many?’ he asked in a strange, grating voice.
‘Three men, sir.’
‘Keep an eye on ’em till I get back.’
Tom and Pete tried to explain that they had nothing to do with the Volunteers. The soldiers listened with a bored expression on their faces.
First floor up lived an elderly bird-fancier, Michael Smith.
On the second floor, one room was occupied by George Ennis, a fifty-three-year-old carriage maker, and his wife, Kate. An old maiden lady, Anne Fennell, had the next room.
Smith was in his room, the rest were on the ground floor in the back parlour when, at 7 a.m., there was a wallop on the door. Before Noonan could open up, about thirty soldiers burst in, smashing the door and windows, and yelling ‘Hands up.’
Seeing it was a quiet household, the same frenzied Sergeant asked, ‘How many men here?’
When Mrs Ennis told them, a dozen soldiers escorted Miss Fennell upstairs. They searched her room and made sure there was no one else in hiding. They no sooner led her down than they started to shove Ennis and Noonan upstairs.
Mrs Ennis clung fiercely to her husband. ‘I want to go up with my George.’
A soldier pulled her screaming away and pressed his bayonet up to her ear, ‘Shut up!’
‘You wouldn’t kill a woman?’ she gasped.
‘Keep quiet, you bloody bitch. We’re keeping ’em prisoners, that’s all.’
The women were locked in the parlour and warned, ‘Move and you’re dead.’
After the men were bundled upstairs, the women heard soldiers running amok, ripping up beds with their bayonets, knocking over furniture, emptying drawers and cupboards. Noises inside coalesced with noises in the street. Then, as suddenly as they came, the soldiers left.
Mrs Ennis and Miss Fennell looked tearfully at each other. There might be a guard on the door. They sat in dread, not daring to move.
An hour or so later, they jumped at the sound of someone falling down the stairs and crashing into the parlour door with such force that it gave in.
Staggering towards Kate was her husband, George, dripping blood, his eyes rolling. Before he dropped at her feet, she saw the wound.
‘I’m shot, Kate.’
‘Who did it?’
‘Soldiers. Shot me through the heart, as I asked them.’
‘And us?’ Miss Fennell shrieked.
Ennis said, ‘They won’t touch you.’ As they bent over him, he murmured, ‘Someone go for a priest.’
Knowing this was impossible, they knelt and said prayers for the dying.
He whispered, ‘They killed poor Noonan, too. I stayed with him as long as I could.’ With his last breath, George said, ‘Forgive them, Kate.’
The sun shone brightly after a long and weary night. The McKane children had not stopped sobbing over their injured father and their sister lying under a stained sheet in the corner. The wounded were groaning; one of them had a bullet in the lung and was coughing interminably. Without medicines, disinfectant, washing facilities, the place reeked of blood.
After eating, the leaders crawled through tunnels dug in the night to a more central HQ in 16 Moore Street. It was Hanlon’s, a fish-market.
Connolly was carried there in a blanket and made comfortable in a back room with a few more of the injured, including the British soldier picked up the night before. There, the leaders held a council of war, with the three nurses coming in from time to time to assist.
Trapped between the GPO and the cordon in the north, their one hope was to go west and link up with Ned Daly at the Four Courts. For this, they would need to create a diversion.
While Sean MacLoughlain crawled through the various houses asking for twenty volunteers, Pearse went to say thank you to Mrs Cogan. Big in the charity of love, she bore no grudges. Seeing this, Pearse pointed to her eldest son, Tommy. ‘Why not grab a rifle and join us, lad?’
Mrs Cogan’s face clouded over, so that he apologized for his insensitivity. In his mind, he was offering the lad a chance of glory.
MacLoughlain found his volunteers in minutes and drew them up in a yard next to Sackville Place, only yards from the British barricade at the top of Moore Street.
When he and McDermott went to reconnoitre, they saw The O’Rahilly. He was on his back, his brown hair tilted back off his forehead.
With four of his men, he led all the civilians through the hole in the wall. No 169 was a tobacconist’s over which a Mrs Connolly lived and where a Mr and Mrs Carroll and their daughter had a room. These, too, were taken through the next wall to the vacant No 170.
Hickey said to Mrs Carroll, ‘Isn’t it terrible? So often the innocent have to suffer with the guilty.’
Inside the echoing room of the empty house, Kate Kelly, the maid, called out, ‘I hope they’re not going to kill us.’
A soldier laughed roughly, ‘You’re a bally woman, you’re all right.’
The three women were left there while the three men were taken to another room at the back. The women heard Christy pleading, ‘Please don’t kill my da.’
Shots rang out and Kate threw herself on her knees, crying, ‘O, my God!’ and her lips added in swift silent prayer, ‘Mother of God, pray for us sinners.…’
Mr Corcoran peeped round his front door to ask a British NCO if she could. Around the Hickeys’ house, a dozen soldiers were sheltering from fierce gun-fire.
‘You can if you like, missis,’ the NCO said, ‘but there’s a few stiff ’uns lying about.’
This so terrified her, she went back inside the Corcorans’, only glancing through the window now and again, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tom and Christy.
Pearse said, ‘Certainly,’ and knelt beside him.
‘Would you lift me up a little, sir.’
He did so.
The Soldier put his arms around his neck and Pearse held him for a few moments. Then, without a word being said, he gently laid him down again.
When McDermott returned and whispered in Pearse’s ear that The O’Rahilly was dead, he simply nodded.
There was a sudden clatter in the street as horses, released from a burning stable, went charging by.
Minutes later, Pearse saw a publican with his wife and daughter, clutching white flags, flash past the window. Their home had caught fire. From the top of Moore Street, a volley rang out and all three fell dead.
Pearse stood looking vacantly for a full minute, then began to pass the word from house to house: ‘No more firing until further notice.
The Provisional government discussed what to do next.
Tom Clarke was in favour of a fight to the death.
Though Pearse found it attractive, the heart of the President of the Republic was full of compassion for his people; they had suffered more than enough. He turned to MacLoughlain. ‘If your volunteers assault the British barricade, they will all die, right?’
MacLoughlain nodded.
Pearse glanced at the wall where there was a picture of Robert. Emmet standing in the dock. It seemed to give him courage for a painful decision.
Taking a deep breath, he pointed to where the family of three lay dead in the street.
‘For the sake of our fellow citizens and our comrades across this city who are likely to be shot or burned to death, I propose … we surrender.’
Clarke, who had not shed a tear in fifteen years in prison, turned to the wall and his thin shoulders heaved. Winifred Carney and Julia Grenan went to comfort him, but sobbed themselves. He pulled himself together and put his arms around them.
McDermott said to Elizabeth, ‘Get a white flag, please.’
He borrowed a white handkerchief and put it on a stick. Michael O’Reilly opened the door and thrust it outside. A volley caused him to withdraw it. Moments later, he tried again. This time, silence.
Realizing what Elizabeth was being asked to do, Julia started to sob, ‘You’ll be shot, shot.’ Too many had been gunned down already waving white flags.
Pearse rehearsed with Elizabeth his message to the military.
In a last hug, the two young women prayed together, then, taking a deep breath, Elizabeth went through the door Pearse held open for her. The pavement of Moore Street echoed with her brisk, bold step. She held the white flag aloft. It was 12.45 p.m.
In the back room, Connolly stared coldly straight ahead. There were alien tears in McDermott’s eyes. Winifred Carney was weeping and could not stop.
The silence held.
Julia let out a little screech, ‘She’ll be all right.’
Elizabeth was now almost up to the barricade. Without turning her head, she saw at the corner of Sackville Lane The O’Rahilly’s hat and his revolver on the ground.
‘That’s hopeful,’ she thought.
At the barricade, she called out, ‘The Commandant-General of the Irish Republican Army wishes to treat with the Commander of the British Forces in Ireland.’
A Colonel named Hodgson said, ‘How many girls are down there?’
She did not answer.
‘Take my advice, go back and bring the others out at once.’ Then he changed his mind. ‘You’d better wait, I’ll have to report this.’
He deputed an NCO to accompany her to the Parnell Monument. There, Colonel Portal, the area commander, emerged from a house and Elizabeth repeated her message.
‘The Irish Republican Army?’ Portal echoed scornfully. ‘Sinn Feiners, you mean.’
‘They call themselves the Irish Republican Army, sir, and I think it’s a very good name.’
He sniffed. ‘Can Pearse be moved on a stretcher?’
‘Commandant Pearse does not need a stretcher.’
Portal had read a military communique which said Pearse had a fractured thigh and Connolly was dead.
He turned angrily to a junior officer. ‘Take that red cross off her, she’s a spy.’
The officer cut the crosses off Elizabeth’s sleeve and apron. He led her to a branch of the National Bank and searched her. She had on her scissors, sweets, bread, cake. She did not seem a great threat to the Empire.
She was taken to Clarke’s shop, 75A Great Britain Street, and held there for an hour while someone telephoned the Castle and the Castle contacted General Lowe at Trinity.
My darling Grace,
This is just a little note to say I love you and to tell you that I did everything I could to arrange for us to meet and get married but that it was impossible.
Except for that I have no regrets.
Give my love to my people and friends.
Darling, darling child, I wish we were together. Love me always as I love you. For the rest all you do will please me.
I told a few people that I wish you to have everything that belongs to me. This is my last wish so please see to it.
Love XXXX Joe.
In front of his signature, he drew a circle with a tiny Celtic cross inside.
The effort seemed to take a lot out of him. He asked Winifred Carney to look after the letter and give it to Grace.
‘That is, if you are not taken prisoner.’
Lowe apologized to Elizabeth for the bad manners of his subordinates and asked her to repeat the message.
Afterwards, he ordered a cease-fire in the area. He had Colonel Portal put his reply to Pearse in writing and signed it.
A woman has come in and tells me you wish to negotiate with me. I am prepared to receive you in Great Britain Street at the North End of Moore Street provided that you surrender unconditionally.
You will proceed up Moore Street accompanied by the woman who brings you this note, under a white flag.
W. N. C. Lowe, Brigadier-General.
Lowe warned Elizabeth that if there was no reply within half an hour, hostilities would recommence. He drove her to the top of Moore Street.
‘Notice the time, please, it’s important. 2.25 p.m.’
Walking back, she saw to her left, a few yards down Sackville Lane, the body of The O’Rahilly. He lay in a pool of blood, his head on a curbstone, his feet in the doorway of the first house.
White and shaken, she ran to the house, crying, ‘The O’Rahilly, he’s dead.’ She could tell they already knew. Michael Joseph O’Rahilly, the reluctant rebel, was the only one of the top officers to die in the rising. The irony of it made surrender even more unpalatable.
The leaders thanked her, then went into private session. Pearse read out Lowe’s message and they drafted their reply which they asked Elizabeth to take back.
When she reached the top of Moore Lane, not daring to look again at The O’Rahilly’s corpse, General Lowe told her she was lucky not to be shot. She was one minute late.
‘Not by my watch, sir,’ she said coolly.
Lowe read the reply and said, his displeasure showing, ‘This is no use. You’ll have to go back with my ultimatum.’
He wrote Pearse a second note:
I have received your letter. Nothing can be considered until you surrender unconditionally.
On your surrender to me I will take steps to give everyone acting under your orders sufficient time to surrender before I recommence hostilities which I have temporarily suspended. You will carry out instructions contained in my last letter as regards approaching me.
He told Elizabeth he would allow another half an hour, not one minute longer.
This time, they synchronized their watches.
Pearse looked down on Elizabeth. ‘Shall we go?’
She was shocked to see a man lying on the floor near the fireplace. She only had time to notice his socks when a soldier appeared.
‘What are you up to, missis?’
‘Who is it?’ she gasped.
‘Nothing for you to worry about. A Sinn Feiner from round about. Now down to your kitchen.’
Struggling to stop herself from shaking, she went back and said to Nellie Walsh, as calmly as she could, ‘What colour socks is your husband wearing, my dear?’
Nellie blinked. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Nothing.’
Both sat down, terrified.
When another soldier appeared, Nellie asked, politely, ‘Where is my husband, please?’
‘Don’t worry, girl. They’ve both been taken to the Detention Barracks.’
He was a strange figure in his greatcoat and slouch hat with its leather strap under his chin. By his own mystical criterion, this was not defeat but victory. He handed Lowe his sword, romantically, on upturned palms. When an NCO searched him, he drew gingerly out of Pearse’s pocket a round object. It turned out to be an onion.
Lowe said, ‘I would like this young lady to stay in military custody so she can take the surrender notice to other outposts. Then, of course, she’ll be set free.’
Pearse said to Elizabeth, ‘Do you agree?’
‘Whatever you wish, sir.’
He shook her by the hand. ‘I do wish it. Thank you.’
She was put under the protection of a Lieutenant Royall and was taken for tea to Tom Clarke’s shop.
Pearse stepped in a car with Lowe’s tall, handsome son, John, and Captain Wheeler to be driven for a meeting with General Maxwell.
The General hardly gave him a glance. Wheeler whispered something in Maxwell’s ear.
‘What’s that you say? An onion?’
The sheer banality of this so-called rebel appalled him. If this object, this thing were not giving himself a mock-post in a mock-Republic, he would probably have made a tolerable errand-boy. He had seen dozens like him in Egypt and the Sudan, selling matches in bazaars.
Pearse, on the other hand, took Maxwell very seriously. He sensed that he would enable him to achieve his destiny.
‘Sit down.’
The scorn was evident in the soldier’s voice.
‘Now pick up that pen and write an order telling your men to lay down their arms. Nothing fancy, mind.’
Pearse wrote: ‘In order to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens, and in the hope of saving the lives of our followers now surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered—’
‘I don’t want a treatise,’ Maxwell interrupted him.
Pearse continued calmly: ‘– the members of the Provisional government present at HQ have agreed to an unconditional surrender, and the Commandants of the various districts in the City and the Country will order their commands to lay down arms. P. H. Pearse, 29 April 3.45 p.m, 1916.’
Maxwell grabbed the sheet of paper and read it through a smokescreen of his cigarette. He sniffed at the pretentiousness of phrases like ‘Provisional government’ – fractious bloody tribesmen always used that sort of pompous bloody language – then, without a word, left the room.
McDermott and Clarke felt that Connolly needed medical treatment as soon as possible. There was something ironic in their choice of hospital.
Seamus Devoy was sent under a white flag to the Moore Street barricade. ‘James Connolly, Commandant-General of the Dublin Division,’ he said, ‘is badly wounded and we intend taking him to Dublin Castle.’
The officer in charge was too shaken to reply.
‘Please open your barricade to let us through.’
The gaping officer nodded.
Six stretcher-bearers under Captain Dermot Lynch picked Connolly up.
As he said goodbye to each of the other leaders, he was thinking they weren’t such a bad lot, after all. He had a special word with his secretary. ‘For everything, Winnie, thank you.’
The bearers halted first outside Clarke’s shop where Connolly spoke briefly with General Lowe. They then back-tracked, with an escort of thirty armed guards, to Capel Street, walked south to the Liffey, crossed the Grattan Bridge and up Parliament Street.
Straight ahead loomed Dublin Castle.
Mrs Norway was delighted; yet, with the tension lifted, she grieved more than ever for her Freddie. In the first quiet moment in days she found a case containing his letters. In it, there were three tiny hankies embroidered with her name. One of the last things he did was to send them from Armentières.
She wept uncontrollably.
Nathan’s next call was to his lodge to bid Estelle goodbye. ‘I am so sorry it had to end like this.’
‘Don’t say that. We enjoyed the excitement, really.’
He asked if she had slept the night before.
‘Not a wink. The noise of guns was frightful.’
‘Anyway, Estelle, the good news is, the rebels have surrendered.’
‘Wonderful! Just as we’re leaving.’
‘Nothing for it, then, except to wish you bon voyage.’
Estelle and the three girls piled into a car. There was chaos on the streets. Never had she seen so many mules, some of them pulling gun-carriages. They had two blow-outs on the way caused by shrapnel and broken glass. But they made it in time to the mail boat, then home to England and sanity.
He signed copies of the surrender as they were typed.
Captain Wheeler had been in charge of Pearse for only fifteen minutes when Lowe phoned, asking him to bring copies to Great Britain Street at once.
‘I want you and Miss O’Farrell to take one to the rebel HQ in Moore Street. After that, maybe you’d go to the Castle and get Connolly’s endorsement for his crowd in the Green.’
He was set down on the spot where PC O’Brien had been shot, three Republicans standing to attention on each side of him, with an outer circle of armed soldiers.
For ten minutes, the authorities discussed what to do with the prisoner. It was vital to put him where he could not be snatched by rebels still at large. They settled on a room in the Officers’ Quarters which Royalty had once used as a bedchamber.
‘May I remind you,’ Clarke said, gently but firmly, ‘that I spent the best years of my life battling for Irish freedom. If I’m satisfied, why aren’t you?’
Sean McDermott backed him up. ‘We surrendered not to save ourselves but other people and the city from destruction.’
Someone snapped, ‘We would’ve fought on.’
‘Of course you would,’ McDermott said. ‘I’m proud of you. You put up a great fight. It’s not your fault that we haven’t yet won a Republic. The other side had more men, better arms, that’s all.’ There was pride in his voice as he added, ‘Believe me, your work will tell some day. There will come a time when Irish people will look back on this Easter week and you, each one of you will be honoured.’
They knelt in the back room, rosaries in their left hands, rifles in their right. Tears ran down many a cheek and the responses came out chokingly.
*
Captain Wheeler was conducted up the Grand Staircase to Connolly’s bedroom. It was a State Room, rectangular in shape, with two large windows and beautiful decor, complete with chandelier.
A white-haired surgeon named Tobin was looking after the patient. Wheeler waited by the bed until his wounds were dressed. Then: ‘If you feel up to it, perhaps you would be good enough to read this.’
Connolly read Pearse’s order of surrender and said he would to add his own coda. He dictated it: ‘I agree to these conditions for the men under my own command in the Moore Street district and for the men in the Stephen’s Green Command.’
Shakily he added an ‘only’ to make it read ‘for the men only under my command,’ and signed his name and the date: ‘April 29/16.’
Daly went to the Four Courts to tell his men, with tears in his eyes, of the Provisional government’s decision.
‘Fight it out,’ his men cried.
‘I’d like to,’ he said, ‘but a soldier must obey.’
Reflecting on the rising, he said, ‘The horrible thing proves how deep in Irish hearts lies this passion for insurrection.’
Finally: ‘Let me know what you expect me to do.’
The women now took courage and went upstairs together. Noonan was in a room on the second floor. He had been shot through the head and bayoneted.
*
Daly marched his men to St John’s Convent in North Brunswick Street. The nuns who had stood every morning on the front lawn and prayed with shining faces for their safe return now filed out to say goodbye.
Sister Agnes called out to Sean Cody, ‘Don’t forget the Germans are on the Naas Road.’
Sean whipped out his revolver and handed it to Sister Louise Moore. ‘Keep that for me, Sister.’
As it disappeared up her broad sleeves, Sister Louise said, ‘Even my guardian angel won’t know it’s there.’
The rest handed their revolvers over to Sisters Brigid, Patrick, Monica, Agnes and even Reverend Mother. As they left, never to return, the Sisters went on their knees to say the rosary.
Lowe was waiting in O’Connell Street when the 1st Battalion arrived.
‘Tell them,’ he said to Wheeler, ‘to lay down their arms.’
Wheeler and Daly smartly saluted each other.
‘God,’ groaned Lowe. ‘Saluting a rebel!’
He asked officers who had accompanied the rebels on the last stage of their march: ‘Who’s in charge of these men?’
Daly, fearless of the implications, said, ‘I am.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ Clarke said. ‘I’ll let the British do me the honour.’
They had delayed, savouring freedom for as long as possible, but now it was the HQ’s turn to surrender.
Sean MacLoughlain, flanked by Willie Pearse and Joe Plunkett, led the way under a cloudless sky, all three waving white flags like symbols of victory. Four abreast the men marched, proudly, arms at the slope.
Down shuttered streets where the dead still lay in doorways they came to Nelson’s Pillar. Above the shell of the GPO they saw their flag. The letters ‘Irish Republic’ were scorched and the pole it hung from was at a crazy angle but it was still flying.
On the other side of the street were their comrades from the Four Courts. They crossed to the Gresham Hotel where the military were waiting and laid down arms. Some Tommies, disciplined until the rebels disarmed, started calling them ‘vicious Irish bastards’.
In contrast, as they were giving their names and addresses, a British officer walked behind them, saying quietly, ‘If you have on you any incriminating papers, tear them up quick and drop ’em in the gutter behind you.’
Among the four hundred who surrendered were Winifred Carney and Julia Grenan. All were marched to the grassy forecourt of the Rotunda Hospital.
Joe Plunkett was almost out on his feet. A Tommy shoved and cursed him, threatening to bayonet him if he didn’t get a move on. An NCO took the private by the arm. ‘Do your duty, soldier, and leave it at that.’
One lad, Sean Harling, had been selling race cards for the Fairyhouse Races outside Broadstone Station when the rising started. This had been the grandest week of his life.
A British officer clipped him on the ear and grunted, ‘Get the hell out of here, lad.’
‘Wha’s a-marrer,’ complained Sean, ‘amn’t I a prisoner?’
He was given a friendly push, ‘Go home to your mommy.’
At the Rotunda, Captain Lee Wilson noticed McDermott leaning on his stick.
‘So,’ he said, with a sneer, ‘you have cripples in your army.’
McDermott replied, with dignity, ‘You have your place, sir, and I mine. Hadn’t you better mind your place?’
At which the Captain, young, thin-faced, caddish-looking, came out with a string of obscenities. He ordered machine-guns to be trained on the prisoners.
‘If any of this bunch move, shoot ’em like the rats they are.’
‘Tell me, General,’ he asked, in a comfortable room off the Long Gallery, ‘how are things over there?’
‘Going very well, Your Majesty.’
The King was concerned about his Irish subjects. ‘Tell me more.’
Sir John drew out a piece of paper.
‘A wire just received from General Maxwell, sir. He says, “There are strong indications of a collapse of the whole rebellion.” ’
‘Thank God,’ the King said. ‘I was hoping it was a storm in a teacup.’
At which she and Nellie Walsh burst into tears.
As he went upstairs with the basin, he called over his shoulder to a drunken sentry in the hallway, ‘If there’s any more bawling down there, blow their bloody brains out.’
The women waited in silent agony for half an hour until he came down, carrying a candle. He pointed to Mrs Hughes. ‘You can come up.’
Sally followed him. In spite of her resolve, she shrieked when she saw her husband lying dead on the floor, riddled with bullets. His cap was over his face, his clothes were drenched with blood and water.
During the night, Captain Wilson came on duty from Mooney’s pub where he had been drinking steadily. Bad before, he now seemed a demon in human form.
‘What shall we do with these Sinn Feiners, boys?’ His drunken drawl echoed eerily in the deserted street. ‘Shoot the swine?’
‘Aye, sir,’ his men replied, without enthusiasm.
He went right up to one prisoner after another, holding a match to his face. ‘Anyone care to see the animals?’
He was particularly hard on Tom Clarke. ‘This old bastard, boys, is the Commander-in-Chief, would you believe! Keeps a tobacco shop across the street. A fine fucking general for a fine fucking army.’
He grabbed Sean McDermott’s walking-stick and snapped it in half. ‘Bloody cripple. Can’t even walk straight let alone shoot straight.’
Seeing the red cross on Jim Ryan’s sleeve, he hacked it off with a bayonet and stamped on it. ‘I don’t recognize you as Red Cross.’
Having victimized individuals, he now turned to them as a group. ‘No smoking, you bastards, and lie down. If you want to shit, do it in your pants like you’ve been doing all week.’
Seeing he was looking for a pretext to shoot them, McDermott passed the word that they were to keep cool.
For some, that was the most wretched night of their lives. They were forced to relieve themselves where they lay, even in the presence of the opposite sex.
Some huddled up to keep warm. During the night, Jim Ryan woke up to find his head resting on Clarke’s shoulder.
Clarke whispered, ‘You awake, young feller?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good, I just wanna turn over.’
Ryan was touched by his consideration.
Mallin had checked that the Republican flag was still flying over Jacob’s. What, then, was going on? He discussed with the Countess the possibility of breaking out if they were cornered. His preference had always been for fighting a guerilla war in the Dublin mountains.
The living prayed over the dead. The Countess, being a Protestant, was not able to join in. But that night she experienced a somersault quite as complete and unexpected as Birrell’s when he heard of the rising.
Religion had so far meant little to her. In her world, it was the preserve of a rich and exclusive minority. At this, the most critical moment of her life, she felt confronted by the ancient faith of Ireland, the faith that people of her breed had tried for centuries by cruel means to eliminate.
She resolved that if God spared her, just as she had shared her comrades’ political and social ambitions, she would one day share their faith.
Her family would not approve, but when had they liked anything she did?
Thirty miles along the main Belfast-Dublin road, they stopped for the night in a field at Balbriggan within sound of the sea. They took off their shoes and stockings and pushed their blistered feet into the soft smooth earth.
Their pleasure did not last. Mists came in off the sea. It turned cold, then very cold. They gathered their clothes about them, trying to sleep, but they did not succeed.
SUNDAY
In the early hours, Frank Henderson, a young prisoner on the Rotunda lawn, knelt to relieve himself. Captain Lee Wilson noticed. He snatched a rifle from a Tommy and yelling, ‘Filthy bastard,’ struck him with the butt, knocking him unconscious.
With first light, the DMP and the G-men, the political division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, woke the prisoners and armed soldiers circled them. It was time to identify the chief troubler-makers. Among the first to be hauled out were Clarke, McDermott and Ned Daly. They took a while to straighten up after that long cold night in the open.
They were marched round the corner to the Rotunda Rink and strip-searched. Clarke had damaged his elbow in the escape from the GPO. When he did not remove his jacket quickly enough, Wilson cruelly straightened his arm and tugged the jacket off.
The prisoners were still refused permission to go to the toilet.
No sooner was she dressed than Captain Wheeler said he would like her to take orders to other commandants.
This was to prove the most dangerous day of her life.
Mrs Hickey looked out of the Corcorans’ where she had spent the last day and a half. Everything seemed so normal. Church bells were ringing across the city; parishioners were coming back from first Mass. Of everyone passing the door she asked, with rising dread, ‘Has anyone seen my man?’ and they shook their heads.
She left the house and started scouring the city for her husband and son.
‘The soldiers,’ she told friends and neighbours, ‘must have taken them somewhere.’
Wheeler told Elizabeth he would like her to deliver the surrender order first to the College of Surgeons. He drove her to Grafton Street. Some shops had been looted, a few gutted.
The car was waved through military check-points until it halted halfway. Wheeler gave her a copy of the surrender and Connolly’s addition. ‘Good luck, miss.’
Holding a white flag, she turned right into a silent Green. She was let into the College by a side entrance and taken to see the Countess.
‘Commandant Mallin is asleep,’ she said. ‘Can I help?’
‘It’s surrender,’ Elizabeth said.
The Countess, feeling a strange compulsion to sign herself like a Catholic, immediately aroused Mallin. Elizabeth, having handed him the orders, returned to the car.
‘Well,’ Wheeler said, ‘what did they say?’
‘I saw Commandant Mallin and he didn’t say anything.’
Wheeler said irritably, ‘You should have brought a yes or a no.’
The car took them back to Trinity where Wheeler phoned Lowe. He returned to say he would like her to take the order of surrender next to Boland’s Mill.
They had to make a detour, ending up at Butt Bridge. Wheeler was apologetic. ‘Sorry I can’t get you any nearer. When you’re back, perhaps you’d join me in Merrion Square.’
In place after place, Elizabeth asked the military if they knew where the Volunteers were. They shook their heads and warned her there was a lot of sniping in the area. She risked her life several times as she tried this street or barricade, then the next. Finally, someone told her where de Valera was.
Her heart was already thumping as she crossed the Grand Canal Street Bridge when a man within feet of her was shot. She called pleadingly to people in nearby houses and they carried him to Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital.
At the Dispensary, a guard sent her round the back where she was lifted in through a window into a small room. The Commandant, long, lean, smooth-shaven for the first time that week, was ready to drop. She handed him Pearse’s message.
De Valera stretched his long neck like an angry goose. This was a trick, surely. He had just made his troops clean their weapons and have target practice. He said, in his usual dry way, ‘I’m sorry, miss. I can only lay down my arms on the orders of my immediate superior, Brigadier MacDonagh.’
When Elizabeth left, de Valera talked it over with his second in command, Joseph O’Connor. It did not take him long to grasp they really had no choice. He took Cadet Mackay with him and crossed the road to Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital to negotiate with the British. On the way, he handed Mackay his Browning automatic.
‘I’d be grateful to you if you would give this to my eldest boy, Vivion, to remind him of his father.’
They had heard rumours of surrender and of a truce in their area. There were still rebels around who would not give in unless they actually saw Pearse’s order. The General assured them it was genuine, all right, though, for the moment, he was out of copies.
‘But,’ he said, ‘James Connolly is a prisoner here. Care to have a word with him?’
Neither priest had met Connolly before. They felt at once that they were in the presence of tremendous goodness. He confirmed he had added his signature to Pearse’s.
He was in such pain, they did not stay long.
‘Satisfied, Fathers?’ Lowe said. ‘Or perhaps you’d also like to see Pearse in Arbour Hill.’
Once they had Pearse’s word as well, Father Augustine told Lowe, ‘We’ll do all we can to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.’
He thanked them, gave them a freshly typed copy of Pearse’s surrender and put a chauffeur-driven car at their disposal.
‘I understand, miss. Would you mind, then, going to see MacDonagh at Jacob’s?’
He stopped the car in Bride Street and wished her luck as once again she walked alone through the firing line. At Jacob’s, she hammered on the gate. A guard blindfolded her and led her for what seemed like ages until she heard MacDonagh say: ‘Take it off.’
Like de Valera, MacDonagh and MacBride greeted the news with scepticism.
‘Why should we surrender?’ MacDonagh asked. ‘We haven’t once been attacked.’
Within minutes, Fathers Augustine and Aloysius arrived. MacDonagh took them aside for a quiet word. How, he asked, could he be sure the surrender was not made under duress? With Pearse and Connolly arrested, he was in charge and, in his view, Jacob’s could hold out for a considerable time. He had heard there was soon to be an international peace conference and the British were keen for them to fold so they would have no case.
‘If anyone is going to negotiate with the British, Fathers,’ he concluded, ‘it has to be me. And I will only deal with General Lowe himself.’
The priests drove back to the Castle where Lowe consulted Maxwell by phone before telling them, ‘I’m prepared to meet him at the north-east corner of St Patrick’s Park at midday.’
He wrote out a safe conduct pass for MacDonagh so that if nothing came of their discussions, he would be free to return to his Headquarters.
Joe Plunkett was close to collapse. McDermott, without his stick, could not keep up, and a soldier was detailed to go with him at his pace. He took forty-five minutes longer than the rest to cover the two miles.
On the way, crowds came out of the slums around Christchurch Cathedral. The rebels had not expected a brass band, but had hoped for a certain respect. But these rude gestures, this hatred as though they had turned bread into stones, this blizzard of abuse! Dublin was well and truly Mitchel’s city of bellowing slaves. They came out to pelt them with filth and rotten vegetables. From upper rooms, some contributed the contents of their chamber pots.
The crowds were most hostile in Thomas Street where Robert Emmet had been executed. ‘Death,’ they yelled, ‘to the bloody Shinners.’
The rebels, marching now like old men into a wind, began to suspect that Captain Wilson had echoed the general feeling.
The people disowned them. The rising had failed utterly.
It took only ten minutes for Lowe to convince MacDonagh that the surrender was unforced. Too many had died already and the city had suffered enough.
They agreed on an armistice until 3 p.m. when MacDonagh said he hoped that his men and Kent’s would give themselves up together.
Lowe offered him the use of his car. MacDonagh beckoned to the priests and they went back with him to Jacob’s. There, Father Aloysius stayed in the car. The driver was so nervous at being in an area controlled by rebels, the friar made him a white flag out of a broom handle and a baker’s apron.
Father Augustine was by MacDonagh’s side as he addressed his men. He spoke calmly until he came to the word, ‘Surrender’, then he broke down.
‘I have to tell you,’ he said, when he recovered, ‘that Father Augustine here advises me there is no other way.’
To the priest’s astonishment, he added, ‘And now Father will say a few words to you.’
The big, bearded Capuchin prayed for divine assistance. His first words proved whose side he was on. ‘Everywhere, our men fought a brave fight.’ His powerful voice filled the building. ‘According to Commandant Pearse, our first duty is to save civilian lives. As good soldiers, you will obey your Commander-in-Chief and lay down your arms.’
‘But they’ll shoot us, Father,’ cried one of the lads.
‘You’re wrong, my son. Nothing of the kind.’
After answering their fears for several minutes, he promised to return before they gave themselves up.
‘Meanwhile, my sons, go on with your prayers.’
In the gymnasium, the chief suspects were scrutinized by the G-men. They picked out the ring-leaders with, ‘Ah, delighted to see you. Won’t you come out here and sit with your friends along this wall?’
After that, forty were packed in one big room and given a dustbin for a lavatory. This raised a hollow cheer. When they had used it, it was removed, emptied and returned full of water. They gladly drank it.
Plunkett lay on the floor in a corner, attended by his brothers, George and John. On Tom Clarke’s face, like frozen lightning, was that same suspicion of a smile; he was well satisfied with himself and the world.
When McDermott finally arrived and saw the appalling conditions, he banged furiously on the door until it was opened. ‘Get rid of this cess bucket,’ he roared, ‘and bring these men clean water.’
The surprising thing was, the soldiers did as they were told.
They had caught rumours in flight, wild talk about the surrender of some commands. They themselves had not yielded an inch. Yesterday had been so quiet they had been able to get vast stores of food from Jacob’s. The only noise in the night was the occasional rifle barking like a dog on a hill farm. Ammunition was plentiful. Mallin had been talking of breaking out into the mountains.
He appeared in the Long Room with the Countess, William Partridge and the other officers. He looked particularly sombre as he sat at the head of a long table. His handsome face was lined, his thick dark hair had lost its lustre, his triangular moustache was whitened by brick dust.
His voice faltered for the first time that week. ‘I have sad news, comrades. Our leaders have decided to … give up.’
Everyone gasped and not a few, leaning on their rifles, murmured, ‘Impossible.’
‘We are … giving up for only one reason. Because of the number of civilians being killed.’
‘It’s a trick,’ someone bellowed. ‘We’re in no danger.’
Mallin read them Pearse’s order with Connolly’s confirmation for the Irish Citizen Army.
The Countess said, ‘It’s Connolly’s signature, all right, and I trust him absolutely,’ and Partridge added, ‘The messenger is one of our own.’
Most of the women began to cry. One of the men said, ‘We should fight to the death,’ and another, ‘When could we trust the British, anyway? They’ll shoot the lot of us.’
Mallin raised his hand for silence.
‘We came here as loyal soldiers, comrades, and that is how we shall leave.’ He looked around him slowly. ‘I want to thank you all. I did not think any group of men and women could be so loyal as you have been this week. It has been such a great honour to lead you that … that—’
He bowed his head over the table.
After a moment: ‘Some of you with family commitments can slip away. We won’t think the worse of you for that.’
A few took the hint and left.
The rest yelled back, ‘We’ve worked and fought together, if it comes to it we’ll die together.’
‘That won’t be necessary, I’m sure,’ Mallin said. ‘As for me, the worst that can happen is to be shot by the British. I expected that all along. I only hope I go to meet it as an Irishman should.’
He went up to the roof and lowered the tricolour. From a British outpost, there was a single rifle shot, the signal that the College had surrendered. It was 2 p.m.
They crossed Mount Street Bridge where so many soldiers had been gunned down by his men, along Northumberland Road where a handful of rebels had for hours held a whole army at bay.
It hurt de Valera to see women offering British troops tea and sandwiches. Did they not realize that Ireland had as much right to freedom as Belgium?
He called out, in a tired, croaky voice, ‘If only you had come out with knives and forks.’
At the Royal Dublin Society, his 117 men were herded into horse-boxes. He himself was treated as an officer and locked in the Weights and Measures Office at the Town Hall.
Captain Wheeler said, ‘Tell the United Services Club to hold their fire while I accept the surrender.’
Mallin and the Countess came out of the side door of the College and saluted. He had no gun, only a walking-stick which he gave up. She handed over her automatic.
‘Have your men lay down their arms inside,’ Wheeler said, ‘then form up out here. How many are you, by the way?’
Mallin said, ‘Apart from us two, 109 men and 10 women.’
Wheeler inspected the building and said, ‘Everything seems to be in order.’ He bowed to the Countess, who was a distant relative of his. ‘If you’d care to travel in my car, ma’am?’
‘No offence, old feller,’ she said, ‘but I much prefer to tag along with my own.’
Under heavy guard, the Citizen Army marched down Grafton Street to Trinity. An elderly College servant came out and shrieked, ‘Shoot every one of the bastards.’
The glimpse they had of O’Connell Street amazed them. It seemed as if only the Pillar and O’Connell’s monument were standing.
As they wheeled left along Dame Street to the Castle they were in for an even worse surprise. Crowds lined the way, pelting them with everything they could find. They were hungry, they had been without work for a week, some had lost family or friends, many of their houses had been destroyed.
Mallin was in uniform but with a trilby in place of the cap which a bullet had pierced. The Countess was in a slouch hat topped by an ostrich feather, green Irish Citizen Army tunic and riding breeches.
She was mocked unmercifully.
‘Who does she think she is, Joan of Arc?’
‘Is it a man or a woman?’
‘No wonder the rebellion was such a mess when it was run by women in trousers.’
The rebels had never seen such venom. Dubliners hated them far more than they had ever hated the British. They were even waving Union Jacks in their faces. If the soldiers had not kept them at bayonet-point, they would have torn Mallin’s men limb from limb.
The rebels had fought and died for these people but they had not won their hearts.
‘Outside Dublin,’ Father Aloysius said gently, ‘there has hardly been any fighting at all. Some in Galway, I believe, and in Wexford.’
MacDonagh sat back, knowing that all their efforts had been wasted and he himself was doomed.
Near Basin Lane, the car came to a halt at a barricade. They walked from there to the South Dublin Union. A shot rang out, narrowly missing them. The priests dropped to their knees in fright; MacDonagh did not flinch.
A British officer ran up to apologize. ‘The soldier who fired that shot is under arrest.’
‘What shot?’ asked MacDonagh.
He was led down a grim corridor to the third cell on the right. Pearse was lying on a trestle. Beside him was a glass of water and a few biscuits.
Mulcahy saluted and stood to attention. ‘I’ve come about your orders, sir.’
‘All our forces, Mr Mulcahy, must surrender.’
‘Nothing else, sir?’
Pearse sadly shook his head.
Mulcahy tried to say, ‘Beannacht De agat, God bless you,’ but the words died in his throat. He saluted and left.
Later, two Volunteers came from Enniscorthy where they had taken over the town and ambushed the RIC barracks. Pearse wrote a special note of surrender for the Wexford men. As he handed it over, he whispered, ‘Make sure you hide your arms. There will come another time.’
The rest of the Stephen’s Green contingent were transferred to Richmond Barracks where they joined their other comrades.
McDermott greeted Liam O’Briain and, noticing he had brought an old quilt, said, ‘That’d be grand for Joe, he’s in a bad way.’ Sean folded it a few times and placed it under Plunkett’s head as he lay cold and quivering on the bare boards. Major surgery, the week’s rising, followed by a night in the open had almost finished him off.
Clarke, thinking this might be his last chance before he was executed, pencilled a letter to his wife.
Dear K,
I am in better health and more satisfied than for many a day – all will be well eventually – but this is goodbye and now you are ever before me to cheer me – God bless you and the boys. Let them be proud to follow the same path – Sean is with me and McGarry, all well – they are heroes. I’m full of pride, my love. Yours, Tom.
On the back of it, McDermott added:
Dear Caty,
I never felt so proud of the boys. ’Tis worth a life of suffering to be with them for one hour. God bless you all, Sean.
Clarke unfastened his watch and gave it to a soldier. ‘If you can get this note delivered to my wife, this is for you.’
The Tommy took it. ‘Do my best, mate.’
Kattie did get the letter but only after three weeks. And much was to happen before then.
He wrote:
It is not an Irish Rebellion – it would be a pity if ex post facto it became one, and was added to the long and melancholy list of Irish Rebellions.
You will I am sure let me know as quickly as possible what you wish me to do in the general interest of the country. I fully appreciate my own position, but I am not in the least frightened of the House of Commons and can put up (for myself) a good fight – tho’ I daresay the general verdict will be adverse, and of course I can’t go on.…
His final comment, the fruit of bitter experience, was: ‘No one can govern Ireland from England save in a state of siege.’
Young Nellie Walsh finally found the courage to venture upstairs. Sick with impending horror, she edged open the drawing-room door. Her heart seemed to expand like a balloon as she saw her husband lying face down across the fireplace, his mouth and nose pressed on the hearth. She knelt and tried to turn him over but lacked the strength.
Shaking all over, gasping madly for breath, she went downstairs for a while to rest.
When she climbed up again, she saw soldiers had placed a rug, stolen from the butcher’s next door, over her husband’s corpse and were using it as a card table. She stood there for a few moments in disbelief. They were eating bully beef, drinking, laughing and jeering at whoever came in the door.
She went to tell her father, Mr O’Neill, who lived nearby. He hugged her and heard her out before saying there was more bad news, about her seventeen-year-old brother.
‘Yesterday morning, Willie was in the street, Nell, when he came across a dead man. A bullet had gone through his eye and come out the back of his head. Thinking it might be me, he knelt to make sure and … and he was shot by a soldier.’
The father held his daughter tight and they sobbed on each other’s shoulder.
‘He took five minutes to die, Nell. His last words were, “O, Mother, Mother.” ’
Drying his eyes, Mr O’Neill asked three men to help him carry his son-in-law on a stretcher, then, in a fury, he burst into No 172 and raced upstairs.
‘That man under the carpet,’ he roared, ‘served for ten years in the British army like yourselves. I have one son serving in France and another just back minus an arm.’
Drunk as they were, the soldiers hung their heads in shame. They removed the carpet from the corpse and slunk away.
Nelly said she couldn’t bear the thought of her man and Sally Hughes’s being taken away, anonymously.
‘They have to be buried properly, Dad, from this house.’
She and Sally went to the coffin-maker’s shop and knocked and knocked until he opened the door. They chose and paid for two coffins which the men carried home.
Bareheaded and tired-looking, he went on by car with Fathers Augustine and Aloysius to arrange the details with Kent’s men.
In the South Dublin Union and the Marrowbone Lane Distillery, MacDonagh had the sad job of informing the rebels. Once more, Father Augustine confirmed what he said.
On the return to Jacob’s, they passed the spot in Thomas Street where Robert Emmet had been hanged and beheaded. Father Augustine could almost hear MacDonagh’s thoughts. He knew that he, too, would soon be executed and that his epitaph would not be written in his generation.
At Jacob’s, the men gathered around Father Augustine, asking him to take messages to their folks. He filled his capacious pockets with notes, mostly to parents, which he promised to see delivered the next day.
Seeing a fourteen-year-old among the prisoners, Father Augustine winked at him and drew him aside. ‘What’s your name, lad?’
‘Vincent Byrne, Father.’
‘Follow me, Vinnie.’
The front door was barred so he led the boy to the first floor and indicated the window. The boy jumped on to the sill and the priest lowered him by his extended arms until he was able to drop to safety.
‘Goodbye, Vinnie Byrne,’ he called after him. ‘You’ll live to fight for Ireland another day.’
In Father Augustine’s absence, many were giving money to Elizabeth O’Farrell. Michael O’Hanrahan, the Volunteers’ Quartermaster and MacDonagh’s second in charge, gave her three pounds for his mother. She then left for Bride Street, where MacDonagh’s Battalion was due to surrender.
At 5 p.m., the Republican flag was hauled down.
During the short march to Bride Street, some of MacDonagh’s younger lads melted into the crowd and went home. The rest laid down their arms and gave their names and addresses. All this time a solitary sniper was firing.
‘Bloody British,’ a Volunteer said.
In fact, it was one of their own, high up in Jacob’s, who had not heard of the surrender.
Monk’s ambition to be a writer proved too strong for him. As he pocketed the letter, he heard Colthurst’s shrill tones. ‘No, no, no, Sergeant, you have to say, “The prisoners were trying to escape.” ’
The elegant building which he had lately redecorated to the highest standards was a mere bullet-ridden facade. His office was a part of space. The smouldering remains meant little to him. But he could have wept over the loss of his son’s few effects.
Freddie now seemed somehow doubly dead.
‘This is my house,’ she said.
‘Sorry, missis, but you can’t come in. You’d better go and see an officer first.’
Apprehensive, she went to Mrs Carroll at No 170. Her neighbour said, ‘I must speak to you, my dear.’ Unable to check herself, she moaned, ‘Oh, poor Christy.’
In that moment, Mrs Hickey knew she had lost both her men. She ran back home, barged in and flew upstairs, with the soldiers in hot pursuit yelling, ‘You can’t go up there, d’you hear?’
One floor up, she opened the door. ‘Christy!’
He was lying on the floor, his face black, his two hands raised in the air as if in silent supplication. ‘O, my poor angel, my darling son.’
She gently kissed his cold face, put his cap under his head for a pillow and joined his hands for death. Standing up, she saw her Tom also stretched on the floor. ‘O Jesus, my Lord!’
Pete Connolly was there, too, with great bayonet gashes about the neck and head. The sight was too much for her. She reeled and fainted. The next she knew, she was in the street with soldiers looking after her.
Stories spread rapidly that in one night fifteen civilians had been brutally murdered. For the first time, many Dubliners began to wonder, timidly at first, who was right and who wrong in the matter of the rebellion.
Father Augustine, seeing the tall, manly Kent, felt immensely proud of him as the representative of a brave body of men and women.
Kent had given up his gun and belt to an English officer, when the friar saw they intended to strip him of his uniform. He went and shook Kent’s hand with, ‘Goodbye and God bless you, Eamonn,’ as if to show these Englishmen the respect they, as Irishmen, had for the prisoners. The two Capuchins then glared at the soldiers before going home to Church Street after a long and tiring day.
Kent appreciated the gesture. This was the very first intimation any of the prisoners had that maybe the rising was not entirely wasted.
The arms which the Volunteers had paid for with hard-earned cash were collected in handcarts and put in lorries. The prisoners, with Kent at their head, were marched off to Richmond Barracks.
At Swords, they ran into a troop of British soldiers going north and their hearts leaped with joy.
‘Are they retreating?’ Ina said. ‘Do you think we’ve won?’
The nearer the city the more British troops there were, their manner showing they were the victors.
Devastation was on a colossal scale; smoke was rising on all sides and a smell of burning was in the air. Worst of all, Nora and Ina did not meet one person with a good word for the rebels. ‘Thank God those crazy people have surrendered,’ was the general verdict.
In Drumcondra, they went to Clonliffe Road. Their friends, the Ryan girls, told them, ‘They’re all surrendering.’
‘Our father?’ asked Nora, apprehensively.
‘Wounded,’ Mary said.
‘Dying,’ said Phyllis.
The Connolly sisters sat without another word.
Their mother had come down from Belfast on Good Friday and was staying at the Countess’s cottage, Three Rock, on the edge of the Dublin mountains. They were keen to see her and the rest of their family but they were exhausted and, besides, it was nearly curfew hour.
‘Stay with us for the night,’ Mary and Phyllis said kindly, ‘please.’
On the way, they ran into more abuse, screamed from windows.
‘Shoot the traitors,’ and ‘Good old Staffs, go to it, bayonet the bastards.’
The men were exhausted. They had been searched, first at the Castle, then at the Barracks. Now there was this long march across a burning city. To lift their spirits, they sang lustily, led by Bob de Coeur. Threatened with reprisals if they didn’t stop singing they whistled, instead.
At the North Wall, soldiers were embarking. They made way for the rebels who were packed like sardines into the North Western Railway Boat.
Only the Tommies were given life-belts.
An NCO said, ‘If we’re torpedoed, at least a few hundred fucking Irish rebels’ll end up feeding the fishes, eh?’
The rebels were given no drinking water. Without toilet facilities, they had to make do in a very confined space among smelly, frightened cattle. They consoled themselves by reciting the rosary, many of them praying that a U-boat would sink them and put them out of their misery. When the sea was at its roughest they, one by one, lifted their heads as Jack O’Reilly, a Tralee man with a fine baritone voice, sang ‘Galway Bay’.
After a twelve-hour voyage many were in bad shape by the time they reached Holyhead. From the Welsh port they were packed in a train for jails in the north of England. For thirty hours, they were to have no food, not even a cup of water.
Back in Richmond Barracks, their leaders were brought individually before a court of preliminary enquiry. British officers held in the GPO were called to witness that the prisoners had been in the GPO and in possession of guns.
That night, Clarke sat with his back to the wall, with McDermott beside him and O’Briain next to McDermott.
Sean was insistent that the Germans were coming to help.
‘We haven’t failed,’ he said. ‘The only real failure in Ireland is the failure to strike.’
At Portobello Barracks, they repaired the damage to the wall against which Skeffy and the two editors had been shot.
