WEDNESDAY
It was three o'clock before I got to sleep last night, and during the
hours machine guns and rifle firing had been continuous.
This morning the sun is shining brilliantly, and the movement in the
streets possesses more of animation than it has done. The movement ends
always in a knot of people, and folk go from group to group vainly
seeking information, and quite content if the rumour they presently
gather differs even a little from the one they have just communicated.
The first statement I heard was that the Green had been taken by the
military; the second that it had been re-taken; the third that it had
not been taken at all. The facts at last emerged that the Green had not
been occupied by the soldiers, but that the Volunteers had retreated
from it into a house which commanded it. This was found to be the
College of Surgeons, and from the windows and roof of this College they
were sniping. A machine gun was mounted on the roof; other machine guns,
however, opposed them from the roofs of the Shelbourne Hotel, the United
Service Club, and the Alexandra Club. Thus a triangular duel opened
between these positions across the trees of the Park.
Through the railings of the Green some rifles and bandoliers could be
seen lying on the ground, as also the deserted trenches and snipers'
holes. Small boys bolted in to see these sights and bolted out again
with bullets quickening their feet. Small boys do not believe that
people will really kill them, but small boys were killed.
The dead horse was still lying stiff and lamentable on the footpath.
This morning a gunboat came up the Liffey and helped to bombard Liberty
Hall. The Hall is breeched and useless. Rumour says that it was empty at
the time, and that Connolly with his men had marched long before to the
Post Office and the Green. The same source of information relates that
three thousand Volunteers came from Belfast on an excursion train and
that they marched into the Post Office.
On this day only one of my men came in. He said that he had gone on the
roof and had been shot at, consequently that the Volunteers held some of
the covering houses. I went to the roof and remained there for half an
hour. There were no shots, but the firing from the direction of
Sackville Street was continuous and at times exceedingly heavy.
To-day the _Irish Times_ was published. It contained a new military
proclamation, and a statement that the country was peaceful, and told
that in Sackville Street some houses were burned to the ground.
On the outside railings a bill proclaiming Martial Law was posted.
Into the newspaper statement that peace reigned in the country one was
inclined to read more of disquietude than of truth, and one said is the
country so extraordinarily peaceful that it can be dismissed in three
lines. There is too much peace or too much reticence, but it will be
some time before we hear from outside of Dublin.
Meanwhile the sun was shining. It was a delightful day, and the streets
outside and around the areas of fire were animated and even gay. In the
streets of Dublin there were no morose faces to be seen. Almost everyone
was smiling and attentive, and a democratic feeling was abroad, to which
our City is very much a stranger; for while in private we are a sociable
and talkative people we have no street manners or public ease whatever.
Every person spoke to every other person, and men and women mixed and
talked without constraint.
Was the City for or against the Volunteers? Was it for the Volunteers,
and yet against the rising? It is considered now (writing a day or two
afterwards) that Dublin was entirely against the Volunteers, but on the
day of which I write no such certainty could be put forward. There was a
singular reticence on the subject. Men met and talked volubly, but they
said nothing that indicated a personal desire or belief. They asked for
and exchanged the latest news, or, rather, rumour, and while expressions
were frequent of astonishment at the suddenness and completeness of the
occurrence, no expression of opinion for or against was anywhere
formulated.
Sometimes a man said, "They will be beaten of course," and, as he
prophesied, the neighbour might surmise if he did so with a sad heart or
a merry one, but they knew nothing and asked nothing of his views, and
themselves advanced no flag.
This was among the men.
The women were less guarded, or, perhaps, knew they had less to fear.
Most of the female opinion I heard was not alone unfavourable but
actively and viciously hostile to the rising. This was noticeable among
the best dressed class of our population; the worst dressed, indeed the
female dregs of Dublin life, expressed a like antagonism, and almost in
similar language. The view expressed was--
"I hope every man of them will be shot."
And--
"They ought to be all shot."
Shooting, indeed, was proceeding everywhere. During daylight, at least,
the sound is not sinister nor depressing, and the thought that perhaps a
life had exploded with that crack is not depressing either.
In the last two years of world-war our ideas on death have undergone a
change. It is not now the furtive thing that crawled into your bed and
which you fought with pill-boxes and medicine bottles. It has become
again a rider of the wind whom you may go coursing with through the
fields and open places. All the morbidity is gone, and the sickness, and
what remains to Death is now health and excitement. So Dublin laughed at
the noise of its own bombardment, and made no moan about its dead--in
the sunlight. Afterwards--in the rooms, when the night fell, and instead
of silence that mechanical barking of the maxims and the whistle and
screams of the rifles, the solemn roar of the heavier guns, and the red
glare covering the sky. It is possible that in the night Dublin did not
laugh, and that she was gay in the sunlight for no other reason than
that the night was past.
On this day fighting was incessant at Mount Street Bridge. A party of
Volunteers had seized three houses covering the bridge and converted
these into forts. It is reported that military casualties at this point
were very heavy. The Volunteers are said also to hold the South Dublin
Union. The soldiers have seized Guinness's Brewery, while their
opponents have seized another brewery in the neighbourhood, and between
these two there is a continual fusilade.
Fighting is brisk about Ringsend and along the Canal. Dame Street was
said to be held in many places by the Volunteers. I went down Dame
Street, but saw no Volunteers, and did not observe any sniping from the
houses. Further, as Dame Street is entirely commanded by the roofs and
windows of Trinity College, it is unlikely that they should be here.
It was curious to observe this, at other times, so animated street,
broad and deserted, with at the corners of side streets small knots of
people watching. Seen from behind, Grattan's Statue in College Green
seemed almost alive, and he had the air of addressing warnings and
reproaches to Trinity College.
The Proclamation issued to-day warns all people to remain within doors
until five o'clock in the morning, and after seven o'clock at night.
It is still early. There is no news of any kind, and the rumours begin
to catch quickly on each other and to cancel one another out. Dublin is
entirely cut off from England, and from the outside world. It is, just
as entirely cut off from the rest of Ireland; no news of any kind
filters in to us. We are land-locked and sea-locked, but, as yet, it
does not much matter.
Meantime the belief grows that the Volunteers may be able to hold out
much longer than had been imagined. The idea at first among the people
had been that the insurrection would be ended the morning after it had
began. But to-day, the insurrection having lasted three days, people are
ready to conceive that it may last for ever. There is almost a feeling
of gratitude towards the Volunteers because they are holding out for a
little while, for had they been beaten the first or second day the City
would have been humiliated to the soul.
People say: "Of course, they will be beaten." The statement is almost a
query, and they continue, "but they are putting up a decent fight." For
being beaten does not greatly matter in Ireland, but not fighting does
matter. "They went forth always to the battle; and they always fell,"
Indeed, the history of the Irish race is in that phrase.
The firing from the roofs of Trinity College became violent. I crossed
Dame Street some distance up, struck down the Quays, and went along
these until I reached the Ballast Office. Further than this it was not
possible to go, for a step beyond the Ballast Office would have brought
one into the unending stream of lead that was pouring from Trinity and
other places. I was looking on O'Connell Bridge and Sackville Street,
and the house facing me was Kelly's--a red-brick fishing tackle shop,
one half of which was on the Quay and the other half in Sackville
Street. This house was being bombarded.
I counted the report of six different machine guns which played on it.
Rifles innumerable and from every sort of place were potting its
windows, and at intervals of about half a minute the shells from a heavy
gun lobbed in through its windows or thumped mightily against its walls.
For three hours that bombardment continued, and the walls stood in a
cloud of red dust and smoke. Rifle and machine gun bullets pattered over
every inch of it, and, unfailingly the heavy gun pounded its shells
through the windows.
One's heart melted at the idea that human beings were crouching inside
that volcano of death, and I said to myself, "Not even a fly can be
alive in that house."
No head showed at any window, no rifle cracked from window or roof in
reply. The house was dumb, lifeless, and I thought every one of those
men are dead.
It was then, and quite suddenly, that the possibilities of street
fighting flashed on me, and I knew there was no person in the house, and
said to myself, "They have smashed through the walls with a hatchet and
are sitting in the next house, or they have long ago climbed out by the
skylight and are on a roof half a block away." Then the thought came to
me--they have and hold the entire of Sackville Street down to the Post
Office. Later on this proved to be the case, and I knew at this moment
that Sackville Street was doomed.
I continued to watch the bombardment, but no longer with the anguish
which had before torn me. Near by there were four men, and a few yards
away, clustered in a laneway, there were a dozen others. An agitated
girl was striding from the farther group to the one in which I was, and
she addressed the men in the most obscene language which I have ever
heard. She addressed them man by man, and she continued to speak and cry
and scream at them with all that obstinate, angry patience of which only
a woman is capable.
She cursed us all. She called down diseases on every human being in the
world excepting only the men who were being bombarded. She demanded of
the folk in the laneway that they should march at least into the roadway
and prove that they were proud men and were not afraid of bullets. She
had been herself into the danger zone. Had stood herself in the track of
the guns, and had there cursed her fill for half an hour, and she
desired that the men should do at least what she had done.
This girl was quite young--about nineteen years of age--and was dressed
in the customary shawl and apron of her class. Her face was rather
pretty, or it had that pretty slenderness and softness of outline which
belong to youth. But every sentence she spoke contained half a dozen
indecent words. Alas, it was only that her vocabulary was not equal to
her emotions, and she did not know how to be emphatic without being
obscene--it is the cause of most of the meaningless swearing one hears
every day. She spoke to me for a minute, and her eyes were as soft as
those of a kitten and her language was as gentle as her eyes. She wanted
a match to light a cigarette, but I had none, and said that I also
wanted one. In a few minutes she brought me a match, and then she
recommenced her tireless weaving of six vile words into hundreds of
stupid sentences.
About five o'clock the guns eased off of Kelly's.
To inexperienced eyes they did not seem to have done very much damage,
but afterwards one found that although the walls were standing and
apparently solid there was no inside to the house. From roof to basement
the building was bare as a dog kennel. There were no floors inside,
there was nothing there but blank space; and on the ground within was
the tumble and rubbish that had been roof and floors and furniture.
Everything inside was smashed and pulverised into scrap and dust, and
the only objects that had consistency and their ancient shape were the
bricks that fell when the shells struck them.
Rifle shots had begun to strike the house on the further side of the
street, a jewellers' shop called Hopkins & Hopkins. The impact of these
balls on the bricks was louder than the sound of the shot which
immediately succeeded, and each bullet that struck brought down a shower
of fine red dust from the walls. Perhaps thirty or forty shots in all
were fired at Hopkins', and then, except for an odd crack, firing
ceased.
During all this time there had been no reply from the Volunteers, and I
thought they must be husbanding their ammunition, and so must be short
of it, and that it would be only a matter of a few days before the end.
All this, I said to myself, will be finished in a few days, and they
will be finished; life here will recommence exactly where it left off,
and except for some newly-filled graves, all will be as it had been
until they become a tradition and enter the imagination of their race.
I spoke to several of the people about me, and found the same
willingness to exchange news that I had found elsewhere in the City, and
the same reticences as regarded their private opinions. Two of them,
indeed, and they were the only two I met with during the insurrection,
expressed, although in measured terms, admiration for the Volunteers,
and while they did not side with them they did not say anything against
them. One was a labouring man, the other a gentleman. The remark of the
latter was:
"I am an Irishman, and (pointing to the shells that were bursting
through the windows in front of us) I hate to see that being done to
other Irishmen."
He had come from some part of the country to spend the Easter Holidays
in Dublin, and was unable to leave town again.
The labouring man--he was about fifty-six years of age--spoke very
quietly and collectedly about the insurrection. He was a type with whom
I had come very little in contact, and I was surprised to find how
simple and good his speech was, and how calm his ideas. He thought
labour was in this movement to a greater extent than was imagined. I
mentioned that Liberty Hall had been blown up, and that the garrison had
either surrendered or been killed. He replied that a gunboat had that
morning come up the river and had blown Liberty Hall into smash, but, he
added, there were no men in it. All the Labour Volunteers had marched
with Connolly into the Post Office.
He said the Labour Volunteers might possibly number about one thousand
men, but that it would be quite safe to say eight hundred, and he held
that the Labour Volunteers, or the Citizens' Army, as they called
themselves, had always been careful not to reveal their numbers. They
had always announced that they possessed about two hundred and fifty
men, and had never paraded any more than that number at any one time.
Workingmen, he continued, knew that the men who marched were always
different men. The police knew it, too, but they thought that the
Citizens Army was the _most deserted-from force_ in the world.
The men, however, were not deserters--you don't, he said, desert a man
like Connolly, and they were merely taking their turn at being drilled
and disciplined. They were raised against the police who, in the big
strike of two years ago, had acted towards them with unparallelled
savagery, and the men had determined that the police would never again
find them thus disorganised.
This man believed that every member of the Citizen Army had marched with
their leader.
"The men, I know," said he, "would not be afraid of anything, and," he
continued, "they are in the Post Office now."
"What chance have they?"
"None," he replied, "and they never said they had, and they never
thought they would have any."
"How long do you think they'll be able to hold out?"
He nodded towards the house that had been bombarded by heavy guns.
"That will root them out of it quick enough," was his reply.
"I'm going home," said he then, "the people will be wondering if I'm
dead or alive," and he walked away from that sad street, as I did myself
a few minutes afterwards.