hope of saving the lives of our followers now surrounded and hopelessly
outnumbered, the members of the Provisional Government present at
Head-Quarters have agreed to an unconditional surrender, and the
Commandants of the various districts in the City and Country will order
their commands to lay down arms.
P. H. Pearse
29th April 1916
3.45 p. m.
I agree to these conditions for the men only under my own command in the
Moore Street District and for the men in the Stephen's Green Command.
James Connolly
April 29/16
On consultation with Commandant Connolly and their officers I have
decided to agree to unconditional surrender also.
Thomas MacDonagh.]
The British did not shoot any one on Sunday. They let us meditate on all
that the past week had done to our leaders. There is no torture so
excruciating as suspense. It is the suspense which Ireland has had to
endure for generations that has weakened her more than any battles. How
we have waited and waited! It has always been hard for us to believe we
were not to realize our hopes. Even in these latter years during which
Home Rule has loomed large before us, we have not suspected that, in the
end, it would become only a parliamentary trick and a delusion. If any
one had told me the Sunday before that all these men were to be shot, I
should not have believed them. Our bitter belief has been forced upon
us.
On Monday the British began it again. This time it was Michael Mallin
they stood against a wall and shot. I remembered how, when I was so ill
at the College of Surgeons, he had been gentle with me. He always had
tried to ease the discomforts of his men. You would never have guessed
by looking at him, he was so quiet and restrained, that he had been
waiting twenty years for the day which would make him a commandant over
Irish soldiers. He told me that, as a boy of fourteen, he had enlisted
in the British army to get experience with which to fight Great Britain.
When he was stationed in India, he said, he had lain awake night after
night, planning how some day he could put his military knowledge at
Ireland's service. Six days he served Ireland; eight days he lay in
prison; now he was dead!
Later his widow came to see me. She brought me the note-book he used
when writing the despatches I carried. She brought me, besides, some
small bits of Irish poplin he had woven himself. She did not break down;
she seemed exalted. It was the same with all the wives of those shot,
and with the mother of Padraic and William Pearse. You would have
thought they had been greatly honored, that their dignity was equal to
bearing it.
Yet they all had terrible stories of cruelty to tell me. Kilmainham
Prison was a grim waiting-room for death. In addition, the court-martial
never lasted long enough for any one to feel he had been fairly tried
and judged. I heard all the prison sentences, over a hundred that first
week! Most of them were for long terms, and five for life. Councilor
Partridge was given a fifteen-year sentence that afterward was commuted
to ten.
It is not the same thing to read of executions and sentences in the
press and to hear of them from the lips of friends,--the wives, mothers,
and daughters of the men executed or sentenced for life. To feel we had
failed in our purpose was enough to make us brood; but to know that
never again would these men sing rebel songs together or tell of their
hopes--
At length Norah Connolly and her sister came to see me. They told me of
their father's last hours; how, because of his wound that already had
brought him close to death, he had to be strapped into a chair to face
the firing-squad. I thought of gentle Mrs. Connolly saying good-by to
her husband, knowing all the while what was about to take place!
Some of the first-aid girls who had been in prison for fifteen days came
to visit me, too. We compared notes. I learned then how Chris Caffrey
had been stripped and searched by British soldiers to her shame, for she
was a modest girl. But she had eaten her despatch before they dragged
her off the street where she had been bicycling. I heard, too, how Chris
had been almost prevented from reaching headquarters by a crowd of poor
women gathered about the post-office for their usual weekly "separation
allowance." Their husbands were all fighting in France or Flanders for
the British. They would not get their allowance this week, and were
terror-stricken, crowding about the post-office and crying and shouting
hysterically. Chris, as we called Christine, had to fire her revolver
at the ground before they would make way for her.
Next followed the story of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, one of the few
men in Dublin we could go to for advice about the law when we had any
plan to carry out. He had been shot without a trial, they said; without
even knowing, when called out into the little courtyard, that he was
about to be killed. And he had had _nothing to do with the rising_! He
always had been against the use of force. When he was arrested, after a
day spent in trying to get a committee of safety together because the
police had disappeared, his wife did not even know where he was. She had
no word of his death until a day after he was buried in quicklime, the
burial of a criminal!
Ah, how the stories of Belgian atrocities which we had heard from the
lips of the Archbishop of Michlin when the Great War broke out, paled
beside this one fortnight in Dublin! We did not know when it would end
or how. There ensued a reign of terror in all Irish homes, whether the
men or women had had anything to do with the rising or not. For both
soldiers and police were now given power to arrest any one they pleased.
Several hundred men were put in prison under no charge, nor were any
charges ever preferred in many cases.
The women, too! Helen Maloney and Dr. Katherine Lynn, whose motor Madam
had used that night in St. Stephen's Green and whose bicycle I had been
riding, were both arrested Easter Monday and taken to Dublin Castle.
Miss Maloney was discovered a few hours later with the lock half off her
door, her fingers bleeding pitifully from attempts to get out. Next they
were taken to Kilmainham jail, where for fifteen days those two women,
with eighty others, were kept in a room completely lacking any sanitary
arrangements. We used to shudder at stories of such deeds, which we then
believed could happen only in Siberia. Dr. Lynn is famous for her
surgical skill. She is one of the Irish doctors to whom the British send
their worst war cripples for treatment, and is far more successful than
they in treating such cases. Many visitors to Dublin have seen Miss
Maloney on the stage of the Abbey Theater and recognized her talent. Dr.
Lynn was deported to Bath; Miss Maloney was sent to the Aylesbury
Prison, and kept there a year. Never once during that time was any
charge preferred against her.
Little Tommy Keenan of Camden Row had, so he thought, the good fortune
to be put in prison with sixty of the Fianna when our men surrendered
the College of Surgeons. But, much to their chagrin, at the end of two
weeks the boys were released. Did they scurry away to grow up into
better British subjects? Not at all! Tommy lined them up in front of the
jail and led them off down the street singing "The Watch on the Rhine"
at the top of their lungs.
There was no end to the stories I heard as I lay there in the hospital.
Stories of heroism and stories of disaster followed one another, each
strengthening my belief that the courage and honor of the heroic days of
Ireland were still alive in our hearts. Perhaps it is for this we should
love our enemies: when they cleave with their swords the heart of a
brave man, they lay bare the truth of life.
XI
There came a day when I could no longer endure lying alone in my room,
thinking of all that had happened for this reason or that. The nurses
had been very kind to me. Some of them were in sympathy with the Sinn
Fein movement, while all of them felt the horror of the executions.
There were times when I could rise above this horror and cheer them,
too, by singing a rebel song. I had interested them, besides, in
suffrage work we had been doing in Glasgow, where for several years
eleven hundred militants had done picketing and the like.
Finally, however, I persuaded them to let me move into the public ward,
where I could see other women patients and talk a little. There were
about twenty women and girls in the ward. Nine of them, who had nothing
to do with the rising, had been wounded by British soldiers. The nurses
insisted this was accidental. But the women themselves would not agree
to that explanation, nor did I, for I recalled the Red Cross girls being
shot at,--a thing I had seen with my own eyes. I told the nurses I had
seen the British firing at our ambulances in the belief, no doubt, that
we were doing what we had caught them at--transporting troops from one
part of Dublin to another in ambulances. Sometimes I felt sorry to have
to make those nurses see facts as they were, instead of helping them
keep what few illusions still remained about their men in khaki. But I
was glad when I could tell them what I had just heard of De Vallera's
daring. With a handful of men, he had prevented two thousand of the
famous Sherwood Foresters coming through lower Mount Street to attack
one of our positions. Or, again, it did me good to relate the story of
the seventeen-year-old lad who single-handed had captured a British
general. The sequel to that tale, however, was not very cheerful, for
the same general had sat at the court-martial, and gave the boy who
before had had power of life and death over him, a ten year sentence.
There were three women in the ward who had all been struck by the same
bullet: a mother, her daughter, and a cousin. They had been friendly to
the British soldiers, had fed them because, as the mother told me, her
husband and son were in the trenches fighting for Great Britain. These
three women had been at their window, looking with curiosity into the
street, when the very soldier they had just fed turned suddenly and shot
them. One had her jawbone broken, the second her arm pierced, and the
third was struck in the breast. They were all serious wounds which kept
them in bed. While I was still in the ward, the two men of this family
came back from Flanders on leave, only to find no one at home. The
neighbors directed them to the hospital. I hate to think how those men
looked when they learned why their women wore bandages. They told me
that during Easter Week the Germans put up opposite the trenches of the
Irish Brigade a placard that read:
_"The military are shooting down your wives and children in
Dublin._"
But the Irish soldiers had not believed it.
I asked them if it was true, as alleged, that in answer to the placard,
the Irish Brigade had sung "Rule, Britannia." They were indignant at the
idea. They might be wearing khaki, they said, but they never yet had
sung "Rule, Britannia." When the day came for them to return to the
front, the father wanted to desert, dangerous as that would be, while
the son was eager to go back to the trenches.
"This time," he said to me, "we'll not be killing Germans!"
When rumors came later of a mutiny in the Irish regiment, I wondered to
myself if these two men were at the bottom of it.
Stories of atrocities poured into our ears when the Germans invaded
Belgium. Now we had to hear them from our own people, and now we had to
believe them. They were stories as cruel as any heard since the days of
the Island Magee massacre.
In the House of Commons shortly after the rising, the cabinet was
questioned if it were true that the body of a boy in the uniform of the
Irish Volunteers had been unearthed in the grounds of Trinity College,
with the marks of twenty bayonet wounds upon him.
"No," was the response, "there were not twenty; there were only
nineteen"!
The body in question was that of Gerald Keogh, one of a family
passionately devoted to the cause of Irish freedom. He had been sent to
Kimmage to bring back fifty men. He went scouting ahead of them, just as
I had done when I brought in the men from the Leeson Street bridge. As
he was passing Trinity College, held by the British, he was shot down
and swiftly captured. It is generally understood he was asked for
information, and that, upon his refusing to answer, the soldiers tried
to force it from him by prodding him with their bayonets. I might add
that the fifty men with him were not attacked as they went by.
This boy's brother was also captured by British soldiers, who decided to
hang him then and there. He begged them to shoot him, but they fastened
a noose around his neck and led him to a lamp-post. Fortunately an
officer came along at that moment and rescued him. Even children were
not safe from being terrorized by the soldiers, as Mr. Dillon later
brought out in the House of Commons.
There also were murders in North King Street. Fourteen men who had
nothing to do with the rising, were killed in their homes by British
soldiers who buried them in their cellars, while others looted the
houses. The house in Leinster Road was pillaged, and the soldiers had
the effrontery to sell the books, fine furniture, and paintings on the
street in front of the dwelling.
I had been in the hospital now about five weeks, and had been told I
might go in a few days to visit friends in the city if I would promise
to return every day to have my wounds dressed. Then one morning I was
informed there was a "G-man," as we call government detectives, waiting
down-stairs to see me. He had been coming every day to the hospital, it
seems, to learn if I was yet strong enough to go to jail. Evidently he
had decided that I was, for he told me I must accompany him to Bridewell
Prison.
When I went up to the ward to say good-by and get my things, I found
the nurses terribly upset. You see, it brought the Irish question right
home to that hospital. They went to him in a body and tried to beg me
off, but he insisted on his rights, and away I went despite tears and
protestations.
This was the first time I had been out, so naturally I felt queer and
weak. Nor was I pleased with my companion. He had a fat, self-satisfied
face; in fact, was not at all the handsome, keen-looking detective you
see on the cover of a dime novel. Besides, he was _too_ polite. He
thought, I suppose, that this would be the best way to get me to answer
the hundred and one questions he began to ask me. I told him I might
answer questions about myself, but I certainly should not answer any
concerning the countess or my other friends.
This response kept him quiet for a block or two. Then he turned
suddenly and asked me about two girls from Glasgow who had come to
Ireland at the same time that I did. I just walked along as though I had
not heard a word, and so we proceeded in silence the rest of the way.
When we entered the vestibule of the prison, an old official immediately
began to catechize me. I refused to answer a single one of his
questions, not even as to my name. Instead I pointed to the "G-man."
"Ask him," I said. "He knows all about me, and can tell you if he wants
to."
The detective's face grew red, but he did answer the old man's
questions. It was very interesting to me to find that he knew who my
parents were; that I had been born twelve miles from Glasgow; that I
had gone to different schools which he named, and that I had attended
the training college for teachers. He told just where I had been
teaching, and how well known I was as a militant suffragette. But what
he did _not_ say was even more interesting. He never declared that I had
been a combatant in the rising. I wondered inwardly if he thought I had
been only a despatch-rider or a first-aid girl. I was exceedingly glad I
had let him answer for me as, taking it for granted they knew all about
me, I might have given myself away.
The old man finally called the matron and told her to treat me well, as
I was not a "drunk or disorderly" person, to which class this prison is
given over, but a military prisoner. Indeed she did treat me well. Since
there was nothing on which to sit down, she kindly opened a cell and
let me sit on the wooden plank they call a bed, and stare at the wooden
head-board. I did not look forward much to such accommodations, with my
wounds still painful. She talked to me, too, very sympathetically.
Sometimes it was hard for us to hear each other, as there were many
drunken men singing and cursing. Being drunk, they were able to forget
that Ireland was under martial law, and cursed the British loudly or
sang disrespectful songs.
The detective had gone out, and those in the jail seemed waiting to hear
from him before they picked out my permanent cell. After about two
hours, he came back. From where I sat, I could see him bend over the old
man and whisper to him. Then he walked over to me.
"Come," he said, "we'll go now."
"Go where?" I asked.
"To the hospital," he replied, "or anywhere else you wish. You are
free."
The matron was as pleased as if she were a friend of mine. I was too
amazed to know what to think. I told the detective, however, that as I
did not know this part of Dublin, I could not find my way back to the
hospital without his company. Off we went again, and he paid my carfare,
for which I thanked him.
In the sky overhead were aëroplanes that the British kept hovering over
Dublin to impress the people.
"Are those the little things with which you fight the Zeppelins?" I
asked my detective.
This remark hurt his feelings. He was not British, he informed me, but a
good Redmondite. How embarrassed he was when I asked him if he liked
arresting Irish who had shown their love of Ireland by being willing to
die for her and, what sometimes seemed worse to me, going into an
English prison for life. After that we did not talk any more until he
said good-by to me at the hospital door.
The nurses were not as surprised to see me back as I had expected them
to be. They had known I was returning, for it was the head doctor who
had telephoned the authorities at Dublin Castle to tell them, with a
good deal of heat, that I was in no condition to begin a prison
sentence. That must have been what the "G-man" had whispered to the old
official at Bridewell Prison.
XII
After two weeks more, I left the hospital and went to stay with a friend
in Dublin. It seemed very strange to me not to be going back to Surrey
House. How everything had changed! As soon as I was strong enough, I
went around to see where the fighting had destroyed whole streets.
Dublin was scarred and, it seemed to me, very sick. I recalled
momentarily that a teacher of mine had once said the name Dublin meant
"the Black Pool."
The building where I had first met Thomas McDonagh, the Volunteer
headquarters, had a "to let" sign in its windows. Who would want to
engage in business in a place where such high hopes had been blasted?
Liberty Hall was a shell, empty of everything but memories.
Around the post-office, all other buildings had been leveled, but the
great building stood there like a monument to Easter Week.
The windows stared vacantly from the house on Leinster Road. Everything
had been taken from it. The looters must have had a merry time. Hundreds
of houses had been thus sacked, for the British soldiers had lived up to
that Tommy whose words make Kipling's famous song:
The sweatin' Tommies wonder as they spade the beggars under,
Why lootin' should be entered as a crime;
So if my song you'll hear, I will learn you plain and clear
'Ow to pay yourself for fightin' overtime;
With the loot!
Bloomin' loot!
That's the thing to make the boys git up and shoot!
It's the same with dogs and men,
If you'd make 'em come again
Clap 'em forward with a
Loo-loo-lulu
Loot!
Against our soldiers, on the other hand, a great many of whom were very
poor, there had not been a single accusation of looting. In the
post-office, for instance, they ordered one of the captured British
officers to guard the safe. In the streets where windows had been
broken, they tried to keep the people from pillaging the shops. Whatever
money our men found lying loose in the buildings they occupied was
turned over to their superior officers. Again and again I myself had
seen men of the Citizen Army, quite as poor as any British soldier, hand
over money to Commandant Mallin. Had I only thought of it, I could have
taken this with me when I was carried to the hospital. The cause would
have been at least one hundred pounds richer.
At the College of Surgeons we had destroyed nothing except a portrait of
Queen Victoria. We took that down and made puttees out of it. We did not
feel we were doing any wrong, for it was Queen Victoria who, in 1848,
wrote to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium:
"There are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland, and I think
it very likely to go off without any contest, which people (I think
rightly) rather regret. The Irish should receive a good lesson or they
will begin it again."
From this quotation any one can see that the Queen looked upon the
Irish as aliens, which, indeed, they are.
We also were very careful of the museum and library at the College of
Surgeons. Although the men did not have any covering and the nights were
cold, they did not cut up the rugs and carpets, but doubled them and
crept in between the folds in rows.
About Jacob's Biscuit Factory, during Easter Week, even though it was a
very dangerous spot, the employees had hovered, for fear their means of
livelihood would be destroyed. But it was not. The machinery was left
uninjured, for we always remembered our own poor.
At Guinness's brewery, where great quantities of stout were stored, none
of it was touched. Most of our men are teetotalers, anyway.
Some of the poor of Dublin had tried to pillage at first, but it was a
pathetic attempt. I saw one specimen of this on Easter Tuesday, while
carrying a despatch. There was a crowd of people about a shoe-shop. The
windows had been smashed, and the poor wretches were clambering into the
shop at great risk of cutting themselves. Once inside, despite all the
outer excitement, they were taking the time to _try on shoes_! Many of
them, one could see, had never had a pair of new shoes in their lives.
Visitors to Dublin going through the poorer parts are always surprised
at the number of children and young girls who walk about bare-footed in
icy weather. It is in this way that their health is undermined.
One day during the week after I left the hospital, I heard that a batch
of prisoners was to be taken to England aboard a cattle-boat leaving the
pier called North Wall. I went down at once to watch for them. It was a
very wet day, and the prisoners had been marched six miles from Richmond
barracks through the pouring rain. But they were singing their rebel
songs, just as if they had never been defeated and were not on their way
to the unknown horrors of an English prison.
The officer in charge seemed much excited, though he had five hundred
soldiers to look after a hundred prisoners.
"For God's sake, close in, or we'll be rushed!" he shouted to his men.
Then the soldiers, with fixed bayonets, "closed in" upon the wet crowd
of rebels, who actually seemed to feel the humor of it.
I knew some of the boys, and walked in between the bayonets to shake
hands with them and march a part of the way. They had heard I was dead,
and looked at first as if they were seeing a ghost. One of them, a
little, lame playwright of whom I had caught a glimpse at Bridewell, had
told me at the time that he was writing a farce about the revolution to
show its absurdity. He had had nothing to do with the rising, for it was
his brother who had been with us at the College of Surgeons. There was
not even a charge against him; yet here he was, limping along in the
rain and mud, but still cheerful. This chap gave me a bundle of clothes
and a message for his mother, so I hunted her up the next morning. She
did not know he had been deported, and was in despair, for she had left
her little cottage in the country to be near her son in Dublin. When I
visited her she was just back from market with fruit she had bought to
take to him, as it was visiting day at the barracks.
These are some of the things that made even quiet old mothers grow
bitter.
XIII