Rebels

by Peter De Rosa

  Women were bitterest. ‘Them bastards,’ they shrieked, tightening their black shawls around them, ‘should be put up against a wall and shot.’

  In a cell in Arbour Hill Detention Centre was Patrick Pearse, the tall Commander-in-Chief of the rebel army with the face of an altar boy. Confident he would be shot very soon, he began writing in a rush.

  A letter to his mother gave his version of the rising.

  We are ready to die and we shall die cheerfully and proudly.… You must not grieve for all this. We have preserved Ireland’s honour and our own. Our deeds of last week are the most splendid things in Ireland’s history. People will say hard things of us now, but we shall be remembered by posterity and blessed by unborn generations. You too will be blessed because you were my mother.

  In a postscript he added, ‘I understand that the German expedition which I was counting on actually set sail but was defeated by the British.’

  He sent a message to Connolly, the Union leader who had commanded the Dublin forces in the rebellion, praying that, at this supreme moment and in expectation of death, the glorious and wounded leader might make his peace with God.

  James Connolly was even then wondering why, when he had been born in an Edinburgh slum, he was now lying under a splendid chandelier in a State Room in Dublin Castle.

  He had been wounded in the rising. Gangrene had set in from a bullet wound in his left leg. In spite of morphine, pain made sleep impossible.

  He sent for a priest. Thin as a whip, benign beyond his years, Father Aloysius, a Capuchin with twinkling eyes, strode through the Gate of the Castle, now a Red Cross Hospital, up the Great Staircase lined with armed men, into the room where the prisoner was lying with his foot in a cradle.

  Connolly, bluff and moustachioed, was never happy except when arguing. He immediately launched into why he could not retract any of his political beliefs.

  ‘I tell you, Father, not only can a Catholic be a Marxist, he ought to be. Did you ever read The Didache, one of the earliest Christian tracts? “Share everything with your brother,” it says. “Do not say, ‘It is private property.’ If you share everlasting things, you should be even more willing to share things that do not last.” ’

  The friar tugged his beard, trying to keep a straight face.

  ‘Did I say something funny?’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Father Aloysius smiled. ‘It’s just that I’m a son of St Francis who never had a bean.’ He paused before saying, without a trace of mirth, ‘Like St Francis, you have part of Our Blessed Lord’s stigmata already. I’ve heard of your charity towards Christ’s poor. So I have no problems sharing everlasting things with you.’

  ‘You mean,’ Connolly gasped, ‘you will hear the confession of a Marxist?’

  ‘I mean, my son, I will hear the confession of anyone who acknowledges he is a sinner. Besides,’ – he patted him on the head – ‘I think our Founder would have approved of you.’

  At Kilmainham, Maxwell called in General Hutchinson, his Chief of Staff, and Prince Alexander of Battenberg, his ADC.

  ‘I aim, gentlemen, to make sure that no word of rebellion is whispered in this queer country ever again. As to the ring-leaders,’ a prodigious sniff, ‘they have broken English law, English law will now break them.’

  His ADC smirked at the witticism.

  ‘The question of punishment,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘I’d like to see them hang,’ his Chief of Staff said.

  ‘Mustn’t let sentimental considerations influence your judgement, Hutch.’ Maxwell exhaled a pillar of cloud. ‘That would create problems. In the first place, we’d have to bring a hangman over from England.’

  ‘Odd that,’ the ADC said.

  ‘It is, Alex,’ Maxwell returned, with a cough like a rifle report. ‘Plenty of hangmen around here, I’m sure, but none with professional qualifications.’

  ‘And I suppose, sir, bringing a hangman over,’ Hutchinson said, ‘would confuse the issue.’

  ‘Correct. Bloody press would poke their noses in, buttonhole him before he gets here. Then there’d be the sickening paraphernalia of civilian lawyers spouting about due process.’

  ‘When,’ Hutchinson said, ‘we have the names of the ring-leaders on that Proclamation thing—’

  ‘Proclamation of a Republic,’ Prince Alexander put in, with a boyish laugh.

  ‘Right,’ Hutchinson went on, ‘we have that and the evidence of our officers who accepted the surrender.’

  ‘Why risk world-wide publicity,’ Maxwell said, ‘and tedious court cases when the whole damn thing’s cut and dried? It’d be like calling in an Oxford Mathematics professor to confirm that two and two make four.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ Hutchinson said, ‘you have the powers to court-martial them.’

  Maxwell nodded. ‘That way, we avoid any blarney about a Republic, as if this were a political matter instead of a straightforward alliance of a bunch of crooks with the Huns.’ He snapped his nicotined fingers. ‘So much easier treating them as simple collaborators. Brief trial, swift verdict and’ – he pointed a finger like a gun – ‘bang!’

  Prince Alexander said, ‘Pity Roger Casement’s in the Tower of London.’

  ‘Yes,’ wheezed Maxwell. ‘Imagine. He came ashore in Tralee from a U-boat on Good Friday. An open and shut case of treachery. And what did that boneheaded Under-Secretary, Nathan, do but send him out of the country?’

  ‘And now,’ the Prince said, ‘there’ll be a big trial and money spent—’

  ‘And a rope at the end of it,’ Hutchinson said, unable to hide his glee.

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell affirmed. ‘If Casement had been left over here, I’d have dealt with him. No noise, no mess, just a nice clean finish in the dawn.’

  Roger Casement, holder of the South African Medal, Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, Knight of the Realm, was sitting slumped on the floor in a corner of his cell. Well over six feet tall, he seemed to have shrivelled. Unshaven, without a belt or tie or shoe-laces, he was still in the salt-stained suit in which he had been washed up on the shore of Tralee ten days before and it stank. Once as dark and handsome as any sitter for Van Dyke, he now had a gaunt face, black horseshoe eyes, and lips puckered like a withered flower.

  A compassionate man, he had won world fame as a British consul. At the start of the century, he had investigated the Belgian King Leopold’s Congo Free State. He found that natives who failed to bring in their rubber quota were killed or had their ears cut off or were driven into the forests to starve. Women and children were beaten with hippopotamus hide. He met Epondo, a fifteen-year-old whose left arm had been hacked off, and many other natives minus arms and legs.

  His report changed things.

  A few years later, he investigated the British-owned Amazon Rubber Company. It was a repeat of his Congo experience. He came across an Indian girl, the mistress of an agent, who, when he found she had venereal disease, had flogged her. Then he had a native boy insert firebrands into the openings of her body.

  Blazing with indignation, Casement wrote up his report which, after frustrating Foreign Office delays, the British published in 1912. His work earned him a knighthood.

  Having defended distant races, Casement, his health broken, dedicated himself to the oppressed natives of his own country, Ireland. It was this that had led him to Germany to seek arms for a rebellion and, now, to imprisonment in the Tower of London.

  He pulled a bent nail from firewood in the grate and tried to swallow it, but the nail was big and his throat dry. It fell out of his lacerated mouth like a tooth.

  He pushed a lens out of his glasses, broke it on the flagstone and with a jagged piece sawed the veins in his left wrist. Into the running wound he rubbed a poisonous powder he had concealed in his jacket. He would not give the British the pleasure of hanging him.

  In Kilmainham, Maxwell was having a final whiskey with his staff when an aide brought him in a file. ‘Letters written by prisoner P. H. Pearse, sir.’


  Maxwell skimmed through them and snorted, ‘The sneaky bastard expects to become famous for murdering my boys in cold blood.’ Then the postscript to Pearse’s mother caught his eye. He read it out. ‘Christ, gentlemen, he admits to treachery in a letter to his mater. Let’s hope the other rebels are as stupid as this.’

  Not far away, in Richmond Barracks, the rebel prisoners in A. Cell were settling down for the night.

  Joe Plunkett, who had drawn up the strategy for the battle, was lying in a corner shivering, a frayed quilt under his head. He had not received a wound but he was, nonetheless, dying.

  Sean McDermott was asleep on Tom Clarke’s lap, sometimes crying, ‘Fire, fire,’ as he remembered the roof caving in on the GPO. These two, the first young, the other a sparrow-like patriarch, had planned the rebellion from the beginning.

  In a neighbouring cell, curly-haired Thomas MacDonagh, Brigadier of the rebel army, was looking nostalgically at pictures of his beautiful wife, Muriel, and his little boy and girl.

  *

  Next day, Maxwell took a call from the President of the Court Martial.

  General Blackadder reported their judgement on Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh. Guilty. He had not liked doing that, they were fine chaps, but there was no doubt about their guilt. All the same, he wanted to shake their hands, especially Pearse’s. He had made a damn fine speech before the Court.

  Anticipating the usual week’s delay before confirmation and sentencing, Blackadder said, ‘We await your decision, sir.’

  ‘Shoot ’em,’ Maxwell said smoothly, putting the telephone down.

  PART ONE

  PREPARING FOR BATTLE

  12 July 1914–20 March 1916

  ‘Give us war in our time, O Lord.’

  John Mitchel

  On Sunday 12 July 1914, on a morning heavy with a golden-ochre mist, the Gladiator, a tug from Hamburg, headed for the Roetigen Lightship, at the mouth of the River Scheldt. On the bridge, the skipper, a burly, bearded and unblinking German, glanced at his watch. Ten o’clock. In a couple of hours, two yachts should arrive and rid him of his accursed cargo.

  With Dover, England, twenty-five miles to the west, the tug hove to off the Belgian coast, using the mist to keep out of sight as it rocked in a gentle North Sea swell. At the rail stood an anxious young Irishman. His high forehead half-hidden by a tweed bucket-type hat, he kept peering ahead and telling the crew, mainly through gestures, that there would be no delay.

  Minute succeeded minute and midday came. Neither of the expected yachts had engines; maybe they were far away, becalmed on that uncannily still sea. The Irishman, Darrell Figgis, was beginning to peck at his chiselled chestnut beard. From time to time, he smiled soothingly at the skipper.

  In the afternoon, the clouds cleared and the mist turned silver. Figgis’s apprehension grew. So far fortune had favoured him. The day before on the Elbe, he had even managed to bribe the pilotcum-customs officer with cigars and a few big English notes to turn a blind eye to what was in the hold. Surely things were not going to turn sour now.

  ‘Where,’ Figgis muttered to himself, ‘are those bloody yachts?’

  In Belfast, in the north of Ireland, Protestants were on the streets for the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. On 12 July in 1690, King Billy, William III, the Sovereign imported from Holland, had defeated the Catholic King James II. That famous victory had guaranteed the supremacy of Orange over Green in Ulster.

  The Twelfth was, by custom, the day when Protestants throughout the province remembered their heritage. It was a colourful day of drum-banging and fifing, of sticks twirled and tossed, of bright Orange Lodge banners held aloft, of bowler-hatted Lodge members with rolled-umbrellas and decorated sashes marching proudly through streets draped in Union Jacks and flags of the Red Hand of Ulster.

  But for three years Protestant supremacy had been under threat. The British government was intent on giving Ireland, the whole of Ireland, Home Rule. If that happened, Dublin, by sheer force of numbers, would have the whip-hand. And Dublin was dominated by a Catholic hierarchy. That, Ulster Protestants thought, would demolish their three-centuries-old tradition. But if it was to be war, they were armed, they were ready.

  This was why sixty-year-old Sir Edward Carson, the most brilliant and best-paid lawyer of the day, a healthy hypochondriac, lean, with sleek black hair and Punch-like profile, was in Belfast. He had achieved fame through cases that made legal history. Most renowned was his cross-questioning of Oscar Wilde, his contemporary at Trinity College, the ancient university of Dublin. At first Wilde had run rings round him; it led him to underestimate his foe. Then Carson enquired, drily, whether Wilde had kissed a servant boy at Oxford. ‘Oh, dear no,’ Wilde had replied, ‘he was, unfortunately, extremely ugly.’ After a telling pause that had the whole courtroom on the edge of their seats, Carson demanded to know why Wilde had said that. Why? Why? Why? Was not the implication that had he been handsome, Wilde would have wanted to kiss him? That one point pressed ruthlessly home again and again turned the trial and led ultimately to Wilde’s disgrace and imprisonment.

  The same formidable Carson now wanted to demolish something far more threatening than Oscar Wilde. In the dock now was Rome Rule in Ulster. As an Irishman, he could not bear the thought of any division of his country; and Home Rule would certainly dismember it in a way that, to Protestant loyalists like himself, was intolerable.

  Next to Carson stood James Craig, his junior by seventeen years, the big bucolic-looking MP for East Down. With a pugilist’s nose and pendulous ears, Craig was first and foremost an Ulsterman, then British, but in no way Irish.

  On this sombre Sunday 12 July 1914, rifles that had been smuggled into Larne on the east coast of Ulster in a marvellous gun-running exploit ten weeks earlier were on show for the first time, on the shoulders of thousands of marching Ulster Volunteers.

  The celebration was climaxed by Carson’s speech.

  ‘I see no hopes of peace,’ he roared, in a southern brogue that contrasted with the northern accents around him.

  No one doubted that tragedy was soon to burst on their quiet, prosperous community. No simple boundaries could be drawn. In the other three provinces of Munster, Leinster and Connaught, there were as many Unionists as in Ulster, though they were scattered over a large area. In Ulster, Home Rulers made up 40 per cent of the population; in five of the nine counties they were in the majority.

  Civil war was bound to be long and bloody.

  Carson clenched his fist and thrust it out like a lance. ‘I see nothing at present but darkness and shadows.’

  When the fiery address was over, the great civilian army, waving Union Jacks and lustily singing ‘God Save the King’, broke up and went sadly to their homes.

  By the Roetigen Lightship, it was 5 in the evening, with a swirling mist returning, when, to Figgis’s relief, a battered black-hulled yacht appeared from the west. On its side it bore the name, Kelpie. From its deck, a strong Irish voice called out over the eerie silence of the sea, ‘Is that the boat with the rifles for the Irish Volunteers?’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Figgis hissed. He called back warningly, in bad Gaelic, that it was.

  The skipper of the Gladiator muttered, ‘You are speaking the Mexican, ja?’

  Figgis nodded. It was imperative for the German at least to pretend that the cargo they were about to transfer to the yachts was destined for a rebellion in Central America.

  For a couple of hours, Conor O’Brien, a Dublin journalist whose chief hobby after sailing was climbing mountains in his bare feet, directed his small crew with unflagging energy. Great bundles wrapped in canvas and heavy wooden boxes were lowered from the tug. All the while O’Brien hummed rebel songs, happy in the knowledge that soon the Irish Volunteers who wanted Home Rule would start to match the Ulster Volunteers in weaponry.

  At 7 o’clock, as the Kelpie was casting off, a second shape loomed out of the fog, a smart white yacht with white sails. The 28-ton, 49-foot ketch bore the legend,
Asgard, an old Norse word meaning, ‘Home of the Gods’. Its skipper was Erskine Childers, aged forty-four, Irish-born, trim and handsome. A former clerk of the House of Commons in London, he had made a name for himself in 1903 with his brilliant sea-novel, The Riddle of the Sands. His crew consisted of twenty-nine-year-old Gordon Shephard, a British airman, two Donegal fishermen, and two women.

  Mary Spring-Rice was in her early thirties. She had a sparkling personality and a waspish nose. Her father was an Anglo-Irish peer and her cousin the British Ambassador in Washington.

  The second woman was Childers’s wife Molly, an American beauty with thick hair pinned in a bun and soft languid eyes. As a child, she had fractured both hips; she had, as a result, lain for twelve years on her back and walking was never easy. It was love at first sight when Childers met Mary Alden Osgood, whose family went back to the Mayflower, at a party in her home-town of Boston. That was ten years before and the Asgard had been her parents’ wedding gift. Molly had insisted on coming on this trip, leaving their sons, Erskine aged eight and Robert aged three, in the care of her husband’s maiden aunts.

  ‘Sorry,’ Figgis called down to Childers, ‘the Kelpie has left you 900 rifles and 29,000 rounds.’

  The Gladiator’s crew jabbered unceasingly as they handed the cargo down to the Asgard. The Donegal fishermen lowered it through the main hatch. It was a sultry night. Soon their muscles ached and sweat poured off them.

  Shephard and Mary Spring-Rice stored bundles of twenty rifles in the saloon with the barrels towards the centre. The men had chopped up the bunks to increase storage space but the rifles were soon at table-level. The cabins were next filled, then the passage way, then the foot of the companion hatch. Childers had the rifles taken out of the canvas and the straw wrapping removed so they could be tucked away in drawers and cupboards. Soon everyone was coated with thick black grease.