Rebels

by Peter De Rosa

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ Nathan enquired.

  ‘Swoop on Liberty Hall for a start. It’s a nest of rebels. The DMP have reported strange goings-on there for weeks.’

  ‘You are not suggesting that a few Volunteers with outdated rifles and pikes are a match for our army?’

  Wimborne had seen military service. He had to admit the rebels had no chance against professionals. Nathan promised that first thing in the morning he would cable Birrell and talk the matter over with the military.

  In Scotland Yard, London, the Head of the CID, Basil Thomson, stood in his office with his binoculars to his eyes, scanning the foggy night sky over the Thames. It was his turn for Zeppelin duty.

  The LZ 90s with their 5,000-pound loads of incendiaries had been warned by the Kaiser to keep well clear of his cousin in Buckingham Palace and of other important sites like St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. They were, however, proving to be a menace in the dock area of London. It was not easy for searchlights to pick them out at around 8,000 feet so that gunners could engage them with the new blue-sparking phosphorus shells.

  At 10.30 p.m., the telephone rang. ‘Yes?’

  The caller said, ‘BT, that stranger who arrived in a boat at Currahane. Do you know who he is?’

  Thomson recognized the voice. Of late, they had been in almost constant contact, though he had never once asked him for his sources or visited Room 40.

  ‘You’re joking,’ he gasped.

  Captain Hall, pleased to have surprised his unflappable colleague, said, ‘He’ll be over early tomorrow evening.’

  MacDonagh and Plunkett were not too concerned about MacNeill’s countermand. In a conflict of loyalties they thought that most Volunteer officers, being IRB men, would obey the Military Council. They overlooked the fact that few were aware of a split between MacNeill and the Brotherhood. Further, the order was bound to confuse the rank and file, especially as it was in some cases borne by IRB men, like Jim Ryan.

  They went from Rathgar to 27 Hardwicke Street, where McDermott was spending the night.

  ‘Once again the Irish are betrayed,’ he said chokingly, tearing his pyjama jacket in his hurry to get dressed.

  He thought the Military Council should meet at once and discuss this new development. They contacted Pearse but failed to reach Connolly, Clarke and Kent.

  The rising had to go on, of course, but with three important colleagues missing they decided at this late hour to leave messages at their hide-outs suggesting the full Military Council meet at the Hall for breakfast.

  MacNeill had smoked many a pipe waiting for MacDonagh, his Brigade Commander, to return or send a message. This seemed to him one more item added to a long list of treachery.

  He might at least be able to influence MacDonagh’s immediate subordinate, his ADC, Eamon de Valera, who was a serious-minded young man. He wrote him a message:

  As Chief of Staff, I have ordered and hereby order that no movement whatsoever of the Irish Volunteers is to be made today. You will carry out this order in your own command and make it known to other commands. Eoin MacNeill.

  Then he hit on an idea that would have worried the Military Council far more than his message to provincial commandants. At midnight he cycled into town to the offices of the best-selling Irish paper, the Sunday Independent.

  He told Cogley, the sub-editor, that he wanted a notice in the morning’s edition. ‘In bold type, please.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. You’re just in time.’

  He took down at MacNeill’s dictation:

  Owing to the very critical position, all orders given to the Irish Volunteers for tomorrow, Easter Sunday, are hereby rescinded, and no parades, marches, or other movements of the Irish Volunteers will take place. Each individual Volunteer will obey this order strictly in every particular.

  Nora Connolly was in Coalisland, County Tyrone. She had been drafted there for Red Cross work. It was an assignment that pleased her. When the Ulstermen of the Irish Volunteers went to Dublin for the rising she would go too.

  Her father would be proud of them, she thought. They were fifty men, good and true, well-equipped with modern weapons.

  When Colm O’Lochlainn arrived at their HQ, a large hut lit by hurricane lamps, Nora was overjoyed. He had surely come to give them their marching orders.

  ‘The Chief of Staff,’ he said, ‘has cancelled manoeuvres.’

  She was stunned. It was impossible.

  All around her, men were mumbling, ‘Nothing for it. Might as well go back to Belfast.’

  Nora gathered round her a handful of Red Cross girls.

  With characteristic fire, she said, ‘I’m catching the morning mail train to Dublin. Are you coming with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ they said.

  Eamonn Kent arrived home from his battalion HQ at 3 in the morning, all keyed up after issuing his men with final orders for manoeuvres next day.

  On his door was a note from Cathal Brugha telling him of MacNeill’s notice in the Sunday Independent.

  He woke up his wife.

  ‘MacNeill,’ he groaned, ‘has ruined us, he’s stopped the rising.’

  Without bidding Aine goodbye, he immediately sped along the river to Liberty Hall where guards barred his way.

  ‘I must see Connolly at once.’

  They told him it was impossible. He had just gone to bed after an exhausting day.

  Kent walked up to the Metropole. The night clerk said, ‘Mr Plunkett gave strict orders not to be woken up till nine.’

  When he trudged back home, bitter and full of foreboding, his wife said, ‘You must get to bed, darling.’

  ‘If I went to bed now,’ he retorted, ‘I would sleep on dynamite.’

  Within minutes he fell fast asleep, exhausted.

  Late Saturday night in New York, early Easter in Ireland, Dan Cohalan phoned McGarrity.

  He had received a message from Valentia Island, somewhat premature: ‘Tom successfully operated today.’ It was signed ‘O’Sullivan’.

  ‘It’s started, Joe.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  McGarrity found his large mansion too small to contain his joy. He went out to walk the streets of Philadelphia alone.

  The phone rang beside Nathan’s bed. ‘What in the name of—?’

  He looked at his alarm clock. It showed 6 a.m. And this was Easter Sunday! ‘What is it?’

  His sleepiness vanished instantly. The second of the castaways had been picked up and was singing beautifully.

  Nathan was quivering with excitement. Something criminal had been planned but he was never more certain of anything in his whole life than that there would be no rebellion this Easter.

  Still, he was a lucky man.

  The ship bearing arms for the rising was at the bottom of the sea. And Roger Casement, the leader of it, was already – he glanced again at his clock – out of harm’s way in England.

  The mail train to London stopped at Willesden Junction. Casement was in a reserved compartment, handcuffed to Major Moul. He had spent another sleepless night and was still not over his seasickness.

  In Arbour Hill, they had taken away his collar, tie and laces in case he tried to take his life. Fortunately, they had missed the more deadly instrument hidden in his jacket.

  Into the carriage at Willesden stepped Chief Inspector Joseph Sandercock of New Scotland Yard, a burly man with a kindly soul.

  ‘Sir Roger, pleased to meet you, sir.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘You are now in my charge.’

  The signalman waved a flag and, to the sound of church bells summoning Catholics to the first Mass of Easter, the train proceeded to Euston Station.

  The Belfast mail train pulled into Amiens Street Station, Dublin. Before it shunted to a halt Nora Connolly and her friends jumped out and ran the few hundred yards to Liberty Hall.

  ‘Sorry, girls, you can’t come in.’

  Fortunately, an aide behind the armed guard recognized Nora.

  �
� ’Tis so, lass,’ he said, ‘your da got to bed after 3.’

  ‘D’you think,’ Nora said, out of breath, ‘I’d want to wake him if it were not an emergency?’

  ‘Wait here and I’ll go see.’

  Connolly was just getting up when Nora burst in on him. He was in a suit with an open collar. She told him of MacNeill’s countermand.

  ‘Daddy, does this mean there won’t be a rising?’

  She started to cry and, to her surprise, for she had never witnessed the like before, she saw two big tears run down his cheeks.

  ‘If there isn’t one, Nora, we’d better pray God to send an earthquake or a tidal wave to bury us under the sea.’ His voice grew strong. ‘It would disgrace our generation.’

  ‘In Tyrone,’ she said, ‘they are fifty men waiting.’

  ‘But I heard tell, Nora, there wouldn’t be fifty in all Ulster to join us as things stand.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ she insisted. ‘Ask the other girls.’

  He had them brought in and they confirmed her story.

  ‘Thanks, girls,’ he said, ‘leave me. I have a job for you in a few minutes.’

  As he scribbled addresses on different pieces of paper, he called to an aide. ‘Get me six of our lads, one for each girl. They are to repeat what they told me to the Military Council and ask them all to join me here at the double.’

  Nora went to McDermott’s place. He had been sleeping in his clothes like her father, with armed guards keeping watch. He heard her out. Then he gave her a hug.

  ‘Tell your dad I’ll be along soon.’

  When Nora returned to her father’s office, she found him in a smart new uniform.

  ‘The first time you’ve seen it, eh?’ he said, with a grin.

  He put on his sword-belt and as she went to buckle it for him, he put his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘You should be doing this for a young man and not an oldster like me.’

  He was bubbling with joy, as if things were going to turn out well after all. In spite of the lack of sleep, his grey eyes were twinkling and he was singing in his tuneless voice,

  We’ve got another saviour now,

  That saviour is the sword.

  Pearse and Willie had been staying at the home of Sean T. O’Kelly. They had risen early for Easter Mass and Communion. In a church reeking of incense the purple drapes had been removed from the statues, there were lilies on the altars, the Paschal candle was lit, the bells rang out again after the Lenten silence. They prayed for the success of the rising, that Ireland, like Jesus crucified, would rise again.

  In good spirits, they went back to O’Kelly’s place for breakfast. There Pearse received his summons to Liberty Hall.

  Monteith woke to bad news. An outlying corps of the Tralee Volunteers had concluded that, without German arms, the rising could not succeed; they refused to take part.

  Minutes later, someone reported to him the Killorglin tragedy in which two Volunteers had been drowned.

  He was at a low ebb when, at 8.30 a.m., two boys came in utterly exhausted. They had walked thirty miles through most of the night. Their message was the first hopeful sign: the men of Dingle were on their way and would arrive about 11 a.m.

  Monteith gave the two brave lads a few shillings and told them to buy themselves breakfast in town.

  Things improved a little more, when the local Cumann na mBan, the women’s branch of the Irish Volunteers, arrived to prepare his own breakfast.

  *

  By 9 a.m., the Military Council started arriving at Liberty Hall. Clarke was first, with McDermott a close second. Nora cooked them bacon and eggs in the cavernous kitchen below stairs.

  Before he left the Metropole Joe Plunkett, knowing his wedding was off, drew up his will on the first scrap of paper that came to hand and asked his brothers to witness it. He bequeathed everything he possessed to Grace Gifford. He thrust it in his pocket and, buttoning his tunic high to mask his surgical wound, went as fast as weak legs would carry him to the Hall.

  At table, Connolly was handed a copy of the Sunday Independent. He read out MacNeill’s statement in his gruff voice. After an incredulous silence, they all started talking at once. The greatest Irish rising in centuries had been cancelled by the Chief of Staff through a notice in a Sunday paper. Clarke was incensed that MacNeill had chosen to put it in a capitalist rag that he himself refused even to sell in his shop.

  This notice would seem official even to members of the IRB. They had had a hard enough job telling their men that the manoeuvres were the rising; how could they convince them that officially cancelled manoeuvres were the rising?

  Words like ‘humiliation’, ‘absurdity’, ‘fiasco’ filled the air. This seemed to be the fate of every Irish rising against the British.

  Pearse alone suggested that MacNeill was acting out of principle not pique. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘who are we to complain if he acts without consulting us?’

  Nathan scanned his Sunday Independent at breakfast.

  Any lingering doubt about the wisdom of waiting on official approval from London before suppressing the Sinn Feiners was dispelled. Their Chief of Staff had cancelled ‘manoeuvres’, doubtless because of the loss of German arms.

  ‘Anything wrong, Matthew?’ his sister-in-law, Estelle, said over the marmalade.

  ‘Au contraire, my dear. Everything is very right.’

  Across the land many Volunteers, reading the Sunday Independent, smashed their rifles on walls in disgust. Some of the more perceptive realized that what had happened in Tralee would force the Administration to round them up. Why, then, call off a scrap that was now inevitable?

  Others, of a more philosophical frame of mind, began marking their cards for next day’s Grand National at Fairyhouse in County Meath.

  The Military Council had barely begun their deliberations upstairs when an aide came in to say the police were surrounding the place. He explained it was due to the fact that 250 pounds of gelignite had been stolen from a quarry in Tallaght.

  ‘They followed it here.’

  Connolly went to make sure his men were on the alert. He came back to find Tom Clarke arguing that this police presence was an earnest of things to come.

  ‘Do you guys reckon the Castle is gonna leave us alone now they know we’ve links with Germany, now they know we were all set to take ’em on?’

  Nathan turned up at the Castle at 9.30 a.m.

  The views of his military advisers coincided with his own. The notice in the Sunday Independent had clinched matters. Not that Nathan was one to take the opposition lightly. When the DMP told him of the haul of gelignite he said, ‘It would not surprise me if Liberty Hall is a bomb-making factory.’

  From Euston Station Casement was whisked off under heavy guard to Scotland Yard. He was led through the courtyard, up a huge curved staircase and along broad corridors. An order came from on high: he was not to be permitted to wash or shave. By 10 a.m., feeling thoroughly sick and humiliated, he was seated in Thomson’s office overlooking the Thames.

  His two interrogators had longed for many months to interview him. In the clever dirty business of counter-espionage none came cleverer or dirtier.

  Basil Thomson was Assistant Commissioner of Police at the Yard and boss of both the CID and the Special Branch which specialized in political subversion. Suave, with neat hair and moustache, he wore a dark tie under a wing-collar. Reginald Hall was in smart naval uniform. Short, rosy-cheeked and bald apart from tufts of greying hair, he was often excitable. They had interrogated many suspects together, including, lately, the beautiful Marguerite Zeller, known as Mata Hari.

  With Thomson calculating and Hall acting from impulse, they had acquired an almost telepathic rapport. Each knew when to let the other speak, when to jump in himself. Sometimes they both remained stonily silent, waiting for the suspect to offer them some crumb of information, anything to break the intolerable silence of two such powerful personalities.

  Outside the office, Hall said, ‘Righ
t, BT, let’s go and sort this traitor out,’ and Thomson added, wrinkling his nose, ‘I’m scared of contaminating myself but it has to be done, I suppose.’

  ‘How do you do,’ Thomson said, affably, as he entered. ‘Please sit down, won’t you, while we all get acquainted.’

  Casement was thin and cadaverous, his thick black hair greying, his forehead a network of wrinkles. The mahogany-coloured hands holding up his trousers twitched with suppressed anxiety.

  In one satisfied glance, Hall saw an exhausted and broken man. His rumpled appearance, from stubbly face to laceless boots, contrasted starkly with their own immaculate turn-out.

  ‘First,’ Thomson said, touching his horn-rimmed glasses, ‘your name, please.’

  ‘Surely you know it.’

  Thomson smiled suavely. ‘I have to guard against the possibility of impersonation.’

  ‘Very well.’ He joined his hands, with the finger-tips touching. ‘I am Sir Roger Casement.’

  ‘So your comrades informed us.’

  Casement looked startled. ‘I thought—’

  ‘You thought,’ Thomson said, with a light chuckle, ‘that Monteith and Bailey, that’s his real name, is it not, would be faithful to you?’

  ‘I thought—’

  Casement broke off, a small smile brightening his lips. They were alive, then, since someone must have identified Beverley. He did not believe they had betrayed him. Certainly not Monteith.

  ‘We are keeping them in Ireland, Tralee to be precise, for the time being. With a man named Stack and others.’

  Hall judged that Casement was too vain to be afraid of them or of anyone. That was the weak point he would home in on: his vanity. But something was bothering the prisoner, of that he was certain.

  ‘I am not endeavouring to shield myself at all,’ Casement said. ‘I did go to Germany. All I ask is that you believe I have done nothing treacherous to my country.’

  Thomson, a former prisoner governor, was an expert on the criminal mind. In his view, Casement was pleased to be the centre of attraction because his crime was so hideous and his execution so certain. It was always harder to break a man who had nothing to lose.