In fact, shells from the gun in Percy Lane landed near the Helga on the Liffey, drenching the crew. The skipper, thinking he was being fired on by the rebels, replied in kind. De Valera took a schoolboy’s delight in the thought of one of Helga’s guns firing on the other.
Shells shook the tower and burst a water tank but failed to dislodge the flag.
Below, a handful of soaked Volunteers believed they had been ordered to stay put. Simon Donnelly and George A. Lyons tried to tell them over the cannon-roar that they were to evacuate the building. Deafened and shell-shocked, they had to be dragged to safety.
In O’Connell Street, the British gunners were still having difficulty targeting the GPO. Solid old buildings nearby continued to be hit and to burn. With firemen off the streets, the fires were getting out of control.
Connolly’s obsession with the notion of a final bayonet charge forced him to take counter-measures. With the British occupying all the surrounding streets, it was vital to get a few small outposts into, say, the premises of the Irish Independent and in Henry Street where an armoured lorry was patrolling.
He was out organizing a barricade in Prince’s Street, part of which was The O’Rahilly’s green Ford, when a stray bullet wounded him in the left arm. He hurried back into the GPO and asked Jim Ryan to draw a screen around him.
He rolled up his sleeve. ‘Just a nick, Jim. No need to tell the others.’
After medical attention, he picked thirty men in the foyer and put them in the charge of fifteen-year-old Sean MacLoughlain who had been for a time with Heuston in the Mendicity Institute and had shown astonishing powers of leadership.
Connolly saw them into Prince’s Street and through an alley into Middle Abbey Street. Stepping into the open, he urged them on. ‘Go!’ As they followed MacLoughlain at the double, he edged out to check that they had made it to the offices of the Irish Independent. He was turning back when a sniper’s bullet ricocheted off the pavement, smashing his left ankle. He fell heavily.
When he came to, he was shuddering all over; perspiration broke out of every pore. He tried to focus his eyes, to get his bearings, then crawled, an inch at a time, leaving a snail-like trail of blood, the hundred yards to Prince’s Street.
In the GPO, they were wondering what was keeping him. As soon as he turned the corner, they rushed to pick him up.
The British doctor, Captain George Mahoney, applied a tourniquet. Connolly had suffered a compound fracture of the shin-bone. Once the flow of blood was stemmed, a bed was brought in and Connolly lowered on to it. The ends of shattered bones were protruding through the skin.
Mahoney whispered to Jim Ryan, ‘Quick with the anaesthetic.’
All Ryan could find was a weak concentration of chloroform.
Mahoney whispered again, ‘We’ll need a lakeful of that stuff to have any effect.’
While the search for a stronger anaesthetic was on, another injured man was brought in. He was so badly hurt, Fr O’Flanagan anointed him.
Ryan gave Connolly more painkillers as Mahoney released the tourniquet. He picked out fragments of shattered bone and ligatured the small blood vessels. He put on a make-shift splint and, after a long search, was able to give him an injection of morphia.
In Coalisland, Tyrone, Nora Connolly was becoming increasingly frustrated.
After delivering her father’s messages, she had holed out with the Volunteers for a couple of days in a big barn lit by a smelly oil lamp. With her were men awaiting the word to rise.
Once, someone put his head round the barn door. ‘Where are the first-aiders?’
Her arm shot up. She went to a nearby hotel to attend a rebel who had shot himself in the thumb. It was easy to deal with, but afterwards someone clapped her on the shoulder. ‘You’re the one for us.’
‘Fine,’ she said, ‘but how’d you know I wouldn’t prefer making holes to plugging them?’
By now it had become clear to her that something was wrong. She felt a strong urge to join her father.
Something told her he needed her.
At 3 o’clock, the flagstaff over the Henry Street corner of the GPO was shot away. Soon after, a shell struck the corner of the Metropole Hotel, followed a minute later by one that brought down part of the Post Office balustrade. There were several more close misses.
The O’Rahilly put his sixteen prisoners in an inner room as a precaution.
‘Whatever happens to us,’ he told the guards, ‘these men must be protected.’
The British bombardment of the GPO from Lower Abbey Street was being frustrated. Any obstacle over twelve feet high got in the way of their incendiary shells. A fire that began on one side of Lower Abbey Street spread via the barricades to the other. Cars, carts, furniture blazed like bonfires on St John’s Day. Within the hour, it was like a forest fire. It spread south to the Liffey and north to the Imperial Hotel opposite the GPO. There had never been anything like it in a British city even in wartime.
In the Fire Brigade tower, Chief Purcell fumed at his helplessness.
In the Post Office, the rebel leaders looked on, wondering if this was an alternative to a bayonet attack.
Tommies turned out to evacuate houses along Eden Quay.
‘Get out,’ they called through megaphones. ‘For your own safety, leave your homes and move along the river beyond the Custom House.’
In a crowded House of Commons, Sir Edward Carson was speaking on the Irish situation. He had been prepared to resist Home Rule in Ulster, even if it meant fighting the British army. Yet, without any sense of irony, he said: ‘Gentlemen, we should be ready to put down these rebels now and for evermore.’
John Redmond was not to be outdone in loyalty to the Crown. With high colour in his cheeks, he hastened to express the feeling of detestation and horror with which he and his Nationalist colleagues heard of events in Dublin. It was a feeling shared by the vast majority of the people in Ireland.
‘Is the insanity of a few to turn all her marvellous victories of the last few years into irreparable defeat?’
*
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 th
e 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.
In line with Lowe’s strategy, a large body of soldiers met up at the Castle intending to cross the Liffey by Grattan Bridge and move east to put a further squeeze on the GPO.
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.
In Boland’s, de Valera, with his outposts overrun, knew he could not hold out much longer.
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.
Hamilton Norway and his wife were in their sitting-room, which overlooked Grafton Street, when the looting began there.
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.
At 6.50 p.m., the GPO Battalion heard a loud bang as a shell hit the Imperial Hotel above Clery’s store.
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 9.30 p.m., Hopkins & Hopkins, the jewellers on the quays, set alight half an hour before, finally surrendered to the flames in an ear-splitting roar.
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 rebels’ situation was becoming ever more critical.
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 be
fore 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.
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