By now, nowhere was safe. Not the cellar, and certainly not the hall. The water pressure dipped, the stream got weaker, dribbled and stopped altogether. The O’Rahilly tossed his hose away in disgust.
Most of the men gathered in the large rear sorting-rooms and the covered courtyard whose glass cracked and sent down splinters and molten streams.
The retreat had to be well organized, for there were now 400 men in the GPO. Beams were burning and ceilings collapsing in blinding, choking smoke and showers of sparks. There was the constant zip-zipping of machine-guns and their own abandoned small-arms ammunition was going off like fire-crackers on the upper floors.
McDermott told Jim Ryan and his women assistants to prepare the wounded for transfer to Jervis Street Hospital. Mattresses and blankets would serve as stretchers. Louise Gavan Duffy, who had scarcely been off her feet during the entire week, was put in charge of the women.
Captain Mahoney, who was going with the wounded, said to Connolly, ‘I’ll just prepare you for the journey.’
‘I am not leaving with the wounded, Captain.’
‘If you don’t get hospital treatment soon,’ Mahoney warned, ‘gangrene will set in and you’ll be no damn use to anyone.’
Connolly was not in a listening mood.
Winifred Carney was not leaving her boss and Elizabeth O’Farrell and Julia Grenan were staying with the main party to nurse any fresh casualties in the retreat.
Jim Ryan stood with Father O’Flanagan and the few women auxiliaries next to the stretcher cases, comforting them, offering them cigarettes, readying them to go as soon as Pearse gave the word.
It was almost 7 o’clock when the 2nd Battalion of the 6th South Staffords approached North King Street to the west of the GPO. They had left Trinity with orders to proceed to the Four Courts area to neutralize rebel snipers.
Mrs Hickey, a store-keeper who lived at No 168, had just crossed to the dairy when one of Daly’s men came running.
‘Get off the street.’
She rushed into the nearest house which was opposite her own.
‘Stay here, dear,’ the Corcorans said, ‘till it quietens down.’
Her husband, Tom, was still at home, chatting with a neighbour Pete Connolly, the father of eight. Hickey pointed to a couple of mirrors. ‘Help me shift those, will you?’
Suddenly objects in the houses began to rock and tremble at the tramp of soldiers.
Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington was in a daze. A doctor had given her Mr Coade’s address and, that afternoon, she had paid him a call.
‘Yes, Ma’am,’ he said brokenly, ‘I did see your man in the mortuary and several others.’
‘You’re certain it was—?’
He nodded. ‘I heard him on his soap-box many a time.’
At last Hanna had confirmation that her darling, fearless, talkative man had been silenced for ever. She had walked home, determined to be brave for the boy’s sake, and immersed herself in household chores.
Around 7 p.m., as the maid was getting little Owen into his green pyjamas, a fresh nightmare began. The girl saw soldiers lining up in the street. To protect the boy, she grabbed him, and dashed out the back door. Hanna, realizing soldiers would be out there, too, rushed to a window and screamed, ‘Come back, you’ll both be shot.’
She ran downstairs just as rifle fire shattered the windows. Next moment, soldiers were smashing their way in with rifle butts, forty of them screaming like wild wounded animals.
In command was Colonel Allatt. With him were a junior officer, Lieutenant Brown, and Captain Colthurst.
Some soldiers thundered upstairs and up on to the roof.
Colthurst, commanding a squad with fixed bayonets, stood over Hanna, Owen and the maid, and shouted, ‘Hands up.’
As Owen pressed up against her, Hanna put her arms around him, saying, ‘Don’t worry, my son, these are the defenders of women and children.’
The O’Rahilly kept his promise. He brought the prisoners up from the cellars where they had spent three hours thinking the building would collapse on top of them any minute or they would roast alive.
He shook the hands of each. ‘We shall probably never meet again. Goodbye and good luck.’
He gave their leader, Lieutenant Chalmers, a big white flag.
From the Henry Street exit, they made their way to Moore Lane where they ran into fire from their own Sherwood Foresters at the barricade. One man fell with a bullet in the head, Chalmers was hit in the thigh. A sergeant helped him over a wall and into the safety of a cellar.
Above the roar of the fire, McDermott managed to yell in The O’Rahilly’s ear the plan of escape. They were to head for the factory in Great Britain Street. Once dug in there, they would try to link up with Daly’s Four Courts Battalion. Combining, they might be able to break out of the city to the north.
The O’Rahilly gathered his advance party of thirty or so men around him. ‘So, boys,’ he said, ‘ ’twill either be a glorious victory or a glorious death.’
Louise Gavan Duffy had piled the food in the centre of the foyer. Men kept taking evasive action from falling timber as they filled their knapsacks with tea, cakes, sugar, hams. There was enough food for a month. Desmond Fitzgerald, having put them on economy rations for days, found this abundance embarrassing.
In the mêlée, two men carrying hair-trigger shot-guns shot themselves in the foot. Fitzgerald cut their shoes off and bandaged their feet and Pearse ordered them to unload.
The O’Rahilly went for a last word with Fitzgerald, who was to stay with the wounded. He was still hurt that comrades like Pearse and Plunkett had not trusted him. Not that he bore them any malice.
‘Goodbye, Desmond. This is the end for certain now.’
‘It seems so, Michael.’
‘I thought we’d only hold out a day. The only thing that grieves me,’ he said, with that ringing laugh of his, ‘is that so many of my lads are good Gaelic speakers.’ He put his haversack on his back. ‘Never mind, when it comes to the end I’ll say, “English-speakers to the fore, Irish-speakers to the rear. Charge!” ’
Fitzgerald knew this was untrue. When the charge came, Michael Joseph O’Rahilly himself would be in front with nothing between him and enemy bullets save the mercy of God.
‘Wouldn’t it be odd,’ was his friend’s parting quip, ‘if I had missed this and then caught my death of cold running for a train?’
Having embraced Fitzgerald, he paused for a last word with Fr O’Flanagan. He went on his knees and, with head bowed, asked for a last absolution and blessing.
He rose, saying, ‘Father, we shall never meet again in this world.’
The rebels remaining prayed frantically as The O’Rahilly took his place at the head of his men at the Henry Street gate.
‘Fix bayonets.’ He took out his Mauser pistol and included everyone in a big round ‘Cheerio’.
Pearse gave him a final meaningful handshake before shouting, ‘Now!’ and The O’Rahilly’s men went out with Sean McDermott roaring them on.
They went from Henry Street up Henry Lane. In Moore Street, they came to their own barricade and gingerly parted it. Directly ahead was the enemy barricade. Though the entire street was eerily silent, they knew the British were peering at them down the barrels of their guns.
The O’Rahilly divided his men into two. He was to head one party up the left side of the street.
After a great gulp of air, ‘This is it, lads,’ and with a yell he led off, running.
In narrow streets devoid of cover, the fire from the British rifles was deafening. Of the thirty rebels, twenty-one fell.
The O’Rahilly was hit in the stomach.
He felt the bullet less as an implosion than as some vital organ exploding in a bloody flux. He dropped to one knee, doubled up in pain.
Comrades had fallen around him. The few who were unhurt joined him. Hugging the side of the street, one hand to his wound, the other grasping his Mauser, he led a second assault.
To
draw fire from his men, he went on a zigzag course across the street. He was not hit again until he was near the barricade at the corner of Sackville Place. He barely had strength to pitch himself round the corner and drag himself into a doorway.
He knew he was done for. With an effort, he drew from his breast pocket a note from his son Aodghan. It had a bullet through it. On the back, in the fierce light from the burning GPO, he pencilled a few words with a remarkably steady hand.
He told his wife he had been wounded leading a charge. ‘I got more than one bullet, I think.’ A few words of love. He folded the paper and wrote, ‘Please deliver this to Nancie O’Rahilly, 40 Herbert Park.’
With the last of this strength, he replaced the note in his pocket.
In the GPO, the Red Cross party was about to leave. It was not easy getting the makeshift stretchers through the holes in the walls, and some men were in a serious condition.
Tom Clarke took Lesley Price by the hand.
‘If you happen to see my wife—’ He blinked. ‘Tell her the men were wonderful to the—’
It took half an hour for Fitzgerald to get the wounded through the walls of intervening houses, across a roof, up a ladder and into the bar of the Coliseum Theatre. Jim Ryan went behind the bar and said, for a joke, ‘Last drinks, gentlemen.’
The priest was impressed that, with oceans of liquor at their disposal, no one touched a drop.
Captain Mahoney was called back to the GPO to fix the cage over Connolly’s leg which someone had tripped over. By then the place was a complete inferno. The two men eyed each other as Connolly squeezed his hand in gratitude.
Mahoney returned to the Coliseum to find the wounded had been laid on a thick-pile carpet. The electricity was off so they had only lamps to see by.
They wanted to run up a Red Cross flag from the pole on the roof but, by the rules of war, they had to get rid of their arms and ammunition first. Fitzgerald and Fr O’Flanagan offered to take them back through the tunnels and dump them.
On the way, they ran into a sea of fire. To avoid being cremated, they climbed down into a yard and up on to the next roof. The priest failed to see an overhead telegraph wire and nearly decapitated himself.
Back in the Coliseum, they hoisted the Red Cross flag. But it was now clear that the wall tunnels had turned into channels of fire. It was only a matter of time before the Coliseum met the fate of the GPO.
They kept quiet about this and persuaded everyone to try and sleep. It was not possible to lower the safety-curtain since it operated electrically, but they all settled down in the plushest seats in the Dress Circle.
Colthurst was not only concerned about Hanna’s sisters. Major Vane, too, was proving to be a damned nuisance.
It was vital to get some evidence against Skeffy. This house, he was sure, would provide plenty of that.
Hanna, Owen and the maid were taken to a front room where soldiers with fixed bayonets watched over them.
‘If they move,’ Colthurst ordered, ‘shoot them.’
With the key he had taken from Skeffy’s body he unlocked the study. Over the desk was a picture of the Kaiser. Colthurst took it down. A promising start.
He went through Skeffy’s papers. There were masses of articles, manuscripts of plays, innumerable rejection slips from publishers. Also his love-letters to his wife before they were married, tied in blue ribbon.
Hanna felt their whole world was in that study and this monster was taking it apart. She heard him reading aloud from their letters in what sounded an obscene parody of love.
A soldier came down the stairs, triumphantly waving a sheet of paper. It was Owen’s drawing of a Zeppelin pasted on his bedroom wall.
By 8.30, not knowing how the advance party had fared, the first of the three main waves prepared to leave the GPO. They could not wait to escape the inferno.
Michael Collins was in charge. He had made up his mind that if he got out of this alive, never again would he be a duck in a British duck-shoot.
Once in the open, they ran single-file. They, too, came under heavy fire in Moore Street. Those who survived fled into alley ways or burst into houses and barricaded themselves in.
The second group followed the same route and met the same fate.
Pearse, like the skipper of a ship, toured the GPO to make sure no one was left behind. He came back, covered with grime, his iodine-coloured eyes swollen with the heat.
With pride, he took a last look round. They had lasted far longer than he had dared to hope.
Connolly was in the final party. It moved him to see one of his stretcher-bearers, a mere lad, shielding him with his body.
As they tried to break into a stable, one man shot himself. Connolly grabbed the rifle from Richard Grogan and said, ‘Help him.’
Inside, they found a family that had been trapped there for the whole week. They were half-crazy with hunger and with fear of the fire that was moving relentlessly in their direction.
‘For God’s sake,’ Connolly yelled, ‘get me out of this hole.’
Elizabeth O’Farrell and Julia Grenan were in McDermott’s group. Some rebels had taken refuge in a house in Henry Place and McDermott yelled for them to move out and Joe Plunkett, waving his sword, cried weakly, ‘Come out, ye cowardly curs!’
With bullets whizzing from every side, they rushed into Moore Lane. Elizabeth stumbled and fell. Sean McGarry rushed out of a house and picked her up and took her into the parlour of Cogan’s on the corner of Henry Lane and Moore Street.
It was mere chance that the Provisional government came together in one spot. They were joined by Jim Ryan who had made his way back from the Coliseum over the rooftops. He had no medicines though several had just been wounded.
Behind Cogan’s was the yard of a small workman’s cottage belonging to the McKane family. The parents and their fourteen children had been holed up for two days without food, saying their rosary. Desperate to get in, a rebel broke the glass panel on the door. As he did so, his gun went off.
Tom McKane, about to open the door, fell, a bawling baby clutched in his arms. The bullet had passed through his shoulder and hit his sixteen-year-old daughter Bridget in the right temple.
The party burst in as Mrs McKane screamed, ‘O God, where’s Daddy?’
Ryan saw that the girl was dead but he might be able to save the father.
He ordered, ‘Get me all the linen you have.’
The wife, in shock, was crying, ‘O me darlin’ man is dying. I must fetch a priest.’
‘He’ll be fine,’ Ryan said, ‘just get me an old sheet for bandages.’
Mrs McKane, wrapping her shawl around her, was soon at the door, with a sheet for a flag.
Someone pleaded, ‘Don’t go, missis, it’s rainin’ bullets out there.’
She took no notice and, remarkably, returned in a few minutes with a Fr McInerney who anointed her husband and several others of the wounded.
Connolly had arrived with his secretary and was being served beef tea. He called out to Mrs McKane, ‘You are a very brave woman, ma’am.’
Elizabeth O’Farrell asked him how he felt.
His gruff reply was, ‘Bad. The soldier who plugged me did a good day’s work for the British.’
On Moore Street, Sean MacLoughlain was now in charge of building a barricade across the street.
George Plunkett heard an Irishman crying out for water in a side street. He zigzagged his way across Moore Lane, only to find the man was in khaki. He lifted him on his shoulder and ran back across the road. The British, realizing this was an act of mercy, held their fire. The wounded man was taken to Cogan’s where he spent the night in rebel company.
The injured were made comfortable on mattresses at the front of the McKane cottage and Elizabeth spent the night nursing them. It was very noisy as Pearse had ordered the able-bodied men to start burrowing from house to house towards the top of Moore Street.
With The O’Rahilly gone, Connolly proposed that MacLoughlain should take over
. ‘Let him have my rank.’
Thus the rising ended with a fifteen-year-old as Commandant of the Dublin Division.
Pearse and Willie went upstairs and lay side by side on a table. But sleep still eluded Pearse. After twisting and turning for an hour, he went down to see how the tunnelling was progressing.
On the way, he passed men who were snoring and others who were quietly saying the rosary.
Not far away, in a deserted lane, Michael O’Rahilly, the man who had opposed the rising, was stretched out, gasping for water. A woman in a cottage heard him and tried to help but British bullets drove her back.
He was mumbling in Irish, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’
Hanna clasped her little boy to her breast. She was afraid that this day would remain in his memory like an immovable stone all his life.
In three hours, the soldiers tore the house to bits. They removed books, pictures, toys, linen and household goods. As they opened the drawers upstairs and found Hanna’s underclothes, she could hear them jeering.
One of the soldiers guarding them, muttered in a Belfast accent, ‘I didn’t enlist for this. They’re taking the whole bloomin’ house with them.’
Outside, they commandeered a car and ordered the women in it to take the confiscated goods to the Barracks. They followed at a distance in case of snipers, leaving an armed guard on the house all night.
Colthurst was very pleased with how things had gone.
Back at Portobello, he filed some of Skeffy’s papers which he classified as incriminating and which he booked in as having been found on him when he was captured.
Major Vane had been making every effort to have Colthurst put under arrest. When the new CO at Portobello, Lieutenant-Colonel McCammond, refused to do anything, he went to the Castle. General Friend and Colonel Kennard told him to be a sensible chap and not make a fuss.
Rebels Page 44
