As Mallin lowered the flag, de Valera, sombre-faced with black pouches under strange staring eyes, was at the head of his men. In front of him marched a Red Cross official with a white flag, and he was flanked by armed guards.
They crossed Mount Street Bridge where so many soldiers had been gunned down by his men, along Northumberland Road where a handful of rebels had for hours held a whole army at bay.
It hurt de Valera to see women offering British troops tea and sandwiches. Did they not realize that Ireland had as much right to freedom as Belgium?
He called out, in a tired, croaky voice, ‘If only you had come out with knives and forks.’
At the Royal Dublin Society, his 117 men were herded into horse-boxes. He himself was treated as an officer and locked in the Weights and Measures Office at the Town Hall.
From a top-floor window of the Shelbourne, the British CO pointed to the bare flag-pole over the College of Surgeons.
Captain Wheeler said, ‘Tell the United Services Club to hold their fire while I accept the surrender.’
Mallin and the Countess came out of the side door of the College and saluted. He had no gun, only a walking-stick which he gave up. She handed over her automatic.
‘Have your men lay down their arms inside,’ Wheeler said, ‘then form up out here. How many are you, by the way?’
Mallin said, ‘Apart from us two, 109 men and 10 women.’
Wheeler inspected the building and said, ‘Everything seems to be in order.’ He bowed to the Countess, who was a distant relative of his. ‘If you’d care to travel in my car, ma’am?’
‘No offence, old feller,’ she said, ‘but I much prefer to tag along with my own.’
Under heavy guard, the Citizen Army marched down Grafton Street to Trinity. An elderly College servant came out and shrieked, ‘Shoot every one of the bastards.’
The glimpse they had of O’Connell Street amazed them. It seemed as if only the Pillar and O’Connell’s monument were standing.
As they wheeled left along Dame Street to the Castle they were in for an even worse surprise. Crowds lined the way, pelting them with everything they could find. They were hungry, they had been without work for a week, some had lost family or friends, many of their houses had been destroyed.
Mallin was in uniform but with a trilby in place of the cap which a bullet had pierced. The Countess was in a slouch hat topped by an ostrich feather, green Irish Citizen Army tunic and riding breeches.
She was mocked unmercifully.
‘Who does she think she is, Joan of Arc?’
‘Is it a man or a woman?’
‘No wonder the rebellion was such a mess when it was run by women in trousers.’
The rebels had never seen such venom. Dubliners hated them far more than they had ever hated the British. They were even waving Union Jacks in their faces. If the soldiers had not kept them at bayonet-point, they would have torn Mallin’s men limb from limb.
The rebels had fought and died for these people but they had not won their hearts.
As MacDonagh went with the priests to the other garrisons, they corrected an illusion he had been under all week.
‘Outside Dublin,’ Father Aloysius said gently, ‘there has hardly been any fighting at all. Some in Galway, I believe, and in Wexford.’
MacDonagh sat back, knowing that all their efforts had been wasted and he himself was doomed.
Near Basin Lane, the car came to a halt at a barricade. They walked from there to the South Dublin Union. A shot rang out, narrowly missing them. The priests dropped to their knees in fright; MacDonagh did not flinch.
A British officer ran up to apologize. ‘The soldier who fired that shot is under arrest.’
‘What shot?’ asked MacDonagh.
Dick Mulcahy, who had been fighting in north County Dublin, was permitted to see Pearse in Arbour Hill to check on the surrender.
He was led down a grim corridor to the third cell on the right. Pearse was lying on a trestle. Beside him was a glass of water and a few biscuits.
Mulcahy saluted and stood to attention. ‘I’ve come about your orders, sir.’
‘All our forces, Mr Mulcahy, must surrender.’
‘Nothing else, sir?’
Pearse sadly shook his head.
Mulcahy tried to say, ‘Beannacht De agat, God bless you,’ but the words died in his throat. He saluted and left.
Later, two Volunteers came from Enniscorthy where they had taken over the town and ambushed the RIC barracks. Pearse wrote a special note of surrender for the Wexford men. As he handed it over, he whispered, ‘Make sure you hide your arms. There will come another time.’
From the Castle, Mallin and the women were transported to Kilmainham Jail. The Countess was the only one of seventy women to be put in solitary. She knew what that meant.
The rest of the Stephen’s Green contingent were transferred to Richmond Barracks where they joined their other comrades.
McDermott greeted Liam O’Briain and, noticing he had brought an old quilt, said, ‘That’d be grand for Joe, he’s in a bad way.’ Sean folded it a few times and placed it under Plunkett’s head as he lay cold and quivering on the bare boards. Major surgery, the week’s rising, followed by a night in the open had almost finished him off.
Clarke, thinking this might be his last chance before he was executed, pencilled a letter to his wife.
Dear K,
I am in better health and more satisfied than for many a day – all will be well eventually – but this is goodbye and now you are ever before me to cheer me – God bless you and the boys. Let them be proud to follow the same path – Sean is with me and McGarry, all well – they are heroes. I’m full of pride, my love. Yours, Tom.
On the back of it, McDermott added:
Dear Caty,
I never felt so proud of the boys. ’Tis worth a life of suffering to be with them for one hour. God bless you all, Sean.
Clarke unfastened his watch and gave it to a soldier. ‘If you can get this note delivered to my wife, this is for you.’
The Tommy took it. ‘Do my best, mate.’
Kattie did get the letter but only after three weeks. And much was to happen before then.
In the Viceregal Lodge, Birrell was penning his last letter to the Prime Minister. At 3 p.m., he was able to report that all the rebels had surrendered, bar the Jacob’s contingent, and they were surrounded. Only a thousand or so rebels had taken part; outside Dublin, there had been almost no trouble.
He wrote:
It is not an Irish Rebellion – it would be a pity if ex post facto it became one, and was added to the long and melancholy list of Irish Rebellions.
You will I am sure let me know as quickly as possible what you wish me to do in the general interest of the country. I fully appreciate my own position, but I am not in the least frightened of the House of Commons and can put up (for myself) a good fight – tho’ I daresay the general verdict will be adverse, and of course I can’t go on.…
His final comment, the fruit of bitter experience, was: ‘No one can govern Ireland from England save in a state of siege.’
As Birrell completed that letter, in 172 North King Street, discipline among the troops reached rock-bottom. There had been goings and comings all day; many drunk and excited soldiers had grabbed what they could.
Young Nellie Walsh finally found the courage to venture upstairs. Sick with impending horror, she edged open the drawing-room door. Her heart seemed to expand like a balloon as she saw her husband lying face down across the fireplace, his mouth and nose pressed on the hearth. She knelt and tried to turn him over but lacked the strength.
Shaking all over, gasping madly for breath, she went downstairs for a while to rest.
When she climbed up again, she saw soldiers had placed a rug, stolen from the butcher’s next door, over her husband’s corpse and were using it as a card table. She stood there for a few moments in disbelief. They were eating bully beef, drinking, laughing and jeering at whoever came
in the door.
She went to tell her father, Mr O’Neill, who lived nearby. He hugged her and heard her out before saying there was more bad news, about her seventeen-year-old brother.
‘Yesterday morning, Willie was in the street, Nell, when he came across a dead man. A bullet had gone through his eye and come out the back of his head. Thinking it might be me, he knelt to make sure and … and he was shot by a soldier.’
The father held his daughter tight and they sobbed on each other’s shoulder.
‘He took five minutes to die, Nell. His last words were, “O, Mother, Mother.” ’
Drying his eyes, Mr O’Neill asked three men to help him carry his son-in-law on a stretcher, then, in a fury, he burst into No 172 and raced upstairs.
‘That man under the carpet,’ he roared, ‘served for ten years in the British army like yourselves. I have one son serving in France and another just back minus an arm.’
Drunk as they were, the soldiers hung their heads in shame. They removed the carpet from the corpse and slunk away.
Nelly said she couldn’t bear the thought of her man and Sally Hughes’s being taken away, anonymously.
‘They have to be buried properly, Dad, from this house.’
She and Sally went to the coffin-maker’s shop and knocked and knocked until he opened the door. They chose and paid for two coffins which the men carried home.
At St Patrick’s Park, MacDonagh, Brigade Commander, formally handed General Lowe an order of unconditional surrender. It was 3.15 p.m.
Bareheaded and tired-looking, he went on by car with Fathers Augustine and Aloysius to arrange the details with Kent’s men.
In the South Dublin Union and the Marrowbone Lane Distillery, MacDonagh had the sad job of informing the rebels. Once more, Father Augustine confirmed what he said.
On the return to Jacob’s, they passed the spot in Thomas Street where Robert Emmet had been hanged and beheaded. Father Augustine could almost hear MacDonagh’s thoughts. He knew that he, too, would soon be executed and that his epitaph would not be written in his generation.
At Jacob’s, the men gathered around Father Augustine, asking him to take messages to their folks. He filled his capacious pockets with notes, mostly to parents, which he promised to see delivered the next day.
Seeing a fourteen-year-old among the prisoners, Father Augustine winked at him and drew him aside. ‘What’s your name, lad?’
‘Vincent Byrne, Father.’
‘Follow me, Vinnie.’
The front door was barred so he led the boy to the first floor and indicated the window. The boy jumped on to the sill and the priest lowered him by his extended arms until he was able to drop to safety.
‘Goodbye, Vinnie Byrne,’ he called after him. ‘You’ll live to fight for Ireland another day.’
In Father Augustine’s absence, many were giving money to Elizabeth O’Farrell. Michael O’Hanrahan, the Volunteers’ Quartermaster and MacDonagh’s second in charge, gave her three pounds for his mother. She then left for Bride Street, where MacDonagh’s Battalion was due to surrender.
At 5 p.m., the Republican flag was hauled down.
During the short march to Bride Street, some of MacDonagh’s younger lads melted into the crowd and went home. The rest laid down their arms and gave their names and addresses. All this time a solitary sniper was firing.
‘Bloody British,’ a Volunteer said.
In fact, it was one of their own, high up in Jacob’s, who had not heard of the surrender.
In Portobello Barracks, Lieutenant Monk Gibbon came across Skeffy’s belongings in the billiard room. Soldiers were coming in, joking and grabbing souvenirs. Gibbon had no intention of taking anything until he saw a letter from George Bernard Shaw. In it, GBS apologized for being unable to give an interview on his next trip to Dublin.
Monk’s ambition to be a writer proved too strong for him. As he pocketed the letter, he heard Colthurst’s shrill tones. ‘No, no, no, Sergeant, you have to say, “The prisoners were trying to escape.” ’
Hamilton Norway, too, was looking for souvenirs. He returned to the GPO, hoping to find his son’s belongings.
The elegant building which he had lately redecorated to the highest standards was a mere bullet-ridden facade. His office was a part of space. The smouldering remains meant little to him. But he could have wept over the loss of his son’s few effects.
Freddie now seemed somehow doubly dead.
Soon after 5 p.m., Mrs Hickey returned home, exhausted from her fruitless, day-long search. Two soldiers outside her shop barred her way.
‘This is my house,’ she said.
‘Sorry, missis, but you can’t come in. You’d better go and see an officer first.’
Apprehensive, she went to Mrs Carroll at No 170. Her neighbour said, ‘I must speak to you, my dear.’ Unable to check herself, she moaned, ‘Oh, poor Christy.’
In that moment, Mrs Hickey knew she had lost both her men. She ran back home, barged in and flew upstairs, with the soldiers in hot pursuit yelling, ‘You can’t go up there, d’you hear?’
One floor up, she opened the door. ‘Christy!’
He was lying on the floor, his face black, his two hands raised in the air as if in silent supplication. ‘O, my poor angel, my darling son.’
She gently kissed his cold face, put his cap under his head for a pillow and joined his hands for death. Standing up, she saw her Tom also stretched on the floor. ‘O Jesus, my Lord!’
Pete Connolly was there, too, with great bayonet gashes about the neck and head. The sight was too much for her. She reeled and fainted. The next she knew, she was in the street with soldiers looking after her.
Stories spread rapidly that in one night fifteen civilians had been brutally murdered. For the first time, many Dubliners began to wonder, timidly at first, who was right and who wrong in the matter of the rebellion.
At 6 o’clock, Kent’s men at the Union, having linked up with the Marrowbone Lane garrison and members of Cumann na mBan, finally arrived in Basin Street and surrendered their arms.
Father Augustine, seeing the tall, manly Kent, felt immensely proud of him as the representative of a brave body of men and women.
Kent had given up his gun and belt to an English officer, when the friar saw they intended to strip him of his uniform. He went and shook Kent’s hand with, ‘Goodbye and God bless you, Eamonn,’ as if to show these Englishmen the respect they, as Irishmen, had for the prisoners. The two Capuchins then glared at the soldiers before going home to Church Street after a long and tiring day.
Kent appreciated the gesture. This was the very first intimation any of the prisoners had that maybe the rising was not entirely wasted.
The arms which the Volunteers had paid for with hard-earned cash were collected in handcarts and put in lorries. The prisoners, with Kent at their head, were marched off to Richmond Barracks.
Nora Connolly’s right foot was very bad, so that she and Ina made slow progress. They had been given a lift by a man searching for bread but that had still left them six miles north of Clontarf. As they reached the outskirts of Dublin, their faces were bright red from the sun. They were suffering not just from blistered feet but from dehydration and hunger, too.
At Swords, they ran into a troop of British soldiers going north and their hearts leaped with joy.
‘Are they retreating?’ Ina said. ‘Do you think we’ve won?’
The nearer the city the more British troops there were, their manner showing they were the victors.
Devastation was on a colossal scale; smoke was rising on all sides and a smell of burning was in the air. Worst of all, Nora and Ina did not meet one person with a good word for the rebels. ‘Thank God those crazy people have surrendered,’ was the general verdict.
In Drumcondra, they went to Clonliffe Road. Their friends, the Ryan girls, told them, ‘They’re all surrendering.’
‘Our father?’ asked Nora, apprehensively.
‘Wounded,’ Mary s
aid.
‘Dying,’ said Phyllis.
The Connolly sisters sat without another word.
Their mother had come down from Belfast on Good Friday and was staying at the Countess’s cottage, Three Rock, on the edge of the Dublin mountains. They were keen to see her and the rest of their family but they were exhausted and, besides, it was nearly curfew hour.
‘Stay with us for the night,’ Mary and Phyllis said kindly, ‘please.’
From Richmond Barracks, the first batch of prisoners was paraded in the square before being marched to the North Wall. They went in twos with two English soldiers on either side.
On the way, they ran into more abuse, screamed from windows.
‘Shoot the traitors,’ and ‘Good old Staffs, go to it, bayonet the bastards.’
The men were exhausted. They had been searched, first at the Castle, then at the Barracks. Now there was this long march across a burning city. To lift their spirits, they sang lustily, led by Bob de Coeur. Threatened with reprisals if they didn’t stop singing they whistled, instead.
At the North Wall, soldiers were embarking. They made way for the rebels who were packed like sardines into the North Western Railway Boat.
Only the Tommies were given life-belts.
An NCO said, ‘If we’re torpedoed, at least a few hundred fucking Irish rebels’ll end up feeding the fishes, eh?’
The rebels were given no drinking water. Without toilet facilities, they had to make do in a very confined space among smelly, frightened cattle. They consoled themselves by reciting the rosary, many of them praying that a U-boat would sink them and put them out of their misery. When the sea was at its roughest they, one by one, lifted their heads as Jack O’Reilly, a Tralee man with a fine baritone voice, sang ‘Galway Bay’.
After a twelve-hour voyage many were in bad shape by the time they reached Holyhead. From the Welsh port they were packed in a train for jails in the north of England. For thirty hours, they were to have no food, not even a cup of water.
Back in Richmond Barracks, their leaders were brought individually before a court of preliminary enquiry. British officers held in the GPO were called to witness that the prisoners had been in the GPO and in possession of guns.
Rebels Page 48
