‘Sure. It’s just I don’t believe it! Why isn’t Colthurst under arrest?’
Vane was not quite sure what was going on in Kitchener’s head in view of his poker-face.
‘I came across to find out.’
Kitchener called in Asquith’s secretary, Bonham Carter.
‘Take a telegram, if you would. To HQ Ireland. “I order Captain Bowen-Colthurst to be placed under arrest pending his trial by court martial.” ’
He touched his moustache. ‘I am Secretary for War. Why was this atrocity not communicated to me?’
Bonham Carter stifled a grin. The PM had said, ‘Kitchener generally finds things out sooner or later – as a rule, later,’ and Margot Asquith had contributed the catty remark, ‘As a General, Kitchener makes a great poster.’
As Vane was on the point of leaving, the General said, ‘We’ll have to see that this officer is shot.’
With his hand on the door handle, Vane said, gallantly, ‘You would not shoot a madman, sir, and, in my view, the man is completely mad.’
Mrs O’Carroll, the wife of the Councillor whom Colthurst had shot on the previous Wednesday, was summoned to Portobello Barracks. She had had no idea where her husband was, and had heard only rumours that he had been shot. In fact, he had lain in agony for six days with a bullet in his lung.
She found him white, close to death. Shivering in her anguish, she said, ‘Tell me what happened, my darling.’
He managed to whisper, ‘Shot. Man called … Colt-hur—’
‘Again,’ she said, ‘tell me his name again,’ but her husband was dead in her arms.
That afternoon, Pearse was taken from Arbour Hill to Richmond Barracks to be court martialled with Clarke and MacDonagh.
The Court was comprised of three army officers with General Blackadder presiding. The judges, all elderly, had no special knowledge of Ireland. There was no stenographer present so they had to take everything down in longhand. This was not only slow, it prevented subsequent checks on facts and procedures.
The men were called individually into a small room, crammed with witnesses, detectives, three officers of the Court and the prosecutor. The proceedings were long on courtesy but short on justice. Two military witnesses identified each prisoner as having taken part in the rebellion and possessing firearms. The G-men gave evidence of their known sedition over a long period. The defendants were refused counsel or time to prepare their own defence or call witnesses.
One prosecution witness would not testify.
Captain Mahoney, who had tended Connolly in the GPO, told the Court: ‘My job was to care for the British and the Volunteer wounded, impartially. That I did. I know nothing about combatants.’
Clarke was first to come before the Court. Dressed in black civilian clothes, he looked like an undertaker.
The President asked him, ‘How do you plead?’
Clarke, looking into the middle distance, did not deign to answer. His silence seemed to be saying, Why are you bothering me at a time like this?
‘Prisoner, do you plead guilty or not-guilty?’
Clarke felt that to plead not-guilty to trying to free his homeland from foreign tyranny was as nonsensical as pleading not-guilty to keeping the ten commandments. In his view, the judges represented British law not justice.
With his continuing silence, the elderly, mild-eyed officers of the Court shrugged and whispered in one another’s ears. This was unusual, to say the least. It was like watching while a gale blew on a summer oak without disturbing a single leaf.
Blackadder said to his colleagues, ‘Enter a plea of not-guilty. Now let us proceed with the first witness.’
When the witnesses had testified, the President asked, ‘Prisoner, is there anything you wish to say in your defence?’
The question was greeted with the same stony silence.
The officers once more whispered among themselves before Black-adder said, ‘The prisoner is found guilty.’
Still without speaking or taking notice of any of his accusers, Clarke rose and left the room.
Pearse was next. In the indictment, he was described as ‘headmaster and barrister’. Though he was as single-minded as Clarke, he wanted his words on record for the history books.
In a quiet voice whose sincerity could not be questioned, he said:
From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced that while it lasted, this country could never be free or happy.
When I was a child of ten I went down on my bare knees by my bedside one night and promised God that I should devote my life to an effort to free my country.
He spoke the next words solemnly.
‘I have kept that promise.’
The room was stuffy. One judge had dozed off and came to with a rasping snort to hear:
We seem to have lost. We have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on a tradition to the future.
I repudiate the assertion that I sought to aid and abet England’s enemy. Germany is no more to me than England is. My aim was to win Irish freedom; we struck the first blow ourselves but should have been glad of an ally’s aid.
I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen who value their freedom and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia.
General Blackadder was listening intently to every word.
Believe that we, too, love freedom and desire it. To us it is more desirable than anything in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again and renew the fight.
A light flashed in Pearse’s splendid eyes.
You cannot conquer Ireland. You cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.
Without retiring, the judges whispered loudly in each other’s somewhat deaf ears before giving their verdict.
‘Guilty.’
The three condemned were sent to the gymnasium.
Clarke was still silent but content; his dread was not death but life-long imprisonment.
MacDonagh was his voluble self, saying he had heard about German raids on Yarmouth and Lowestoft. ‘An invasion is on the way,’ he insisted.
Pearse sat on the floor, composing in his head a note to Maxwell. He wanted his letters and poems to be forwarded to his mother, together with seven pounds, his watch and other effects taken from him.
General Blackadder called Maxwell at Kilmainham Hospital to report the verdicts.
‘We await your decision, sir.’
‘Shoot ’em,’ Maxwell said.
The cell in Arbour Hill that Pearse had recently vacated had a new occupant: John MacNeill.
He had sent his eldest son Niall with a note for General Maxwell. He wanted to help to avoid further bloodshed. Besides, he was Chief of Staff of the Volunteers; and if his men were imprisoned, he had a right to share their fate.
Colonel McCammond had collected him and taken him to Arbour Hill where, at 2 p.m., he was interrogated by Major Price. He wanted MacNeill to confess that politicians like Dillon were implicated in the rising.
‘Absolute nonsense,’ MacNeill said.
At 4 p.m., an aide told Maxwell that John Dillon had arrived, requesting an interview. Maxwell cursed his luck. Like most soldiers, he held politicians in contempt. He had just got rid of one in the shape of Birrell; now Dillon, an Irishman with Irish sympathies, the worst of a very bad bunch, was being a nuisance.
‘Show him in,’ he barked, extinguishing his cigarette.
Dillon felt the country’s mood was changing rapidly. The nationwide curfew, the mass arrests of people who, in many cases, had expressly repudiated the rising, were having an effect. In the person of Pearse, the Irish had already surrendered to the English; they did not like that. They would take even less kindly to the British slaughtering their countrymen. It reminded them of how, d
own the centuries, the English had cut them down, starved and evicted them and forced them to emigrate.
He was reminded of an old saying, ‘Ireland’s history is something the English should remember and the Irish should forget.’
It was a sacrifice for Dillon even to talk to Maxwell. It reminded him of much he preferred to forget. Could he ever make him realize that the Irish would always take the part of Irishmen about to be executed by British justice whatever they had done? They did not really believe in their hearts that Irishmen should be punished for breaking a law not their own or for being disloyal to a monarch not their own.
The little hope Dillon had evaporated at once in the presence of this not unkind but quintessential soldier.
Straightening his silver hair, then polishing his pince-nez, the politician expressed his point of view and Maxwell his.
‘Surely,’ Maxwell complained, banging the report in front of him, ‘you cannot expect me in the light of appalling casualties and damage to property to put on velvet gloves?’
Dillon was thinking, Is this idiot going to send the rebels to immortality with Tone and Emmet?
He said: ‘In dealing with this country, General, it’s wise to remember its history.’
‘History,’ retorted Maxwell, ‘what do I know about that? My job is to keep order here and, by God, I’ll do it.’
‘Jail them, General, and they won’t even fill a cell. Shoot them and they’ll grow so big they will fill all Ireland.’
As Dillon rose to leave, the General, who had not understood a word, was brushing his nicotine-stained moustache and saying, ‘I am going to do something, sir, that you Irish will never forget. I am going to ensure that there will be no treason whispered, even whispered, in Ireland for another hundred years.’
That Tuesday afternoon was bright and sunny when two friars visited Richmond Barracks.
Fathers Augustine and Albert, both bespectacled, the former with thick hair and fabulous beard, the latter with receding hair and trim black beard, saw a few prisoners lying on a patch of grass opposite a big building.
‘What’s happening?’ Father Augustine asked.
‘Waiting for court martial,’ a prisoner answered.
Lying on the grass was a Volunteer officer, thin and tubercular. His body was sloping backwards as he rested on his hands. His eyes behind his rimless glasses were wedged closed. To the priests’ experienced gaze, he looked near to death.
A British NCO emerged from the building and called, ‘Next: Joseph Mary Plunkett.’
The friars saw the young man struggle to his feet and walk, shaky as an autumn fly, towards inevitable condemnation. Minutes later, he was back in the barrack room. He had been found guilty, but he had heard rumours that they were to be sent to England. He pencilled a note to Grace Gifford on the back of his will which he had kept in his pocket.
Listen, if I live it might be possible to get the Church to marry us by proxy – but it is difficult, I am told. You know how I love you. That is all I have time to say. I know you love me and so I am very happy. Your own Joe.
He handed the letter-cum-will to a soldier who seemed sympathetic, asking if he could get it delivered.
In his New York office of the Gaelic American, John Devoy was going through the files. Most American papers were against the rebellion.
‘Just like ’em. Whoresons! They’re against failure of any sort.’
In a fury, he bared big yellow teeth and slapped the cuttings with his blue knuckles.
‘What the hell do they know, those morons? Most of them are dumb enough to think Roger Casement was the leader of the enterprise, planning it through the USA. Always looking for the local angle.’
The New York Times called Casement ‘treacherous and perfidious’.
‘What d’you expect,’ he muttered, ‘from an administration rag?’
The Washington Post was more guarded. His execution would serve no useful purpose. ‘Casement, as a prisoner, kept out of mischief until the end of the war, would be practically forgotten; Casement, executed in the Tower, would become a martyr, enshrined in Irish hearts.’
‘Rory, my boy,’ he muttered, bitterly, ‘may you be executed in the Tower.’
The Philadelphia Enquirer wanted Casement imprisoned for life: ‘That will meet the claims of justice and Irish susceptibilities.’
‘Irish susceptibilities!’ Devoy’s marble-chip eyes shone with scorn, as he put through a call to McGarrity in Philadelphia.
‘Joe,’ he barked, ‘can’t you darned-well do something about that Enquirer?’
He slammed the phone down before he got an answer.
Both the Washington Star and the Chicago Tribune were sure the rising would not advance Irish freedom.
He slammed the file down on his cluttered desk. ‘We shall see about that.’
He threw his hat on the floor and danced on it for five minutes.
In late afternoon, an officer came into the gymnasium and ordered Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh to stand to attention.
‘You are to be transferred forthwith to Kilmainham Detention Centre and shot at dawn tomorrow, Wednesday 3 May.’
Tom Clarke relaxed. ‘Thank God,’ he said.
They were marched to the grim prison which was only a stone’s throw away. They passed through the main gate over which was a bas-relief of a serpent in chains, into the central reception area, arched like a Gothic chapel, and up iron steps to the catwalk. It was dark and windowless. Gas pipes running along the wall were out of action owing to the emergency.
Thomas MacDonagh took out the pictures of his children.
The cell was like an opened grave, its air brown and rancid from being locked up for twenty years. A fly could not breathe it.
But the pictures of his little boy and girl brightened the place up, made him feel happy – and unhappy.
Clarke had a cell opposite the stairs. He went in shivering. In the cold damp air his breath came out frosty, like old ghosts returning to haunt him. He remembered only too well how it had been when he was a young man known by his alias of Henry Hammond Wilson.
Sentenced to solitary confinement in Portland Jail, he got neither silence nor solitude. For six years, from morning till night and into the night, he was harassed by guards. If he managed to fall asleep, there would be a loud report as the warder deliberately slammed shut the heavy, iron trap door. He once calculated that he had been strip-searched over 350 times. The warders looked with malicious glee and sometimes perverse pleasure between his toes, inside his mouth, inside his anus where a bull’s eye lamp was shone.
He was often punished with the bread-and-water, no-sleep torture in a bid to make him mad. John Daly, whose niece he was to marry, had kept him sane. They had written to each other every week for eleven years under the noses of the authorities. Clarke had provided flies for the spider which Daly was training in his cell, though they were not allowed to talk to each other or shake one another’s hand.
So developed was his sense of smell, though a guard crept along, Clarke could detect his presence by his hair-oil or the beer he had been drinking or the blacking on his boots.
Clarke shivered as he remembered sounds, smells, events burned into his soul. One incident, in particular, shocked him.
He had found Albert Whitehead, prisoner J 463, in the carpenter’s shop stuffing his mouth with crushed glass, saying in a cracked voice, ‘A pound of this won’t do you any harm.’ Clarke spoke about him to the prison chaplain. ‘Sorry, J 464,’ the priest said, ‘if I do a thing, the Governor will ask how I know this and I’ll lose my job.’
From then on, Clarke, devout but none too religious, was alienated from the Church.
He was punished for thirteen days for trying to talk to other prisoners. One winter, he spent forty days in the Arctic Cell, where it was several degrees below zero, on bread and water. He had chewed rags used for cleaning his tin plate to keep himself alive, to keep alive his love of Ireland.
He had written his own G
olden Rules of Conduct: ‘Clinch your teeth hard and never say die. Keep your thoughts off yourself. No mooning or brown studies. Guard your self-respect – if you lose that you’d lose the backbone of your manhood. Keep your eyes wide open and don’t bang your head against the wall.’
Those rules helped him keep sane – just – until he was released on 21 September 1898. He had gone in a young man of twenty-six and emerged an old forty-one.
No, he could not live any longer in prison.
For Pearse, in a cell opposite, this was his first time in prison. He enjoyed the sound of the door clanging behind him, the bolt being drawn and the key turning in the big padlock. He liked the economy of that single candle. He stretched out his hands and stroked the whitewashed walls with reverence.
His stay would be brief and he could not imagine a better place to die. God – and the British – were being kind to him. Kilmainham was the Bastille of Ireland where many great Irishmen had expiated the crime of patriotism. It was more sacred in the annals of Ireland than was Westminster Abbey to the English.
It had housed Napper Tandy who had fought as a general with the French against the English in 1798. He would have been hanged but for Napoleon, who threatened to take the life of an English prisoner of equal rank.
Robert Emmet, aged twenty-five, Pearse’s hero, had been jailed there before being taken to Thomas Street and hanged. No Irish patriot fought or died so smilingly as Emmet, a dreamer and man of peace who had turned into a revolutionary. Pearse hoped against hope that one day he would be remembered like Emmet.
Others of Pearse’s heroes had suffered there: John O’Leary, John Devoy whom he had met in America, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa at whose funeral he had preached his great panegyric. And, of course, Charles Stewart Parnell.
There was no place in the world, not even at home in St Enda’s with his mother and his pupils, where Pearse would rather spend the last night of his life.
He wrote out his court martial speech, letters to his mother and brother, and a last poem, ‘The Wayfarer’:
Rebels Page 50
