Rebels
Page 57
Father Augustine still had his arm through Con’s – ‘Hold tight to God’s sleeve, lad,’ he whispered – and now, with Father Albert arriving breathless to take the lad’s left hand, they entered the corridor lit only by a lamp carried by a soldier. Though Con was shaking and his legs felt they belonged to someone else, his lips were moving in prayer as he went before the firing squad.
Father Augustine, on the treadmill of death, left his colleague to anoint the body and rushed back to find Kent being led towards him down the hall. His heart went out to embrace this gallant man. And together they walked to the Stonebreakers’ Yard.
Kent, too, dry-mouthed, heart pumping, knees jerking, was made to sit on the soap box to await his view of God’s face.
Only when Father Augustine rushed to anoint him did he notice that in Kent’s bound hands was his crucifix. He withdrew it to find the figure on the cross was spattered with blood.
‘More exe-cut-ions!’
The Connolly girls had been trying to get their mother to sleep when she came to with a start at the newsvendor’s cry. Nora went out to learn the names of the new dead.
Lillie was in a state of exhaustion when she turned up at the Castle with little Fiona to see her husband. The Grand Staircase up which she was conducted had an armed guard on practically every step. Outside the room in the Royal Corridor, a nurse was ordered to search her.
‘Pardon me,’ Lillie said, ‘but what are you looking for?’
‘A knife or maybe poison, in case the prisoner tries to commit suicide.’
Lillie laughed thinly. ‘That proves how little you know James Connolly. Otherwise you wouldn’t dream of suggesting that to avoid a little pain—’
‘A lot of pain,’ the nurse interrupted, kindly.
‘All right,’ Lillie said, dampening down, ‘a lot of pain. But as long as there’s life in him, he’ll go on fighting.’
The first thing she saw on entering was the cage that kept the bedclothes off his leg. One glance at him and she knew the nurse was not exaggerating.
He was pale, there were circles under his eyes, his mouth was strangely twisted. And she had never seen him so skinny. He tried to lift himself off his pillow but could not.
She pressed her lips to his, feeling the familiar tickle of his moustache; and he stroked her dark hair, now streaked with grey, murmuring, ‘Lillie, Lillie.’
He said he was being well looked after. The civilian surgeon, Tobin, had even crossed to London to try and find a remedy for the spread of gangrene in his body.
‘And, James?’
‘Nothing has worked so far.’
Somehow, Lillie found that reassuring.
When Madge and Laura came across their sister, she was very white. Laura whispered, ‘She’s not at all well.’
The day before an official had handed Kattie her husband’s effects: glasses’ case, pencil, post office book with seven stamps in it, knife, a pound note taken from him at the Rotunda. It was like being presented with his severed limbs.
Before her sisters could speak, Kattie said, in a hollow voice, ‘In the night … I lost … the baby.’
‘Oh, Kattie!’ Madge said, ‘I’ll fetch a doctor.’
‘No need. I can handle it.’
They decided it was best to leave her alone.
Kattie had never felt so empty. First, her heart, and now her body, empty.
In London, Nathan received a letter from George Bernard Shaw.
‘My dear Sir Matthew,’ he wrote, ‘I congratulate you on coming in for the best rebellion for 118 years, probably the last chance of such an experience.’
Shaw suggested that Birrell’s best defence was that he could only have avoided the danger ‘by impartially disarming the population. As he was not enabled to do this, he was not in a position to conclude that any section of the population could run amok like lunatics.’
Shaw had one regret.
‘Why, oh why didn’t the artillery knock down half Dublin whilst it had the chance? Think of the insanitary areas, the slums, the glorious chance of making a clean sweep of them! Only 179 houses and probably at least nine of them quite decent ones. I’d have laid at least 17,900 of them flat and made a decent town of it!’
Nathan chuckled. Shaw was right about one thing. Had they tried to disarm the Volunteers north or south, they would have had not a six-day but perhaps a six-months’ war. As if they had failed where others might had succeeded! As if there were not problems to which no solutions exist!
Not one sign pointed to a rising on that Monday. But wasn’t there talk of a rising? the critics would ask. There was never talk of anything else, that was the trouble. The peculiarity of the Easter Rising was, it was at once the most public and most secret of all rebellions. Connolly was always ‘taking the Castle’ in practice, then left it alone when it was at his mercy.
How could anyone predict anything as illogical as that?
A guard unlocked an isolation cell in the Tower of London in a panic. ‘I need help here,’ he hollered.
The prisoner was near to death. His forehead was cold and clammy, his eyes rolled in his head, his pulse was barely perceptible.
Sir Roger Casement was rushed to the hospital wing where the doctor immediately diagnosed poisoning. He pushed a tube down his throat and pumped his stomach. It went on for over an hour before the doctor said, ‘He’ll live.’
For days on end, Casement had been completely isolated. Even the soldiers guarding him were forbidden to utter a single word, though a Welsh corporal did whisper that the leaders of the Dublin rising were being executed.
‘I don’t care whether it’s against orders, sir,’ he said with a lilt. ‘I want you to know that lots of us are very sorry about this and I ’ope you get off. We think you are a brave man, sir.’
He was never on duty again.
Before the rising, Casement had been considered a curiosity, afterwards, the worst traitor of the war.
He had not heard a word from any of his friends. The Governor said they were all too disgusted. In fact, Gertrude had been trying for days to visit him. She had been shunted from Scotland Yard to the Ministry of War to the Home Office. She had written Roger a letter, telling him how much they all loved him and were praying for him. The Governor withheld it.
She took to walking around the Tower, trying to communicate with him through the walls. Hearing rumours that he was to be shot, she had written to Asquith but he had not replied.
To ease the pain and the loneliness, to try to banish the ghosts inside his brain, Casement tried to kill himself. He tried swallowing a bent nail, then rubbing curare, used by South American Indians to poison their arrows, into his veins. Finally, he swallowed all the curare he had.
After the use of the stomach-pump, he had to bear two silent soldiers in his cell, with a third outside looking every minute through the Judas-hole. The electric light was never switched off so that he did not know the day or the hour; and he, the most private of men, could not sleep or even think.
In deep depression, he saw his suicide attempt as just one more in a long line of failures.
Gertrude finally contacted an Irish lawyer, George Gavan Duffy, who was sympathetic to Sinn Fein. He promised to take up Casement’s defence. After a week of negotiation, he was allowed to visit him.
Casement’s beard was only half-grown, giving him a neglected look. His blood-red eyes were blurred, his lids too heavy to fully lift, the sides of his face frozen as after a stroke, and his fingers were bunched, almost welded together. Dark thoughts were evidently serpentining his brain. His lower lip was turned out, a glossy purple.
He peered at Gavan Duffy as at a distant object. When asked questions, he paused for a long time, seeming to have to invent language. His speech was breathless, hesitant; he had a slight stammer. It was hard for him to remember names or dates.
Gavan Duffy noticed the untreated bites on his hands, face and neck. His clothes were foetid. This most fastidious of men was still in the same sea-soiled suit he
wore when picked up on Banna Strand; the dried slime showed. His brittle laceless boots were draped around his ankles. With nothing to support his trousers, he kept hitching them up nervously.
‘When were you last allowed out for a walk, Sir Roger?’
Casement shook his head like a dog out of a pond.
‘You mean you have never been allowed out?’
Another shake of the head.
The lawyer felt desperate to scratch himself. The cell was verminous.
He promised to procure writing material. ‘Write notes to refresh your memory. It will help me in your defence.’
Casement mumbled that he wanted to be treated the same as his friends in Dublin. ‘Military tribunal.’ Then, in a low tremulous voice: ‘Can’t they shoot me, too?’
Duffy went from the Tower to see Gertrude and Mrs Green. He had met Casement, he said, but he could not be sure this wreck was the same man.
Mrs Green wrote a letter at once to the PM, telling him of Casement’s condition and threatening, if nothing was done at once, to send accounts of his maltreatment to American papers.
Asquith was genuinely upset. He told his secretary to phone Major Arbuthnot of the Life Guards at Whitehall. From now on, Sir Roger Casement was to be treated decently.
At 2 that Monday afternoon, de Valera went before a court martial. It was brief and to the point.
‘Can you tell us where you were born?’
‘New York,’ he replied. ‘But I do not know if my father was a Spanish subject or a naturalized American. I have always regarded myself as an Irishman and not a British subject.’
Captain Hitzen testified that de Valera was the one who surrendered in Boland’s Mill and that the Sinn Feiners there regarded him as their senior officer.
Cadet Mackay said he had been well treated while he was de Valera’s prisoner.
After the trial and verdict of guilty, he was conducted to the now notorious Kilmainham Jail.
John Dillon had been hearing that the conduct of the rebels during the rising was magnificent. These were no ne’er-do-wells, no criminals.
He had also received reports of a massacre of civilians in North King Street. He kept saying, ‘Cromwell is risen from the dead and is stalking the land again.’
Everywhere now, in streets, pubs, pulpits, people were saying, ‘Didn’t those men love Ireland?’ ‘Really, we never knew it was worth dying for!’ ‘Yes, they made mistakes but aren’t they Irishmen, and aren’t the British, as usual, murdering them without a fair trial?’ ‘Jasus, these brave men are not a lot of foreigners, they’re our own.’ ‘They might have been traitors to Britain but they weren’t traitors to Ireland, not by a long chalk.’
Perched on bar stools, their noses dipped in perpetual mourning, the great philosophers were saying, ‘Dear Lord, rebels, hunger-strikers, traitors, once they’re dying or dead, don’t we rush to claim them as our own?’ One Dublin waitress said, ‘They don’t shoot German prisoners, although they call them “Huns” and “baby-killers”; they only shoot our brave Irish boys.’
In O’Connell Street, one elderly black-shawled lady, with eyes swollen from mourning her only son, asked, ‘Could the Germans have done worse?’ and her companion said, ‘But the English don’t hate the Germans, Maura, not the way they hate us.’
Children were collecting cheap prints of the leaders of the rising.
Lady Fingall told a friend, ‘It’s like seeing a continuous trickle of blood coming from under a locked door.’
Already that most feared of critics, the back-street balladeer, was writing songs that were being sung the length and breadth of Ireland.
Priests were making a good living out of saying masses for dead rebels whose names were read out from pulpit after pulpit.
The Irish, by and large, hated violence, which was why most were in principle against the rising. But now a new consciousness was dawning nationwide: what the rebels did was the violence of the brave; what was being done to them was the violence of the coward. Most ominously for the future, in Limerick, Cork and Tralee, a silent rage was deepened by their sense of guilt that the men of Dublin had risen and they had not.
Dillon was furious that he had got nowhere with Maxwell. He was trying to make villains out of Irishmen by shooting them on Irish soil. He might, while he was at it, square the circle!
Stories of maltreatment were multiplying.
Even lads had been put up against a wall for refusing to inform on their leaders; the officer in charge only stopped the firing squad at the last second.
One fifteen-year-old rebel, on being told that he had only half an hour to live, said, ‘Shoot away.’ They blindfolded him, pressed his back to the Barrack wall. There was the click of the safety catch being lifted. ‘Last chance.’ ‘No!’ They removed the blindfold and sent him home to his mother.
What finally made Dillon determined to take on the Administration was when he met with Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington.
She told him in detail how Skeffy had been shot in cold blood and the murderer made second in command of Portobello Barracks.
Deeply moved, Dillon said, ‘My dear, I intend to see to it that the whole of Britain, the whole world knows about your husband’s murder.’ He adjusted his pince-nez. ‘I intend to address the House of Commons.’
In the condemned cell, de Valera decided not to write to his mother or his wife until his death-sentence was confirmed.
His mind went back to Bruree, County Limerick, and his boyhood days. He was remembering his grandmother and his uncle Pat and the brook he used to follow from Drumacummer to Trinity Well at its source in Dromin. He recalled every road and bush and bird along the way.
He imagined himself on top of Knockdoha looking north towards Tory Hill, east towards Kilmallock, south to the Ballyhoura Hills, west to the mountains of Limerick.
He was a boy again, spending all day sometimes with the cows, feeding them hay and cutting buckets of turnips for them in the evening. And he was listening to Fr Eugene Sheehy preaching the boycott while he, in cassock and cotta, sat on the step beside the altar.
He thought especially of beautiful Sinead Flanagan who taught him Irish and became his wife. And even as his long face grew longer there was a shining in his eye.
He wrote to the nun in charge of the Training College where he taught, Sister Gonzaga.
I have just been told that I am to be shot for my part in the rebellion.
Just a parting line then to thank you and all the Sisters (especially Mother Attracta) for your unvarying kindness to me in the past and to ask you to pray for my soul and for my poor wife and little children whom I leave unprovided for.
Ask the girls to remember me in their prayers.
Goodbye. I hope I’ll be in heaven to meet you.
As darkness came to Richmond Barracks, in a crowded smelly cell on Block L, Row 6, prisoners were telling McDermott, ‘They won’t shoot you, Sean.’
He shook his head. ‘Sean Heuston and Con Colbert were and they didn’t even sign the Proclamation. Only Connolly and myself of the signatories are left.’ He seemed not in the least concerned as he added, ‘The British will shoot us both.’
Not long after they had settled down for the night, an officer came to the door. ‘Is John McDermott here?’
Sean awoke, rose and limped to meet him. ‘Yes?’
The officer handed him a slip of paper. He was being charged with taking part in an armed rebellion.
‘Court martial at 11 in the morning.’
His fellow-prisoners surrounded him, noisily. ‘That doesn’t mean a thing, Sean.’
He refused to discuss it. ‘This calls for a concert, lads.’
On the parade ground, the officer who had just delivered the notice of certain death, heard rebel songs and the harsh, unmistakable tones of Sean McDermott.
I am Brian Boy McGhee,
My father was Owen Ban,
I was awakened from happy dreams
By the shouts of my startled clan.
‘Father John Sexton,’ he said, ‘to see the prisoner, Kent.’
Fifty-one-year-old, black-haired, black-bearded Tom Kent, court-martialled on the 4th for the murder of Head Constable Rowe, greeted him warmly.
‘Any news of Richard, Father?’
Father Sexton lowered his eyes. ‘I thought they—. Your brother died of his wounds two days after he was taken.’
Tom signed himself, saying, ‘May he rest in peace.’
He handed the Chaplain his temperance badge.
‘ ’Tis for Father Ahearne of Castlelyons. From him I got it and I wish it to be returned untarnished to him.’
Father Sexton said, ‘He will be pleased to get it, Tom.’
He handed Kent a rosary.
It was still in Kent’s bound hands when the Chaplain stooped to anoint his bullet-ridden corpse.
The news of Kent’s execution was communicated to Maxwell before breakfast. He telegraphed the Prime Minister that of the ring-leaders only Connolly and McDermott remained to be tried.
‘If convicted they must suffer the extreme penalty. They will be the last to suffer capital punishment, as far as I can now state.’
He told his staff, ‘That will be the end of the so-called Government of the Republic. I assure you, gentlemen, no more will be heard ever again of an Irish rising of 1916.’
It was rare for Sean McDermott to ask a favour of an Englishman but he begged a Tommy for the loan of a razor.
After shaving, he ran his hand over his cheek. ‘I want to make a nice corpse, men.’
As the escort unbolted the door, Sean shook hands with each of his comrades.
‘Pray for me at dawn.’
After his trial, he was taken to Kilmainham where he was told the Commander-in-Chief had already confirmed his sentence.
Though the Castle’s medical staff strongly disapproved of Connolly’s part in the rising, he was treated with professionalism and the utmost personal kindness.
That day, Surgeon Tobin whispered to a nurse, ‘His leg is not responding to treatment.’