Rebels

by Peter De Rosa

  The nurse whispered back, ‘He’s in agony all the time.’

  The surgeon nodded. ‘It’ll have to come off, I’m afraid.’

  He went to brief a senior officer on what had to be done.

  The officer said, ‘That isn’t necessary.’

  ‘I assure you, sir, it is.’

  ‘Take it from me, Mr Tobin,’ the officer said, meaningfully, ‘it isn’t.’

  *

  At the Viceregal Lodge, someone else was for the chop.

  Lord Basil Blackwood, who was not a vindictive man, entered Lord Wimborne’s study.

  With distinct pleasure, he said, ‘Excellency, a message has just come in from the Cabinet in London.’

  Wimborne smiled. ‘Oh?’

  ‘They are asking for your—’

  ‘Not my resignation?’

  An hour later, still white with fury, Wimborne dictated his reply in formal terms that stuck in his throat.

  He then poured himself a brandy that was stiff even by his stern standards.

  A young nurse was told, ‘Prepare the prisoner, Connolly, for court martial.’

  She could hardly believe it. He was so ill, and, anyway, so nice. Many a time she had heard him and Surgeon Tobin swap poems and joke together. Everyone liked him; they just could not understand what had made him a rebel.

  Having eased him on to the pillow, she washed his face and combed his hair.

  ‘What’s this for, nurse?’ When she did not answer, he said, ‘So it’s my turn.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can get you some clean pyjamas.’

  In a cupboard she found a brand new pair and helped him struggle into them.

  As he gritted his teeth in pain, he said, ‘I have to look my best, don’t I?’

  Suddenly, the door was flung open and three officers burst in. One of them barked, ‘Nurse, wait outside.’

  The President of the Court said sharply, ‘Sit up! You know what this is.’

  From the horizontal, Connolly eyed him, without saying a word.

  ‘I told you to sit up, man.’

  The young RAMC officer in the corner whispered, ‘The prisoner is dying, sir.’

  ‘Well,’ the officer bellowed, ‘prop him up, then.’

  The nurse was called back to place pillows and a mattress in position so that he could sit upright.

  His ball-shaped face white with pain, Connolly made no attempt at a defence. What was the point when they had his signature to the surrender? He strongly rejected, however, allegations that he had ill-treated PoWs.

  He told the Tribunal: ‘We went out to break the connection between this country and the British Empire and to establish an Irish Republic. We believe that the call we then issued to the people of Ireland was a nobler call, in a holier cause, than any issued to them during this war, having any connection with this war.’

  ‘Is this really necessary?’ the President demanded.

  Connolly took no notice.

  ‘We succeeded in proving that Irishmen are ready to die endeavouring to win for Ireland those national rights which the British government has been asking them to die to win for Belgium. As long as that remains the case, the cause of Irish freedom is safe.’

  One officer yawned loudly, another tapped his watch.

  ‘Believing that the British government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable minority, ready to die to affirm that truth, makes the Government for ever a usurpation and a crime against human progress.

  ‘I personally thank God that I have lived to see the day when thousands of Irish men and boys, and hundreds of Irish women and girls, were ready to affirm that truth, and to attest it with their lives if need be.’

  ‘Anything else?’ demanded the President, irritably.

  ‘Yes,’ Connolly said, undaunted, ‘I want to see my wife and eldest daughter.’

  The President gathered up his papers. ‘Granted,’ he said. ‘Good afternoon.’

  When Nora went with her mother to the Castle, she could hardly believe her eyes. Soldiers were on guard with fixed bayonets on every step and on the Battleaxe Landing above. Were so many needed to watch over someone too ill to shift from his bed?

  Before they entered, the Intelligence Officer warned them, ‘You must not talk about the rising or anything that has taken place since. Anything, you understand?’

  They nodded.

  A nurse, detailed to search them, only went through the motions. ‘I refuse,’ she muttered, ‘to be part of this.’

  The RAMC officer never left Connolly’s room but when the wife and daughter entered, he courteously turned to the window with his back to them, reading.

  Lillie hastened towards the bed, murmuring, ‘How is the pain today, James?’

  ‘Not too bad, Lillie.’ Never one to keep a secret, he blurted out, ‘I’ve just been court-martialled.’

  Both women gasped, and Lillie moaned, ‘Then they’re—’

  ‘Dad’s a sick man,’ Nora cut in.

  ‘If they can court-martial him, why won’t they kill him?’

  Connolly waved speculation aside. He told them how he came by his injury and how the medics couldn’t staunch the blood. He praised the bravery of the lad who shielded him with his body when they left the GPO.

  ‘We can’t fail after things like that, can we?’

  His chief concern was his family. So many girls. Owing to his many activities, he had not given them much of a life.

  ‘Listen to me, Lillie. I reckon you all ought to go back to the States.’

  ‘Where would we get the money?’

  ‘Get Skeffy to edit and publish my writings.’

  With a sharp look towards the officer, Norah said, ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Who? Skeffy? How?’

  ‘In Portobello Barracks.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ the young officer said kindly, ‘or you’ll have to leave.’

  Connolly was left pondering a few moments on this surprising news. In a barracks? Did they execute pacifists?

  In an attempt to cheer them up, he said, ‘The rising will put an end to recruiting. Irishmen will realize it’s crazy fighting for the freedom of another country while we’re slaves in our own.’

  Nora told him about his own son. ‘Rory was in prison.’

  ‘Really?’ His eyes lit up. ‘Where?’

  ‘Richmond Barracks. He was with Sean McDermott for eight days. He gave the soldiers the name Alfred Carne.’

  Lillie said anxiously, ‘He’s under sixteen, so they would have let him go anyway.’

  Connolly chuckled. ‘Imagine, he’s fought for his country, been in prison for his country and he’s not sixteen. He’s had a great start in life, hasn’t he?’

  Nora told him about her long and fruitless walk with Ina from Ulster.

  ‘So,’ she concluded, sighing, ‘all I did was carry messages.’

  His eyes brimmed with pride again as he squeezed her hand.

  ‘My little woman did as much as any of us. If you hadn’t come down from the North I might not have persuaded the leaders to fight.’

  One thing still bothered him.

  ‘Skeffy, dead?’ He asked it voicelessly.

  Nora mouthed back, ‘Murdered. By a drunken officer.’

  With words that escaped her, she added, ‘There’s only you and Sean McDermott left.’

  Nothing had ever jolted Connolly so much. No one in the Castle had hinted at anything like that.’

  ‘All of them gone?’

  Nora nodded. More to console her mother, she said, ‘But they won’t shoot you, Daddy, not a wounded man.’

  He racked his brain. ‘During the Boer War, the British captured a prisoner wounded just like me. Name of Scheepers. In a farmhouse. They court-martialled him,’ – his voice dipped – ‘then they shot him in a chair.’

  Lillie passed her hand over her throbbing forehead.

  Co
nnolly gestured for Nora to put her hand under the bed covers. Into it he placed a compressed piece of paper.

  ‘My defence at my trial,’ he whispered. ‘See it gets out safely.’

  Feeling his rough warm skin, Nora was suddenly a child again.

  ‘Daddy mine,’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Daddy mine.’

  When they left, Nora held the paper in her clenched hand while she was being searched. She would have fought the entire British army on her own to keep it.

  At Kilmainham Hospital, Maxwell was composing a report to the Prime Minister.

  He was far from being the stereotype of the dumb and vicious soldier. Everything in Ireland, he realized, was thirty years too late. The rebellion happened because Home Rule had been put on the long finger at Westminster. From then on, those who backed the ballot rather than the bullet were finished.

  If there were an election, he predicted, Redmond’s party would lose out massively to the men of violence. The Masses and the grand funerals, the badges and the banners, all pointed the way of Sinn Fein.

  Moreover, there was not now the remotest possibility that Ulster would consent to be governed by a treacherous crowd in the south, nor could mainland Britain ask it of them. By demanding a Republic in blood, the rebels had signed and sealed the partition of Ireland.

  Maxwell even sensed that, sooner or later, he would be blamed for the troubles ahead. Setting politics aside, he told Asquith that his policy had been not to confirm any death sentence unless he had overwhelming evidence that the prisoner was either a leader or a rebel commander who had shot down His Majesty’s troops or subjects.

  He answered the PM’s query about Connolly and McDermott by saying that since they were ring-leaders, it would be both illogical and unjust not to execute them.

  He had set the date: 11 May.

  ‘It is hoped that these examples will be sufficient to act as a deterrent to intriguers and to bring home to them that the murder of His Majesty’s subjects or other acts calculated to imperil the safety of the realm will not be tolerated.’

  When Asquith read the letter, he saw that its icy logic was irrefutable. But it was the logic of a soldier.

  Sometimes, unhappily, the pursuit of justice led only to more injustice, and the passion for order ended in chaos.

  The London Daily News on 10 May set the tone for the day. It featured an article by Bernard Shaw.

  Dillon read it. Redmond read it. More importantly, the PM read it.

  Shaw’s view was that the Irishmen who had been recently shot in cold blood after capture or surrender were prisoners of war. It was, therefore, wrong to slaughter them. Without their own national government, these men considered themselves occupied by a foreign power. They were only doing what Englishmen would do if England were overrun by Germany. Each one knew he would be killed if they were beaten.

  This danger only adds in the same measure to his glory in the eyes of his compatriots and of the disinterested admirers of patriotism throughout the world.

  It is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this position without making him a martyr and a hero, even though the day before the rising he may have been only a minor poet.

  The Irish, he stressed, have a great tradition in these matters. In a prophetic vein, he went on:

  The military authorities and the English government must have known that they were canonizing their prisoners. I remain an Irishman, and am bound to contradict any implication that I can regard as a traitor any Irishman taken in a fight for Irish Independence against the British government, which was a fair fight in everything except the enormous odds my countrymen had to face.

  While civil servants in the Foreign Office were digesting this, they received confirmation of its good sense in a second cable from the Washington Ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice.

  Newspapers in the States, he reported, were saying the executions were incredibly stupid and were creating considerable alarm and discussion among the public.

  That afternoon, the House of Commons was crammed to capacity. Even Ministers of the Crown could not get their friends tickets for the Visitors’ Gallery.

  The air was buzzing with excitement as word got round that Dillon, just back from Dublin, was to address the House.

  The PM and the entire Cabinet were seated when he rose on an adjournment debate to make one of the most contentious speeches in the history of the Commons.

  A straight, handsome man, he adjusted his spectacles and patted his white hair into place. He claimed to speak for the entire Nationalist Party that had worked for reconciliation and Home Rule, that had encouraged Irishmen to enlist in the British army, and had indeed given thousands to death in the war. His primary aim was to stop the senseless killings in Dublin.

  His magnificent voice rang all the changes. It was, by turns, scolding, beseeching, sarcastic, belligerent.

  ‘You are letting loose a river of blood, and, make no mistake about it, between two races who, after 300 years of hatred and strife, we had nearly succeeded in bringing together.

  ‘It is the first rebellion that ever took place in Ireland when you had the majority on your side. It is the fruit of our life work. We had risked our lives a hundred times to bring about this result. We are held up to odium as traitors by those men who made this rebellion; and our lives have been in danger a hundred times during the last thirty years because we have endeavoured to reconcile the two things, and now you are washing out our whole life work in a sea of blood.’

  When, he demanded, his grey eyes blazing, did Englishmen ever think of Ireland except as England’s back yard?

  To shouts of ‘No’ and ‘Scandalous’, and frantic waving of order papers, he went on like an avalanche:

  ‘I say I am proud of their courage, and, if you were not so dense and so stupid, as some of you English people are, you could have had these men fighting for you, and they are men worth having. It is not murderers who are being executed: it is insurgents who have fought a clean fight, however misguided, and’ – he glared up at the Gallery where many top-ranking officers were seated, foaming at the mouth – ‘it would have been a damned good thing for you if your soldiers were able to put up as good a fight as did these men in Dublin.’

  The Chamber echoed and re-echoed with roars of anger. Some shouted, ‘What impossible people these Irish are!’

  When he could make himself heard, an unrepentant Dillon compared Britain with America after the Civil War.

  ‘When the insurrection there was over, I do not think Abraham Lincoln executed one single man, and by that one act of clemency he did an enormous amount of good for the whole country.’

  The chance of reconciliation in Ireland had been tossed aside.

  ‘One of the most horrible tragedies of the fighting was that brother met brother in the streets of Dublin.’

  Yet even General Maxwell agreed that the soldiers, almost wholly Irish, had proved themselves utterly trustworthy.

  A profound silence settled on the House as he outlined the Sheehy-Skeffington case. He had spoken with the man’s wife and checked the story out. That quaint vegetarian, that gentle pacifist had been arrested and shot in the back by a British army captain. And Maxwell refused to arrest his murderer.

  The silence that attended this revelation was shattered as Dillon spoke a final word of praise for the rebels.

  ‘I admit they were wrong; I know they were wrong; but they fought a clean fight, and they fought with superb bravery and skill, and no act of savagery or act against the customs of war that I know of has been brought home to any leader or any organized body of insurgents.’

  Dillon sat down and when the hubbub subsided, the Prime Minister rose. He addressed himself, in particular, to the case of Sheehy-Skeffington.

  ‘I confess I do not and cannot believe it. Does anyone suppose that Sir John Maxwell has any object in shielding officers and soldiers, if there be such, who have been guilty of such ungentlemanlike, such inhuman conduct? It is the last thing the British army
would dream of!’

  There were hear-hears, tapping of benches and murmurs of assent throughout the House. In the Visitors’ Gallery, the top-brass and titled ladies exchanged approving glances.

  The PM took Dillon’s point about the bravery of the rebels: ‘So far as the great body of insurgents is concerned I have no hesitation in saying in public they have conducted themselves with great humanity which contrasted very much to their advantage with some of the so-called civilized enemies which we are fighting in Europe. They were young men; often lads. They were misled, almost unconsciously, I believe, into this terrible business.’

  The PM had a surprise in store for the House. He himself was going to Dublin.

  Carson and the Unionists were not pleased. It would look to the Sinn Feiners as if their rebelliousness was even more effective than the politicking of Nationalist politicians.

  Asquith not only made immediate preparations to see for himself why the Irish administration had failed. He also said to Lord Kitchener, ‘Tell Maxwell to hold his hand for a while.’

  Kitchener said, ‘What about the two executions fixed for tomorrow?’

  ‘Tell him to delay them. This Sheehy-Skeffington case is most worrying.’

  Kitchener, who had heard the story of the murder first-hand from Major Vane, could not but agree.

  Vane was back in Dublin. He had caught the night boat and spent the morning resting in the Gresham Hotel. In the afternoon, he took a cab to Skeffy’s home in Rathmines.

  He had been in many a battle but this was the hardest thing he had ever had to do. Hanna had a great deal, perhaps too much, to forgive. The mere sight of khaki might make her furious.

  It was a relief to find the little boy playing on his own in the front garden. The Major stood there a while watching him. Here, he sensed, was a great man in the making.

  Eventually, Owen saw him and waved. So Colthurst’s brutality had not soured or frightened him.

  ‘Hello, sonny, my name is Vane,’ he said. ‘Francis. Like your father. I’m just back from London.’

  In spite of his whiskers and plum-coloured face, the boy took to him; he liked his smile.