Rebels

by Peter De Rosa

  ‘Owen, how’d you like to go to the zoo sometime?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir.’ Neither of them noticed that Hanna had come to the window. ‘And after the zoo, how’d you like to join me for dinner at my hotel?’

  ‘Yes, please, sir.’

  ‘We’d better ask your mommie, hadn’t we?’ Vane took the lad by the hand. ‘What would you say to a nice chicken meal?’

  Owen stopped and looked up at the Major with a serious expression. ‘I don’t eat chicken, sir.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Why ever not?’

  ‘My daddy never ate meat.’

  ‘I see.’

  After a pause, Owen added, ‘He doesn’t even eat vegetables now.’

  In New York, Mollie Monteith was growing more and more worried. Still no news from Bob. She had read the list of the dead and executed in Dublin. Among them were The O’Rahilly, Tom Clarke, Ned Daly. All friends of hers. Each day she expected to see Bob’s name.

  She took her two little girls and went to the office of the Gaelic American.

  John Devoy, a crusty old bachelor, was not the best of comforters but he did his best.

  Mollie said, ‘I read of four men in a cab driving into a river in Killarney. Only three names appeared in the paper.’ She touched her children. ‘Maybe the fourth was their father.’

  Devoy became edgy. ‘Please, please, Mrs Monteith, don’t let thoughts like that get to you.’

  ‘But you have told me nothing.’

  ‘All I know is that the German submarine put three of our people on the coast of Kerry early on Good Friday. I can only presume that your husband is being taken care of by the men who were supposed to have met him with a pilot boat.’ He stood up. ‘Now, please go home, ma’am, with your little ones.’

  ‘Where’s Daddy, Mommy?’ said five-year-old Vie.

  ‘He’s alive,’ Mollie said fiercely. ‘I know he’s alive.’

  At Kilmainham Hospital, Maxwell was writing a reply to Kitchener.

  He could not stop coughing. He had spent long days and quite a few nights sifting the evidence against the accused. He could not get out of his head the fact that this revolt had occurred when the very existence of the Empire was under threat. Some rebels had fought without uniforms, dealt out death like reptiles and then slipped back among ordinary civilians. No wonder some atrocities on the British side had occurred. The surprising thing was there were so few.

  But he had to be firm. Dublin was still smouldering and the blood of his brave boys was scarcely dry on the pavements.

  It seemed that the Skeffington case was what bothered Westminster most.

  He admitted: ‘The officer, Colthurst, is apparently a hot-headed Irishman and on this occasion completely lost his head.’

  He assured Kitchener he was under arrest and would be court-martialled.

  Later, in conference with his aides, Maxwell was in a foul mood. The PM had asked him to finish off the executions speedily and then asked for a delay on McDermott and Connolly.

  ‘Isn’t that typical of politicians? Left to me, the whole damn thing would have ended at dawn this morning.’

  His mood did not improve when aides told him that damage to Dublin City was estimated at £2½ million, a third of the total annual revenue for the entire country. The official casualty figure was 1,351 dead or seriously wounded. 100,000 people needed government assistance to avoid starvation.

  In the light of this, Maxwell composed a Proclamation. Rather late in the day, he explained that he had felt compelled to execute the known organizers of the rising.

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

  Prince Alexander came in with a cable from Kitchener. It read: ‘Unless you hear to the contrary from Mr Asquith you may carry out tomorrow the extreme sentence of death upon McDermott and Connolly.’

  The General sighed. ‘Alex, make the necessary arrangements.’

  In Cell 59 at Kilmainham Jail, de Valera still had no confirmation of his sentence. He knew his prospects were not good.

  He was reading the Confessions of St Augustine when an officer arrived. He stood to attention. He had been expecting this and had prepared himself. Only the thought of leaving his wife and children without support disturbed him.

  The officer read out: ‘The said Eamon de Valera is found guilty and sentenced to death.’

  De Valera had vowed to himself he would not flinch, nor did he.

  After fumbling in his pocket, the officer read from a second document. The sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.

  The prisoner was wrenched back from thoughts of bullets exploding in his belly to the realization that he was going to live, after all. The sharp switch nearly unnerved him. In spite of his madly thumping heart, he still did not flinch.

  The officer turned and left, clanging the door behind him.

  De Valera sat down on the stool, took up his book and read a passage he had underlined: ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.’

  De Valera was a commandant. When news of his reprieve spread, there was a general sense of relief that the killings were over. At street-corners, people smiled again. There were only two rebel leaders left. Surely, even ‘Bloody Maxwell’ would not shoot a cripple and a wounded man.

  In the Tower of London, Casement was looking better. Gertrude had visited him and brought him, apologetically, a suit off the peg.

  He thanked her for what he now knew was her on-going concern. He was only afraid she might lose her teaching job because of him.

  He had combed his growing beard, was recovering his majestically straight back, his distinguished appearance. If only he could get rid of those tiger-toothed lice in his hair.

  It had been good talking to a friend after the long silence. He was pleased that a fund had been opened to pay for his defence, even though the outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion.

  Well versed in Irish history, he knew that hanging would be his final consecration in the eyes of his compatriots. He might not go to heaven from a British scaffold but he would certainly go from there, with shiny halo, straight into the pantheon of Irish demi-gods.

  One thing still bothered him. He could not reconcile himself to the fact that loyal Irishmen had rebelled against MacNeill’s express command.

  Already, he was making notes for his trial.

  ‘Loyalty,’ he scribbled, ‘is a sentiment, not a law. It rests on love, not on restraint. The Government of Ireland by England rests on restraint and not on law; and since it demands no love it can evoke no loyalty.’

  He reflected on how the English for centuries had appropriated French territory but they never executed Frenchmen for fighting to recover it.

  ‘They did not assassinate them by law. Judicial assassination today is reserved only for one race of the King’s subjects, for Irishmen; for those who cannot forget their allegiance to Ireland.’

  Gripping his imagination was the green sea-girt land of his birth. Never would he see her again. But at least he, like his Dublin comrades, could die for her.

  In Ireland alone in this twentieth century is loyalty held to be a crime. If we are to be indicted as criminals, to be shot as murderers, to be imprisoned as convicts because our offence is that we love Ireland more than we value our lives, then I know not what virtue resides in any offer of self-government held out to brave men on such terms.

  Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth; a thing no more doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself – than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind.

  It is only from the convict these things are withheld for crimes committed or proven – and Ireland, that has wronged no man, that has injured no land, that has sought no dominion over
others – Ireland is treated today among the nations of the world as if she was a convicted criminal.

  If it be treason to fight against such an unnatural fate as this, then I am proud to be a rebel, and shall cling to my ‘rebellion’ with the last drop of my blood.

  Casement’s views were now part of orthodoxy in Ireland. Forgotten were the inconveniences of the brief rebellion. The man- and woman-in-the-street were only beginning to discover who these men were whom the British were secretly executing.

  Pearse was a schoolmaster, and by all accounts a grand one. And Clarke, now, he was a tobacconist whom the English had put in solitary for year after year. And MacDonagh was a lecturer in the National University, a family man who had never been heard to utter an unkind word. Not the usual crowd of plotters and mischief-makers, but idealists like Emmet and Tone.

  Presently, there was James Connolly. True, few Irish folk had ever heard of him except when priests cursed him from the altar but wasn’t he a prisoner, for heaven’s sake, in that godless hole, the Castle? And he loved the poor, they say, as much as bold Jim Larkin.

  The sentiment was growing like a tide that the rebels were wrong, but not as wrong as the situation that made them rebel. And their shooting soldiers better armed and trained than themselves was nowhere near as bad as soldiers murdering them in cold blood without a fair trial and no chance to explain why they took up arms.

  Late that Thursday afternoon, Father Aloysius was called to Connolly again.

  He could not believe there would be any more executions. People were sick of them. Maxwell’s Proclamations made it plain that court martials were practically over. There was Shaw’s article. There was Dillon’s speech in the Commons and the Prime Minister’s courteous response. And Connolly was a wounded man.

  Father Aloysius found him no better than before, though he seemed easier in his mind.

  For reasons he could not fathom, the priest was disturbed. After the visit, he was walking through the Castle Gate when he turned on his heels. He had to know if Connolly was going to be shot or not.

  He asked for Captain Stanley.

  The kind young officer said, ‘Don’t upset yourself, Padre. The PM would not possibly permit executions pending the debate in the House this evening.’

  The friar found this very sensible. Why, then, could he not shake off this grim sense of foreboding?

  He was back at the friary at 7 p.m. He took supper with his brethren and settled down in his room to pray for Connolly and his friend, McDermott.

  In Kilmainham, Sean was told he was to be shot at dawn.

  Immensely calm, he wrote to his brothers and sisters.

  By the time this reaches you, I will, with God’s mercy, have joined in heaven my poor father and mother as well as my dear friends who have been shot during the week. They died like heroes and with God’s help I will act throughout as heroic as they did.

  He assured his family he had had priest friends constantly with him over the last twenty-four hours.

  I feel a happiness the like of which I never experienced in my life before. You ought to envy me. The cause for which I die has been re-baptized during the past week by blood of as good men as ever trod God’s earth.

  He asked them to contact his friends.

  Tell them that in my last hours I am the same Sean they always knew and that even now I can enjoy a laugh as good as ever.

  Goodbye, dear Brothers and Sisters, make no lament for me. Pray for my soul and feel a lasting pride in my death. I die that the Irish nation may live.

  God bless and guard you all and may He have mercy on my soul. Yours as ever, Sean.

  At 9 o’clock, Father Aloysius’s devotions were interrupted. A Brother knocked to say an officer was waiting downstairs.

  By a curious twist, the bearer of bad news was Captain Stanley. He stood in the hallway, cap in hand, sad-looking, shuffling his feet.

  ‘Just to say, Padre, your services will be required at two in the morning.’

  ‘It’s not—?’

  ‘Sorry. I’m not allowed to say another word.’

  There was no point in Father Aloysius trying to sleep. He had witnessed many painful things in the last few days. There were tales of atrocity in North King Street worse even than anything he had seen. Connolly’s death was just one more pointless addition to the litany.

  Having finished his divine office, he remained kneeling on his prie-dieu in front of the crucified Christ which had been sprinkled with Pearse’s blood and now bore his name.

  At 11 p.m., Connolly was woken up. For a while, he could not grasp what they were doing to him.

  An officer said, ‘Sorry to disturb you, but—. Are you awake?’

  Connolly yawned. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are to be shot at dawn.’

  With the return of the shrieking pain, Connolly’s first reaction was, Bullets are better than morphine. Then, in full possession of his wits, he asked, ‘My wife?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Your wife and daughter are being sent for.’

  At midnight, McDermott had visitors. Phyllis and Mary Ryan had been driven from Drumcondra. They entered his cell to see a board at the end for a bed, a chair and, on the table, a yellow candle in a metal candlestick. The candle kept spluttering and flaring up.

  He gave them both a big hug. ‘Can you stay long?’

  ‘Yes,’ they said.

  They sat down together on the board, Sean in the middle with an arm around each of them.

  For the girls it was unreal. It was like old times when they had talked the night away.

  At one in the morning, a motor ambulance drew up outside Bill O’Brien’s house.

  An officer said, ‘A message from the Castle. James Connolly is unwell and wishes to see his wife and eldest daughter.’

  Lillie believed it. James had lost a lot of blood. He had been weak, in pain and could not sleep without morphine.

  But Nora knew.

  Lillie asked, ‘Are they going to shoot my man, sir?’

  ‘I know absolutely nothing, ma’am.’

  With the curfew still in force, Dublin was dark and deserted. O’Connell Street had a haunted look and still reeked of burning.

  Nora refused to be reconciled to all those armed men on the stairs and outside the room where her father lay.

  As the two women entered, Connolly turned his head, painfully. ‘Well, Lillie, I suppose you know what this means?’

  She had tried so hard to fool herself this was just another visit.

  ‘Oh no, James,’ she exclaimed, ‘not that.’

  He spoke of the irony of being woken up after his first natural sleep in nights. At which Lillie put her face on the bed and cried. He patted her head, her heaving shoulders. This man who had hardened his heart so often to do the task fate imposed on him was now overwhelmed with compassion. He remembered his lovely Lillie when they were young. She always wore black. So long was her dark hair that when she brushed it, it reached down to her hips and, ah, those fairy curls at the base of her neck.

  She was better educated than he was; and he had relied on her in the beginning to correct his grammar and punctuation.

  Dear Lillie, how much the labours of his life had cost her, and she never complained. The poverty, the endless grind to make ends meet; the feeling of never being settled anywhere for more than a few years; the nights when he had gone out and she wondered if he would come back alive; his belonging to the Union or the Rebellion, so that she was mostly left alone with a large family trying to cope; the long periods when they had to be apart, living separately abroad, even.

  Most painful of all was something that happened early in their marriage when he had gone ahead to America. He went, so happy, to pick them up at Ellis Island. Too happy, for it was only when he counted them that he realized one was missing. His eldest daughter, Mona. ‘Where is she?’ he asked in a strangled voice. And Lillie, wide-eyed, said, ‘Didn’t you get my cable?’ ‘No!’ The anguish was rising in him, so he almost screamed, ‘
Where is my Mona?’ ‘Dead, James.’ And his joy, as so often in his life, turned to ashes.

  The story took little telling.

  One afternoon, Lillie had left Mona with a sister. Her clothes had caught alight and she was burned all over, except for her lovely head. She had taken twenty-four hours to die, conscious all the time. And he had blamed himself for not being there, for not being able to take her hand, or stroke her forehead, and tell her how much he loved her.

  Whenever lately he had thought of his darling little Mona he did not feel the pain in his leg at all, nor the poison that was racing through his body.

  Now a fresh sorrow: knowing Lillie would have to bear another death, his, without him being there to comfort her.

  ‘Look, Lillie,’ he said, in desperation, ‘please don’t cry, or you’ll make me cry.’

  ‘But your life, James.’ Her words were muffled in the bed covers. ‘Your beautiful life.’

  He stroked her hair. ‘Well, Lillie, hasn’t it been a full life and isn’t this a good end?’

  Nora was crying, too. Her father saw how his daughter’s fierce dark eyes were darker still with mourning. He pleaded with her, ‘Don’t you cry, there’s nothing to cry about.’

  ‘I won’t cry, Papa.’

  He patted her hand. ‘That’s my brave girl.’

  The officer looked at his watch. ‘Five more minutes.’

  Lillie nearly passed out. Sister Sullivan brought a glass of water to revive her.

  Connolly tried to clasp his wife in his arms, but he could only lift his head and shoulders a little. So the couple held hands until the officer made them jump with ‘Time’s up.’

  Connolly said softly, ‘Goodbye, Lillie,’ but her head was so heavy she could not raise it off the bed. Nora tried to lift her but even she couldn’t. The Sister took Lillie by the shoulder and helped her in a daze out of the room.

  Nora was at the door when her father, his face screwed up with pain and longing, beckoned to her. She ran back and he put his arms round her and pulled her to him and hugged her. In her ear, as though it were a prophecy certain to be fulfilled, he whispered, ‘Don’t be too disappointed, Nora. We shall rise again.’