Part 6

Then she begged the Commandant, who could make the decision for our division, not to think of giving in. It would be better, she said, for all of us to be killed at our posts. I felt as she did about it, but the girl who had brought the despatch became more and more excited, saying that the soldiers outside had threatened to "blow her little head off" if she did not come out soon with the word they wanted. Possibly they suspected any Irish girl would be more likely to urge resistance than surrender.

Commandant Mallin, to quiet us, I suppose, said he would not surrender unless forced to do so. But he must have decided to give in at once, for in less than an hour an ambulance came to take me to St. Vincent's Hospital, just across the Green.

As they carried me down-stairs, our boys came out to shake my hand. I urged them again and again to hold out. As I said good-by to Commandant Mallin, I had a feeling I should never see him again. Not that it entered my head for a moment that he would be executed by the British. Despite all our wrongs and their injustices, I did not dream of their killing prisoners of war.

I felt no such dread concerning the countess, though our last words together were about her will. I had witnessed it, and she had slipped it in the lining of my coat. I was to get it to her family at the earliest possible moment. It was fortunate that I did.

My departure was the first move in the surrender. That afternoon all the revolutionists gave up their arms to the British in St. Patrick's Square.

X

Those first two weeks in St. Vincent's Hospital were the blackest of my life. In that small, white room I was, at first, as much cut off as though in my grave. I had fever, and the doctors and nurses were more worried over my pneumonia than over my wounds, though every time they dressed them I suffered from the original treatment with corrosive sublimate. My greatest anxiety, however, was because I could get no word to my mother in Glasgow. I knew she would think I had been killed.

That was just what happened. The first word she had received since the day I left home was that I was dead; that I had been shot in the spine, and left lying on the Dublin pavement for two days. The next rumor that reached her was that I was not dead, but paralyzed. The third report was that the British had sentenced me to fifteen years' imprisonment. Had I not been wounded, the last would probably have been true.

After two weeks I wrote a letter, and the doctor had it forwarded home for me. It had not been easy work writing it, for my right arm was the one that had been wounded. I knew, though, that unless she had word in my own handwriting, my mother might not believe what she read.

Presently news began to drift in to me of trials and executions. I could not get it through my head. Why were these men not treated as prisoners of war? We had obeyed all rules of war and surrendered as formally as any army ever capitulated. All my reports were of death; nothing but death!

At dawn on May 3, the British shot Padraic Pearse, Thomas McDonagh, and old Tom Clarke.

The following day they shot Joseph Plunkett, the brother of Padraic Pearse, and two other leaders, Daly and O'Hanrahan.

The third day John McBride, a man known the world over for his stand in the Boer War, was shot to death. He was the only one killed that day, and we wondered why. What was this British reasoning that determined who should go in company with his fellows and who should go alone?

At length came the turn of the Countess Markievicz. Because she was a woman, they commuted her death-sentence to penal servitude for life. I was very glad; but I knew that, since she had fought as one of them, she would rather have died with them. Penal servitude! Those words rang like a knell for one who was all energy, who needed people around her, who wanted to serve.

The British did not shoot any one on Sunday. They let us meditate on all that the past week had done to our leaders. There is no torture so excruciating as suspense. It is the suspense which Ireland has had to endure for generations that has weakened her more than any battles. How we have waited and waited! It has always been hard for us to believe we were not to realize our hopes. Even in these latter years during which Home Rule has loomed large before us, we have not suspected that, in the end, it would become only a parliamentary trick and a delusion. If any one had told me the Sunday before that all these men were to be shot, I should not have believed them. Our bitter belief has been forced upon us.

On Monday the British began it again. This time it was Michael Mallin they stood against a wall and shot. I remembered how, when I was so ill at the College of Surgeons, he had been gentle with me. He always had tried to ease the discomforts of his men. You would never have guessed by looking at him, he was so quiet and restrained, that he had been waiting twenty years for the day which would make him a commandant over Irish soldiers. He told me that, as a boy of fourteen, he had enlisted in the British army to get experience with which to fight Great Britain. When he was stationed in India, he said, he had lain awake night after night, planning how some day he could put his military knowledge at Ireland's service. Six days he served Ireland; eight days he lay in prison; now he was dead!

Later his widow came to see me. She brought me the note-book he used when writing the despatches I carried. She brought me, besides, some small bits of Irish poplin he had woven himself. She did not break down; she seemed exalted. It was the same with all the wives of those shot, and with the mother of Padraic and William Pearse. You would have thought they had been greatly honored, that their dignity was equal to bearing it.

Yet they all had terrible stories of cruelty to tell me. Kilmainham Prison was a grim waiting-room for death. In addition, the court-martial never lasted long enough for any one to feel he had been fairly tried and judged. I heard all the prison sentences, over a hundred that first week! Most of them were for long terms, and five for life. Councilor Partridge was given a fifteen-year sentence that afterward was commuted to ten.

It is not the same thing to read of executions and sentences in the press and to hear of them from the lips of friends,--the wives, mothers, and daughters of the men executed or sentenced for life. To feel we had failed in our purpose was enough to make us brood; but to know that never again would these men sing rebel songs together or tell of their hopes--

At length Norah Connolly and her sister came to see me. They told me of their father's last hours; how, because of his wound that already had brought him close to death, he had to be strapped into a chair to face the firing-squad. I thought of gentle Mrs. Connolly saying good-by to her husband, knowing all the while what was about to take place!

Some of the first-aid girls who had been in prison for fifteen days came to visit me, too. We compared notes. I learned then how Chris Caffrey had been stripped and searched by British soldiers to her shame, for she was a modest girl. But she had eaten her despatch before they dragged her off the street where she had been bicycling. I heard, too, how Chris had been almost prevented from reaching headquarters by a crowd of poor women gathered about the post-office for their usual weekly "separation allowance." Their husbands were all fighting in France or Flanders for the British. They would not get their allowance this week, and were terror-stricken, crowding about the post-office and crying and shouting hysterically. Chris, as we called Christine, had to fire her revolver at the ground before they would make way for her.

Next followed the story of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, one of the few men in Dublin we could go to for advice about the law when we had any plan to carry out. He had been shot without a trial, they said; without even knowing, when called out into the little courtyard, that he was about to be killed. And he had had _nothing to do with the rising_! He always had been against the use of force. When he was arrested, after a day spent in trying to get a committee of safety together because the police had disappeared, his wife did not even know where he was. She had no word of his death until a day after he was buried in quicklime, the burial of a criminal!

Ah, how the stories of Belgian atrocities which we had heard from the lips of the Archbishop of Michlin when the Great War broke out, paled beside this one fortnight in Dublin! We did not know when it would end or how. There ensued a reign of terror in all Irish homes, whether the men or women had had anything to do with the rising or not. For both soldiers and police were now given power to arrest any one they pleased. Several hundred men were put in prison under no charge, nor were any charges ever preferred in many cases.

The women, too! Helen Maloney and Dr. Katherine Lynn, whose motor Madam had used that night in St. Stephen's Green and whose bicycle I had been riding, were both arrested Easter Monday and taken to Dublin Castle. Miss Maloney was discovered a few hours later with the lock half off her door, her fingers bleeding pitifully from attempts to get out. Next they were taken to Kilmainham jail, where for fifteen days those two women, with eighty others, were kept in a room completely lacking any sanitary arrangements. We used to shudder at stories of such deeds, which we then believed could happen only in Siberia. Dr. Lynn is famous for her surgical skill. She is one of the Irish doctors to whom the British send their worst war cripples for treatment, and is far more successful than they in treating such cases. Many visitors to Dublin have seen Miss Maloney on the stage of the Abbey Theater and recognized her talent. Dr. Lynn was deported to Bath; Miss Maloney was sent to the Aylesbury Prison, and kept there a year. Never once during that time was any charge preferred against her.

Little Tommy Keenan of Camden Row had, so he thought, the good fortune to be put in prison with sixty of the Fianna when our men surrendered the College of Surgeons. But, much to their chagrin, at the end of two weeks the boys were released. Did they scurry away to grow up into better British subjects? Not at all! Tommy lined them up in front of the jail and led them off down the street singing "The Watch on the Rhine" at the top of their lungs.

There was no end to the stories I heard as I lay there in the hospital. Stories of heroism and stories of disaster followed one another, each strengthening my belief that the courage and honor of the heroic days of Ireland were still alive in our hearts. Perhaps it is for this we should love our enemies: when they cleave with their swords the heart of a brave man, they lay bare the truth of life.

XI

There came a day when I could no longer endure lying alone in my room, thinking of all that had happened for this reason or that. The nurses had been very kind to me. Some of them were in sympathy with the Sinn Fein movement, while all of them felt the horror of the executions. There were times when I could rise above this horror and cheer them, too, by singing a rebel song. I had interested them, besides, in suffrage work we had been doing in Glasgow, where for several years eleven hundred militants had done picketing and the like.

Finally, however, I persuaded them to let me move into the public ward, where I could see other women patients and talk a little. There were about twenty women and girls in the ward. Nine of them, who had nothing to do with the rising, had been wounded by British soldiers. The nurses insisted this was accidental. But the women themselves would not agree to that explanation, nor did I, for I recalled the Red Cross girls being shot at,--a thing I had seen with my own eyes. I told the nurses I had seen the British firing at our ambulances in the belief, no doubt, that we were doing what we had caught them at--transporting troops from one part of Dublin to another in ambulances. Sometimes I felt sorry to have to make those nurses see facts as they were, instead of helping them keep what few illusions still remained about their men in khaki. But I was glad when I could tell them what I had just heard of De Vallera's daring. With a handful of men, he had prevented two thousand of the famous Sherwood Foresters coming through lower Mount Street to attack one of our positions. Or, again, it did me good to relate the story of the seventeen-year-old lad who single-handed had captured a British general. The sequel to that tale, however, was not very cheerful, for the same general had sat at the court-martial, and gave the boy who before had had power of life and death over him, a ten year sentence.

There were three women in the ward who had all been struck by the same bullet: a mother, her daughter, and a cousin. They had been friendly to the British soldiers, had fed them because, as the mother told me, her husband and son were in the trenches fighting for Great Britain. These three women had been at their window, looking with curiosity into the street, when the very soldier they had just fed turned suddenly and shot them. One had her jawbone broken, the second her arm pierced, and the third was struck in the breast. They were all serious wounds which kept them in bed. While I was still in the ward, the two men of this family came back from Flanders on leave, only to find no one at home. The neighbors directed them to the hospital. I hate to think how those men looked when they learned why their women wore bandages. They told me that during Easter Week the Germans put up opposite the trenches of the Irish Brigade a placard that read:

_"The military are shooting down your wives and children in Dublin._"

But the Irish soldiers had not believed it.

I asked them if it was true, as alleged, that in answer to the placard, the Irish Brigade had sung "Rule, Britannia." They were indignant at the idea. They might be wearing khaki, they said, but they never yet had sung "Rule, Britannia." When the day came for them to return to the front, the father wanted to desert, dangerous as that would be, while the son was eager to go back to the trenches.

"This time," he said to me, "we'll not be killing Germans!"

When rumors came later of a mutiny in the Irish regiment, I wondered to myself if these two men were at the bottom of it.

Stories of atrocities poured into our ears when the Germans invaded Belgium. Now we had to hear them from our own people, and now we had to believe them. They were stories as cruel as any heard since the days of the Island Magee massacre.

In the House of Commons shortly after the rising, the cabinet was questioned if it were true that the body of a boy in the uniform of the Irish Volunteers had been unearthed in the grounds of Trinity College, with the marks of twenty bayonet wounds upon him.

"No," was the response, "there were not twenty; there were only nineteen"!

The body in question was that of Gerald Keogh, one of a family passionately devoted to the cause of Irish freedom. He had been sent to Kimmage to bring back fifty men. He went scouting ahead of them, just as I had done when I brought in the men from the Leeson Street bridge. As he was passing Trinity College, held by the British, he was shot down and swiftly captured. It is generally understood he was asked for information, and that, upon his refusing to answer, the soldiers tried to force it from him by prodding him with their bayonets. I might add that the fifty men with him were not attacked as they went by.

This boy's brother was also captured by British soldiers, who decided to hang him then and there. He begged them to shoot him, but they fastened a noose around his neck and led him to a lamp-post. Fortunately an officer came along at that moment and rescued him. Even children were not safe from being terrorized by the soldiers, as Mr. Dillon later brought out in the House of Commons.

There also were murders in North King Street. Fourteen men who had nothing to do with the rising, were killed in their homes by British soldiers who buried them in their cellars, while others looted the houses. The house in Leinster Road was pillaged, and the soldiers had the effrontery to sell the books, fine furniture, and paintings on the street in front of the dwelling.

I had been in the hospital now about five weeks, and had been told I might go in a few days to visit friends in the city if I would promise to return every day to have my wounds dressed. Then one morning I was informed there was a "G-man," as we call government detectives, waiting down-stairs to see me. He had been coming every day to the hospital, it seems, to learn if I was yet strong enough to go to jail. Evidently he had decided that I was, for he told me I must accompany him to Bridewell Prison.

When I went up to the ward to say good-by and get my things, I found the nurses terribly upset. You see, it brought the Irish question right home to that hospital. They went to him in a body and tried to beg me off, but he insisted on his rights, and away I went despite tears and protestations.

This was the first time I had been out, so naturally I felt queer and weak. Nor was I pleased with my companion. He had a fat, self-satisfied face; in fact, was not at all the handsome, keen-looking detective you see on the cover of a dime novel. Besides, he was _too_ polite. He thought, I suppose, that this would be the best way to get me to answer the hundred and one questions he began to ask me. I told him I might answer questions about myself, but I certainly should not answer any concerning the countess or my other friends.

This response kept him quiet for a block or two. Then he turned suddenly and asked me about two girls from Glasgow who had come to Ireland at the same time that I did. I just walked along as though I had not heard a word, and so we proceeded in silence the rest of the way.

When we entered the vestibule of the prison, an old official immediately began to catechize me. I refused to answer a single one of his questions, not even as to my name. Instead I pointed to the "G-man."

"Ask him," I said. "He knows all about me, and can tell you if he wants to."

The detective's face grew red, but he did answer the old man's questions. It was very interesting to me to find that he knew who my parents were; that I had been born twelve miles from Glasgow; that I had gone to different schools which he named, and that I had attended the training college for teachers. He told just where I had been teaching, and how well known I was as a militant suffragette. But what he did _not_ say was even more interesting. He never declared that I had been a combatant in the rising. I wondered inwardly if he thought I had been only a despatch-rider or a first-aid girl. I was exceedingly glad I had let him answer for me as, taking it for granted they knew all about me, I might have given myself away.

The old man finally called the matron and told her to treat me well, as I was not a "drunk or disorderly" person, to which class this prison is given over, but a military prisoner. Indeed she did treat me well. Since there was nothing on which to sit down, she kindly opened a cell and let me sit on the wooden plank they call a bed, and stare at the wooden head-board. I did not look forward much to such accommodations, with my wounds still painful. She talked to me, too, very sympathetically. Sometimes it was hard for us to hear each other, as there were many drunken men singing and cursing. Being drunk, they were able to forget that Ireland was under martial law, and cursed the British loudly or sang disrespectful songs.

The detective had gone out, and those in the jail seemed waiting to hear from him before they picked out my permanent cell. After about two hours, he came back. From where I sat, I could see him bend over the old man and whisper to him. Then he walked over to me.

"Come," he said, "we'll go now."

"Go where?" I asked.

"To the hospital," he replied, "or anywhere else you wish. You are free."

The matron was as pleased as if she were a friend of mine. I was too amazed to know what to think. I told the detective, however, that as I did not know this part of Dublin, I could not find my way back to the hospital without his company. Off we went again, and he paid my carfare, for which I thanked him.

In the sky overhead were aëroplanes that the British kept hovering over Dublin to impress the people.

"Are those the little things with which you fight the Zeppelins?" I asked my detective.

This remark hurt his feelings. He was not British, he informed me, but a good Redmondite. How embarrassed he was when I asked him if he liked arresting Irish who had shown their love of Ireland by being willing to die for her and, what sometimes seemed worse to me, going into an English prison for life. After that we did not talk any more until he said good-by to me at the hospital door.

The nurses were not as surprised to see me back as I had expected them to be. They had known I was returning, for it was the head doctor who had telephoned the authorities at Dublin Castle to tell them, with a good deal of heat, that I was in no condition to begin a prison sentence. That must have been what the "G-man" had whispered to the old official at Bridewell Prison.

XII

After two weeks more, I left the hospital and went to stay with a friend in Dublin. It seemed very strange to me not to be going back to Surrey House. How everything had changed! As soon as I was strong enough, I went around to see where the fighting had destroyed whole streets. Dublin was scarred and, it seemed to me, very sick. I recalled momentarily that a teacher of mine had once said the name Dublin meant "the Black Pool."

The building where I had first met Thomas McDonagh, the Volunteer headquarters, had a "to let" sign in its windows. Who would want to engage in business in a place where such high hopes had been blasted?

Liberty Hall was a shell, empty of everything but memories.

Around the post-office, all other buildings had been leveled, but the great building stood there like a monument to Easter Week.

The windows stared vacantly from the house on Leinster Road. Everything had been taken from it. The looters must have had a merry time. Hundreds of houses had been thus sacked, for the British soldiers had lived up to that Tommy whose words make Kipling's famous song:

The sweatin' Tommies wonder as they spade the beggars under, Why lootin' should be entered as a crime; So if my song you'll hear, I will learn you plain and clear 'Ow to pay yourself for fightin' overtime; With the loot! Bloomin' loot! That's the thing to make the boys git up and shoot!

It's the same with dogs and men, If you'd make 'em come again Clap 'em forward with a Loo-loo-lulu Loot!