Heart of War (13 page)

Pearse gathered all the Volunteers who were not guarding the entrances and read out the proclamation already printed at Liberty Hall, whence the revolutionaries had started on their march this morning:

Men went out and posted the proclamation in the street.

‘When are the British going to do something?' Plunkett muttered.

Margaret, writing out a message from Plunkett to be sent to de Valera at Boland's Mill, raised her head. They were shouting something through the upper windows, but she could not make out what they were saying. A man came tearing down the wide steps and into the main room, shouting, ‘General Connolly … Lancers!'

Margaret ran to a window, sandbagged since she had last been there, and peered up the street. The top end of Sackville Street, near the Parnell Monument, was blocked by a column of khaki-clad horsemen, carrying long lances. Red and white pennants fluttered gently from the shafts just below the steel points.

Connolly was close to her, staring, muttering under his breath. He turned back into the room and shouted, ‘Don't fire till they pass Nelson's Pillar … then fire on my command.'

Margaret stared up the wide street. The troop was advancing now at a trot, an officer in front. The lances were still held upright, the rifles still in their buckets. What on earth did they intend to do? Ride the horses up the steps and into the Post Office?

She heard now, in the hushed room, the clatter of the hooves, the clink and thump of the harness. They passed the Nelson Pillar and Connolly yelled, ‘Wait … wait!'

But at once a shot rang out, fired by a Volunteer at a window farther along; it was followed by a ragged volley from the higher floors, and the roof. Four Lancers fell from their saddles, to land with jingling crashes in the street. More men were firing from the Post Office, another horse fell, and another … The Lancer officer was shouting orders, the troop milling around, aimless, disoriented. The revolutionaries fired with greater intensity, but they did not hit another man, or horse. Under the storm of bullets the Lancers retreated the way they had come, but at a gallop. Inside the Post Office a cheer swelled, rose, and soared to a triumphant paean. Connolly, pointing up Sackville Street at the fast disappearing Lancers, called, ‘Look! The Fairy house races! If that's how the British plan to take a fortified place, we've little to fear here, lads!'

Margaret opened her mouth to speak to him; but changed her mind and said nothing. It was at least possible, she thought, and on the face of it much more probable, that the
British troops had merely been passing down Sackville Street on their way from one place to another in the city. But they had been fired on; and men and horses killed; the Rising was a reality now.

The cheering died away. Plunkett called out, ‘Lady, will you come back here, please? There's reports coming in from all over and they have to be marked up …'

An hour later reports were still coming in fast and furiously, and so far things were going amazingly well. Apart from the incident of the Lancers, British troops did not seem to have come into action anywhere.

Plunkett, who had been lying down in another room, reappeared. Patrick Pearse came to the table, his face long, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. He said, ‘That is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if they're worth it … our sacrifice.'

‘What sort of thing?' Plunkett said, without looking up from the map.

‘Take a look outside … Connolly's saying it's just the result of the capitalist system, but I say it's a damned disgrace to Ireland.'

Margaret walked to a window. Two Volunteers standing there were looking out with rifles rested, their mouths downturned in disgust. She pushed between them and looked out. The lower end of Sackville Street was filled with a mob of people. Clothes and food were being dragged out of shops on both sides of the street, and carried away, or fought over. Women screamed and pulled each other's hair.

One of the Volunteers said, ‘Wish I'd as much poteen in my belly as those whoors have in theirs.'

Margaret stared, at first in disbelief, then in anger. It was the people of the Dublin slums. Word of the rising had reached them, with news that the police had left their beats; and they'd come running, not to help the rebels, but to loot. Pearse was beside her, reciting scornfully –
‘Only the Irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland
… That's from Connolly's book
Labour in Irish History
. Those women down there can't have read it. He's sending some men down to chase them off the street. He can't bear to see it.'

Margaret watched the little band of would-be police go out of the front doors, walk into the street, argue, plead, and
wave hands. She heard the women shouting, ‘Bloody Sinn Feiners, leave us alone! … What's it to do with you what I take home for seven starving children, I'd like to know? … Bloody bowsies! Fuck off!'

She saw the lieutenant in command raise his hand and shout an order. She saw the dozen men raise their rifles. She heard the shots. No one fell. Pearse muttered, ‘They're firing over their heads … Thank God. I couldn't bear to see Irishmen kill Irishmen today.'

Connolly was there, surly, angry, determined. He growled, ‘Unless a few of them get shot, you'll never stop them.'

But no one sent orders to fire at the looters, and Margaret returned to the map table. The women of the Volunteers' Auxiliary, Cumann na mBan, started to arrive, in green uniforms with white and orange sashes, Sam Browne belts, knives and pistols. An outlying rebel detachment sent to the Post Office copies of a proclamation issued by the Viceroy of Ireland, which they'd found nailed to house, church, and shop doors. Margaret took one, and began to read; daylight would fail soon, and the British would certainly turn off the power:

Whereas an attempt, instigated and designed by the Foreign enemies of our king and country to incite rebellion in Ireland, and thus endanger the safety of the United Kingdom, has been made by a reckless, though small, body of men, who have been guilty of insurrectionary acts in the city of Dublin:

Now we, Ivor Churchill, Baron Wimborne, Lord-Lieutenant-General and Governor General of Ireland, do hereby warn all His Majesty's subjects that the sternest measures are being, and will be taken for the prompt suppression of the existing disturbances and the restoration of order: And we do hereby enjoin …

Margaret read on to the end. Nothing would persuade the English that the Irish rebels were not in the pay of Germany. But it wasn't as simple as that. As Connolly had written: ‘… the instinct of the slave to take sides with whoever is the enemy of his own particular slave driver is a healthy instinct, and makes for freedom'; and that was why Pearse, in his proclamation, had referred to the Germans as Ireland's ‘gallant allies in Europe.' But in fact they'd bought
the arms from Germany and paid for them, just as they might have bought them from America; and if Germany won the war and tried to take the place of the English here, as an occupying power, she'd meet the same troubles. The fact was that any war involving England was an opportunity to the Irish cause; every educated rebel could quote the famous passage from John Mitchel's
Jail Journal
, referring to the outbreak of the Crimean War:
‘Czar, I bless thee. Give us war in our time, O Lord
.' Margaret wondered whether her father would believe the words she had tried to impress on him in her brief note:
‘We serve neither king nor kaiser, only Ireland
. '

She let the Viceroy's proclamation flutter from her hand to the floor, and returned to Plunkett's side. The first night of the Rising fell slowly with the looters reeling in drunken orgy up and down Sackville Street, the night full of raucous song, and Pearse watching tragically by the light of the street lamps. The English had not turned off the power.

She was awake early on Wednesday, the third day, feeling like everyone else, tired, frustrated, angry, and let down. She had expected death all night, since a midnight false alarm; and it had not come – not even the catharsis of firing her revolver through the windows at the advancing khaki uniforms in the irregular violet glare from Lawrence's store. She had eaten breakfast, served by girls of the Auxiliary upstairs, and was now at Plunkett's desk, working.

The building shook to the same combination of sound and silent reverberation that had shaken it yesterday: artillery fire. Now the guns were much closer, and they were firing more insistently. Plunkett looked up once, then made a show of continuing his calm study of the map of the city; but Margaret saw that his hand was shaking. Poor devil, she thought, with him it's a race between the British and the consumption, as to which gets him first.

Margaret went to the windows. The Volunteers there greeted her like an old friend, one saying, ‘Now might that be artillery we're hearing, Lady?'

She nodded. ‘It's a gunboat at Butt Bridge.'

The man said, ‘But General Connolly told us only yesterday that the British would never use artillery against us, now did he not?'

The other rebel said, ‘He did, an' I heard him … Wonder when we'll next be in the Twangman, on the wharf down there, pints of Guinness in our hands?' His voice became dreamy – ‘We'll be minding each other about how the British attacked the Post Office and we beat them off … and the general marched up with a white flag …'

‘Ah, hold your gab, ye shitehead!' the other snapped. ‘Sorry, Lady.'

Margaret returned to the table. Connolly was not there, but soon came down the stairs, and joined them. ‘When the British start using artillery in the centre of Dublin,' he said, ‘it shows what a hurry they're in to finish the job.' Margaret made no effort to show that she was accepting the Commandant General's insinuation: that the British were becoming desperate. Connolly said, ‘There are probably hundreds more of our boys on their way to help us at this very minute.'

Margaret took a message from a runner, and bent over the map. No more of the boys would come to the Post Office, except those being driven in from the outposts, such as those who came in from Westmoreland Street yesterday.

When she had recorded the information she looked up at Connolly – ‘They're just going to advance house by house, destroying them – and us – from a distance, by shell fire.'

‘It looks like it,' Connolly said.

‘We
ought to be out in the streets,' she said, ‘attacking everything in uniform. They'd have to scatter men all over Dublin – all over Ireland, it should have been.'

Connolly walked away, his face set. When he had gone, Plunkett said, ‘I don't know, Lady … you may be right. But this is Connolly's plan. We're holding the centre of Dublin – the capital … we may hold it for a week. That'll create a new feeling in Irishmen, Irish patriots.' His rings flashed as he gesticulated.

Margaret said, ‘You've seen that report from De Valera?'

Plunkett shook his head, and Margaret said, ‘He says that a battalion of Sherwood Foresters, just landed at Kingstown, has been attacking him all day. He's inflicting heavy casualties on them.'

‘There, that's what you want, isn't it?'

She shook her head emphatically – ‘No, because they're being attacked, at the English's time and place. It should be
the other way round. De Valera should have been sent to Kingstown, to attack the troops, as they were getting off the ships, not to wait for them at Boland's Mill. Think what chaos he could have caused!'

Plunkett sighed and shook his head – ‘We're committed to this … and I think it's right. The Republic has a capital – this Post Office.'

Margaret hitched up her revolver belt and said, ‘I'm going up onto the roof to have a look round.'

As soon as she appeared on the roof the nearest Volunteer made a violent gesture and shouted, ‘Down, woman!' The smack of two bullets close by made her drop to her knees, and thus hidden behind the parapet, crawl to the edge. The man who had shouted said, ‘It's coming from Trinity … must be a hundred of the shiteheads hidden up there!'

Margaret stuck her head over and looked down, then quickly drew back as more bullets cracked into the stone close by. ‘The looting's stopped, at least,' she said.

The Volunteer shouted, ‘Only on Sackville Street. There's plenty of them still at it in Sackville Place and Prince's Street.'

A twelve-year-old boy farther along the roof attracted Margaret's attention. He seemed to have profited by the looting to acquire a set of new clothes – though he was barefooted – at least a size too large for him, but of a cloth and cut that his parents could never have afforded to buy for him. He was firing a rifle toward Trinity, over the Liffey, with a jar that jerked his whole body at every shot, each time shouting obscenities at the British – ‘Take that, ye bloody shiteheads … limey bastards! … I'll blow your fuckin' heads in …'

A priest appeared, looking round in amazement as though he had not expected to see any such sights. He was old with flowing white hair and a gentle, baffled mien. He dropped to one knee beside the boy, and Margaret heard his frail, reproving voice – ‘You should be at home with your mother, my boy. Run along now, while you can.'

The boy turned and stared, and after a moment shouted in the old man's face – ‘Walk away from a foight loike this? Bejasus, you must be daft!'

Margaret suppressed a smile. The adults on the roof were
watching in amazed awe. None of them would have addressed a Catholic priest in such a way … indeed it was obvious that the old man had just walked in from the street, unchallenged by the guards, with the passport of his Roman collar. That was another area where she disagreed with the other leaders of the Irish rebel movements; she thought that Roman Catholicism was part of Ireland's problem, not part of its solution. Look at the way the Church had hounded Parnell, Ireland's greatest man, simply because of his adultery.