1916- the Easter Rising

by Tim Pat Coogan

  Plunkett’s original plan had called for de Valera to occupy some sixteen posts in the area. These included a two-mile stretch of railway, a gas company, mills, a railway station and the bakery itself. Even if he had had the battalion at full strength, which the plan envisaged, it would have been an impossible task. However, de Valera made the best of a bad job, ordering his men to tunnel through cottages so that they commanded the entrance to Beggars Bush Barracks, from which it was imagined an onslaught would inevitably come. Barricades were erected at the nearby bridge over the Grand Canal by stripping bread vans of their wheels.

  After a sleepless night, de Valera paraded his men and instructed everyone under the age of eighteen to go home. Those who went did so reluctantly, and two youngsters insisted on staying. One of them, Willie FitzGerald, was only fifteen, but though he was chased away repeatedly, he doggedly hung about until allowed to stay. In an effort to shift the other lad, Richard Perle, aged sixteen, his mother was sent for, but Richard despatched her with a lordly: ‘Go home mother, this is no place for a woman’. Richard, at least, did not share James Connolly’s views on the equality of women on the battlefield which had led to Countess Markievicz taking a commanding role in the fighting around St Stephen’s Green.

  De Valera also released from duty the bakery horses, which could not be fed. However, he rather vitiated the good opinion of Dubliners for this display of concern by cutting the gas company’s pipe lines, thus ensuring that they too found it difficult to be fed. The difficulty was increased by the interruption to the bread supplies caused by his seizure of the huge bakery.

  The assault on de Valera’s men did not come until Wednesday morning. By then serious hostilities had taken place at various points in the city, at City Hall, St Stephen’s Green, parts of Sackville Street and around the Mendicity Institute near the Four Courts. The Institute was defended by approximately twenty Volunteers under the command of twenty-five-year old Sean Heuston. Connolly had asked him to hold it for three or four hours to give the Four Courts garrison a chance to dig in. Heuston held it for fifty, against odds of twenty to one. His men made up for their lack of bombs by hurling the British hand grenades back at the soldiers – members of the Dublin Fusiliers. Four Volunteers died in the process but Heuston only gave up when his ammunition ran out.

  The Four Courts, strategically located on the Quays commanding the southern entry to Dublin, was, with the ill-fated North King Street area, under the command of Ned Daly, Tom Clarke’s brother-in-law. Yet despite the ferocity of the fighting, Daly, whose men had captured a large number of British officers and soldiers, insisted that the prisoners be given ‘the best we had’. The South Dublin Union (now St James’s Hospital) was an inappropriate place to seize, whatever arguments might be made about its strategic value, as inevitably fighting raged through wards filled with terrified patients who were housed in some of this vast sprawling complex of hospital buildings. Many of these patients were mentally ill. In attempting to protect them a Nurse Keogh was inadvertently shot by British troops. Nevertheless both sides showed extraordinary courage. An English officer, Captain Martyn, under heavy fire and cut off from his men but in possession of a box of hand grenades, single-handedly almost succeeded in breaching a key rebel strongpoint before finally being driven back when his bombs ran out.

  On the Irish side Cathal Brugha passed into folklore as the contemporary embodiment of the legendary hero Cuchulain who tied himself to a tree stump during battle so that he should not fall from his wounds. Cuchulain’s enemies only approached him when a raven perched on his shoulder, indicating that he was dead. Brugha, a Vice-Commandant whom a former colleague later described as being as brave and as stupid as a bull, received twenty-five wounds. He was defending a barricade erected to guard the Nurses’ Home where the Volunteers’ leader Eamonn Kent along with William Cosgrave, who later became an Irish Prime Minister, and a small group of rebels were located. He gave his watch to a subordinate to be given to his wife – if the Volunteer ever got out alive.

  Then, his own life apparently forfeit, he turned to defend the barricade alone for as long as he could. Inside the Nurses’ Home the Volunteers were dispirited and weary. It appeared that the end had come and while waiting for a final attack that they did not expect to survive, they joined Kent in saying a decade of the Rosary. Then from outside the Home they heard Brugha singing God Save Ireland. He had dragged himself to a position with his back to a wall where he could command the barricade and was challenging the British to come over it. Reinvigorated, the rebels shook off their depression, remanned the barricade and kept the British at bay. Incredibly Brugha survived the Rising – to die six years later in a civil war at the hands of forces commanded by a government which included William Cosgrave.

  By Wednesday morning the Mount Street units had not yet been tested under fire, although they were suffering from lack of food and sleep. However, their situation changed drastically following the arrival of strong forces of British troops at Kingstown Harbour throughout the night and early morning. Two columns of men set off for the Royal Hospital Kilmainham with instructions to clear all side streets and houses overlooking the two roads allocated to the columns; one, the upper route into Dublin via Donnybrook, the second, the lower route through Ballsbridge where the Royal Dublin Spring Show continued, seemingly in blissful ignorance of the waiting Volunteers 500 or 600 yards away. Incredibly, in view of what had befallen the Georgius Rex, the troops were equally ignorant. They were encouraged to remain so, despite the bloodthirsty rumours on which they had been fed since embarkation was ordered, by the fact that they were apparently welcome to the population at large. Fruit and food were pressed on them as they marched although some officers forbade them to eat it lest they be poisoned.

  The deceptive friendliness was further heightened by a heart-warming little scene that occurred en route. One of the British officers, a Captain Dietrichsen, suddenly found himself hailed from a footpath by his two children. Because of the Zeppelin raids his wife had sent the children to Dublin for safety. They were waving at the troops when they suddenly realised that their daddy was passing by. Dietrichsen dropped out of the marching column to hug his two children joyfully. A few hours later they were orphans. He was one of the first officers to die when the jaws of an ambush closed a few hundred yards away.

  Had the soldiers swung left into Dublin along Pembroke Road a few hundred yards below Northumberland Road, they would have bypassed the men at de Valera’s command completely and would not have encountered any opposition until they reached St Stephen’s Green, where the Volunteers’ position was vastly inferior to that taken up at Mount Street. But the young men in No. 25 were expecting the equally young and almost equally inexperienced soldiers. A few minutes before the Tommies appeared in the Volunteer sights, a sister of Jimmy Grace arrived with a despatch from Connolly, alerting Malone to the British landings at Kingstown and ordering that the utmost efforts must be made to stop them. Brigid Grace had also brought food for her brother and his friends but there was no way it could be passed through the barricaded door.

  However, bullets could pass from behind the barricades. Such training as the troops had, and this generally consisted of some three months only, had prepared them for trench warfare. The idea of coming under fire in what could have been a well-to-do London suburb was utterly foreign to them. But they were ordered forward nonetheless. The Volunteers were astounded at the manner in which waves of soldiers, most of them obviously terrified, charged up the street. The Tommies were scythed down, Malone and Grace in particular creating terrible havoc. It took the British a long time to work out where the fire was coming from. Intelligence had warned them to expect trouble from the school, but it was relatively late in the engagement before the British discovered that Clanwilliam House was occupied. Max Caulfield penned this moving account of how the Tommies’ attack looked to the rebels:53

  For almost an hour there had not been a single movement along the far side of the canal.
The tree shadows had grown perceptively on the still waters, broken now and then by a slight ripple as the gentle breeze stroked it…Then the defenders realised that the attack had begun again. In front of them stretched an unforgettable sight. There were khaki troops everywhere – crouched behind flights of front steps, behind the garden hedges, behind the trees lining Northumberland Road. And lying in the road, especially lying in the road. Four great khaki caterpillars pulsated towards them like obscene monsters. Two lines had stretched themselves in the gutters and two more crawled along on their bellies, jammed against the coping stones. It was not like killing men; it was more like trying to slaughter a great insect or animal. Tom Walshe at once opened fire and just kept on firing. As one man was killed, another crawled up and over him. When he too reached the head of the line, he was either killed or wounded. Sometimes as the caterpillar tried to move forward – it could never advance beyond the group of dead and wounded at the entrance to the bridge – it appeared to be weaving from side to side as men elected to move around a dead or wounded body rather than risk crawling over it. Sometimes a few men at the head of the line would rise up and attempt to charge the bridge, generally led by an officer with drawn revolver. None ever got beyond the half-way mark.

  The killing could have been worse were it not for a combination of circumstances – the chivalry of the rebels, their paucity in numbers and their lack of experience. Tom Walshe of the Clanwilliam House Garrison knocked himself unconscious from the recoil of his rifle when he fired it at a running soldier. It was the first time he had pulled the trigger. Another factor which kept down the casualties was the heroism of the doctors, nurses and clergy from nearby Sir Patrick Dunn’s Hospital who donned white coats and marched into the firing to attend to the wounded. The rebels allowed them to do so even though the soldiers understandably used the lull in the firing to attempt to find hiding places.

  But more important than all the foregoing is the fact that while the killing could have been far worse, it could also have been far less had General Lowe not personally ordered his troops to the slaughter. The defenders of the tiny garrisons could have been waited out, starved out or even bombed or shelled out quite easily. But when their commanding officer, Colonel Oates, attempted to bypass the deadly area and do as earlier units had done, march into Dublin around Beggars Bush Barracks, Lowe personally forbade the diversion. He wanted a full frontal assault; the rebels could and should be cleared out. When the brigade officer, Colonel Maconchy, contacted Lowe on the telephone and warned him that it would cost reinforcements and heavy casualties, Lowe still insisted that the position must be taken at all costs.

  Taken it finally was. Malone and his Peter the Painter revolver eventually succumbed to vastly superior numbers. By then the engagement certainly deserved to be regarded as a Thermopylae. Malone died at his post, but Grace managed to escape in the darkness. He hid in a woodshed for three days before being captured. The Parochial Hall Garrison was also caught trying to escape as fire intensified on the Hall. Then the British managed to bring a machine gun to bear on Clanwilliam House from the belfry of a church in Haddington Road. The combined effect of its fire, hand grenades and superiority in manpower of in excess of a hundred to one eventually told. By eight in the evening, after a day without food or water, almost continuously firing and under fire, the little garrison was decimated. One of them, Patrick Doyle, called out: ‘Boys, isn’t this a great day for Ireland? Did I ever think I’d live to see a day like this. Shouldn’t we be all grateful to the good God that He’s allowed us to take part in a fight like this?’ He was shot dead as he finished speaking.

  The defenders tried to make up for his loss by dressing a dressmaker’s dummy with his hat and jacket and placing it near a window. One by one, the garrison was being killed off. But when someone outside called out ‘surrender’, Reynolds replied with a fusillade and told the survivors not to worry: ‘We’ll have more men and plenty of ammunition soon…’ He was killed shortly afterwards. The survivors made their way out of the back of the now-blazing house, leaving dead men still apparently guarding the windows. Some, however, must still have been alive to judge from Redmond-Howard’s description of the final assault as the Tommies hurled hand grenades into the house:54

  There was a ‘Crash! Crash!’ as the windows burst with the concussion, and within a few seconds the sky was lit up with the flames of the burning houses and the air rent with the screams of the Sinn Feiners as they faced cold steel. It was a ghastly scene. The smell of roasting flesh was still around the blazing building at ten o’Clock.

  Three of the survivors, William Ronan and the Walshe brothers climbed over garden walls until they eventually found an empty basement flat where they put on clothes of all sorts including women’s, and thus disguised, got away. The temper of the Dublin public was still that which had offered food and drink to the Tommies eight hours earlier. One of the Clanwilliam men, the wounded James Doyle, was set upon by a crowd as he literally staggered along. He was lucky enough to get away and to collapse near a friendly house into which he was carried and treated for his wounds. Meanwhile, in Mount Street Colonel Maconchy, having carried out General Lowe’s orders, sat atop his horse riding through lines of British soldiers with fixed bayonets, while behind the bayonets massed crowds cheered and hailed the conquering hero.

  Between them, Malone’s men had accounted for four British officers killed, fourteen wounded and 215 other ranks killed and wounded. De Valera, of course, had taken no direct part in this action. His stronghold had been bypassed as that of Mount Street should have been. Nevertheless, not so very long after Maconchy’s triumphal progression, the Dublin crowds would be cheering de Valera, the commander of the Mount Street men. Seeing the flames and hearing the bomb explosions and fierce fighting, neither de Valera nor his men realised that they had been bypassed and waited for an attack that never came. The strain told on de Valera.

  He refused to sleep and rushed around giving orders which he frequently then countermanded. He ordered a retreat from his bakery headquarters to the railway, which had a higher elevation. However, this also afforded a frightening better view of the fires now consuming Dublin and had a demoralising effect on his men. He changed his mind and ordered his men to quit the railway and reoccupy the bakery, which of course could easily have been taken by the British in the meantime had they known about his evacuation. He did make one decision during the week which probably saved the lives of several of his men. He caused a green flag to be erected on a high unoccupied building so that when the British commenced shelling that position, they imagined this to be his command post and concentrated their fire on the empty building.

  But his appearance tended to have an unsettling effect on his men. As he moved about giving contradictory orders, a tall, green, uniformed figure set off by long red socks, the Volunteers feared that they might lose their sanity. One Volunteer did so, shot a comrade and had to be clubbed unconscious himself. Once de Valera did yield to pressure and lay down to sleep after refusing to do so for days, saying: ‘I can’t trust the men – they leave their posts or fall asleep if I don’t watch them’. This was a somewhat startling judgement on the fortitude of the men under his command. Malone and his men, after all, had no contact with him and received no reinforcements from him during the week. However, he tossed and turned in obvious agitation and sat bolt upright, eyes staring, crying out: ‘Set fire to the railway, set fire to the railway!’ He then ordered that an attempt be made to set fire to Westland Row Station and to some rolling stock with the aid of newspapers dipped in whiskey.

  This order was ultimately countermanded and the fire put out. But the memory of the railway obviously abided with him, because many years later when he had become President of Ireland, he confided a revealing anecdote to a friend of mine, the late Sean J. White. The scholarly White, in addition to being the head of Public Relations for the State Transport Company, Coras Iompair Eireann, was a fluent Irish speaker and was thus always chosen to accomp
any de Valera on his official journeys. Speaking in Irish, de Valera told White of an occasion during the occupation of the railway when he was overcome by tiredness and lay down in an empty carriage and went asleep. When he awoke, he thought he had died and gone to heaven. All he could see above him were angels and cherubs. After a while, he realised there was a very good reason for this. He was looking at angels and cherubs. He had unknowingly gone to sleep in the Royal Coach – a coach which he later used himself on his Presidential journeys.

  In the conditions of Easter Week it did not seem possible that de Valera or any of his colleagues would ever survive to make train journeys anywhere. Michael Collins later wrote this assessment of the fighting and of his leaders:55

  Although I was never actually scared in the GPO I was – and others also – witless enough to do the most stupid things. As the flames and heat increased so apparently did the shelling. Machine-gun fire made escape more or less impossible. Not that we wished to escape. No man wished to budge. In that building, the defiance of our men, and the gallantry, reached unimaginable proportions.

  It is so easy to fault the actions of others when their particular actions have resulted in defeat. I want to be quite fair about this – the Easter Rising – and say how much I admired the men in the ranks and the womenfolk thus engaged. But at the same time – as it must appear to others also – the actions of the leaders should not pass without comment. They have died nobly at the hands of the firing squads. So much I grant. But I do not think the Rising week was an appropriate time for the issue of memoranda couched in poetic phrases, nor of actions worked out in a similar fashion. Looking at it from the inside (I was in the GPO), it had the air of a Greek tragedy about it, the illusion being more or less completed with the issue of the beforementioned memoranda. Of Pearse and Connolly I admire the latter the most. Connolly was a realist. Pearse the direct opposite. There was an air of earthy directness about Connolly. It impressed me. I would have followed him through hell had such action been necessary. But I honestly doubt very much if I would have followed Pearse – not without some thought anyway.