The post office began to look very disheveled inside. Rows of men stood near windows, guns lying in their arms. Others bedded down, and I remember the scene as that of an august building being occupied and barricaded from within against its wishes. Not much light shone anywhere except in that one pool at the rear, and people teemed all over the place, rationing out the food that had been brought in.
And then, all of a sudden, everything went quiet. Still. Silent. I heard a seagull somewhere—and then some gunfire somewhere else—it was like a dream. But I know now that it merely amounted to a moment in which nothing took place; it was as though all the work had been done and nothing else needed to happen—the night before the battle, so to speak.
In the silence I saw two monks in their robes. One man was long and thin, one was short, fat as butter, and from the ease they showed to each other, even in that grim circumstance, it was clear that they were great friends. A man and a woman, comrades-in-arms, it seemed, stood side by side—quite military in appearance, except for the fact that every now and then she looked up at him with a tender gaze. Most remarkable of all, a boy of about eighteen had a drum, and he began a soft hypnotic beat; I would guess it kept time with the human pulse.
When all is said and done, the business of telling stories—call it an art, call it a trade, as I do, or a profession—depends principally upon one matter. It depends on making your listener ask all the time, “What’s going to happen next?” As I wandered through the GPO that day, I couldn’t answer that question for myself. As far as I could see, the answer, for some hours, was, “Nothing.” No gun was fired, no glass was broken, no band struck up, nobody died.
Then, in the middle of the afternoon, I was talking to two brothers from the Naul, that easy place north of Dublin—they were twins with curly hair the color of brick—when the boy with the drum shouted.
“Shut up, everyone! Listen!” and then he got embarrassed at what he had said. It seems that like many musicians he had a keen ear. Through the thick walls and in all the noise and hum of chatter and the lugging of things around those hard floors, he had heard something.
Men rushed to the windows, I ran with them, and, peering through the rifle holes, we saw a thrilling, frightening sight. Down the wide and now almost empty street rode a big party of Lancers, troops of British cavalry. Who in God’s name sent them in? It’s not a difficult question to answer. The cavalry had won many a battle for king and country, and the British commanders tended to come from the cavalry, especially here in Ireland—they came over for the good hunting and the great horses. But they had never faced a circumstance like this—a huge building, locked against them, fortified from the inside by men with guns that were as up-to-date as Germany could supply.
Some of the Lancers, poor fellows, waved their swords in the air and shouted. At a given moment, all the rebel commanders gave the same order. The young Irish boys poked their rifles out through the holes in the panes of glass and opened fire.
In front of my eyes I saw a horse go down. One bullet had hit him, and another had hit his rider. Both of them died. All across the range of these riders the bullets hit again and again. Men flung their hands to their faces and then fell off their horses, and the lucky ones were those who didn’t get shot. They were also the reckless ones, because you have to say it—those Lancers were brave men. The rebels inside the post office kept firing, but the Lancers came back at them again and again.
Of course they got nowhere—they never could have done—and eventually some officer found a little bit of sense somewhere in his addled brain and called them off. They retreated, and we saw them galloping away along Sackville Street. Outside the windows, people picked themselves up off the paving stones, surprised that they were still alive.
Inside the post office you never saw such jubilation. Men cheered and clapped, and heroes were born instantly. The more thoughtful ones went back to the windows and wondered which of the bodies they had been responsible for. When they saw that so many horses were there as well, they grew morose. At least four of the horses had been killed outright. Three more had been wounded, although only one of them had to be put down. Four or five more reared and bucked about the place because their riders were dead.
Then a man appeared whom I’d like to have met—he was the fellow who came in and collared some of those horses. He had black, black hair and a tweed waistcoat. I watched him; he came out of Henry Street at the side of the post office, and he ran over to where two horses had begun to ease down a bit. Brazen as you like, he grabbed one bridle and then the other one, soothed the two agitated beasts, and led them away. I bet he sold them back to the British Army as good Irish three-quarter-breds.
It was plain to see that the leaders in the post office, while pleased at the repulsion of the Lancers, remained puzzled that no greater attack came. And none did that day. Outside the windows, the people who had hid when the Lancers came in now dispersed, and we could see them across the street, looking for doorways to hide in, watching to see what would happen next.
There had been such talk for months of a new rebellion. But nobody believed it, and even though rebel volunteers from the IRA and Mr. Connolly’s Citizens’ Army had been patrolling openly, the police didn’t bother with them anymore. That was why they were able to march so freely that morning. Now they had put their rebellion into operation, and I think everyone was shocked—including themselves.
The post office now felt as still as a church. I took advantage of the lull to get into conversation with Mr. Pearse. From time to time he would walk around by himself as if in contemplation, and when he was coming out of one of these reveries, I made sure I was standing by.
He looked at me with a question on his face.
“You’re not a soldier?”
“No, sir, I’m not, and I’d make a poor soldier.”
“And even though you’re somewhat dressed as a cleric, I judge that you’re not a priest either.”
“Oh, sir, as a priest I’d be even poorer than a soldier.”
He laughed; he had an accent that was unusual—soft it was, certainly, but it had a slight twang in it—and later in the day somebody told me his father was an Englishman, which would account for the twang.
“So what are you?”
“I’m a man passing by, sir. That’s what my life is. I spend my time traveling the roads as a storyteller, but somehow my heart was caught on this bush here this morning.”
He shook my hand, and I shook his.
“Well,” he said. “I’m not sure I have the makings of a soldier either. Those young men who died out there were true soldiers—riding into the jaws of death. But I suppose you could argue that they are also contributing to the freedom of a nation, even though they certainly didn’t mean to.”
“All wars kill the young, sir,” I said to him.
“Where were you educated?”
“I went to Rome.”
He looked at me again. “They—my friends here and my brother, he’s over there somewhere—they tell me I’m too soft to be a soldier and too innocent to be a politician.”
Here I must tell you what one of the men told me later. A few nights before the Rising, a group of the lads took Mr. Pearse to the Gaiety Theatre, where they saw dancing girls in a chorus line. They watched him to see whether he’d feel any excitement at these high-kicking fillies, and all he said was, “How good of God to give them such lovely legs.” Not what you’d call a raucous man.
As night began to fall, I made my way through the narrow passageway to where the lights shone at the rear. There I found something that greatly surprised me; leaning back against a pillar was a man in a British army uniform. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I said to him, “In the name of God what are you doing in here?”
He laughed a little, and then I realized that he was tied to the pillar.
“What’s your name?” I said to him.
“Chalmers, sir.”
“Mr. Chalmers, this is no place
for you to be.”
“It’s better than where I was, sir.”
“And where were you?”
“They had me tied up in the telephone booth. Very painful, sir, that was.”
Apparently Mr. Chalmers was a Royal Fusilier, and he had been captured when Mr. Connolly’s men stormed the post office.
“Are you all right?” I said to him.
“Oh, yes, sir, I’ve been treated very well, thank you.”
I liked him; he was a sprightly fellow, good sense of humor.
That night I slept on the floor—it was no hardship to me, floors were nothing new in my sleeping experience, and I was accustomed to wrapping myself in my coat. During the night I woke more than once and realized that the guard watch was being changed, and I began to get the feeling that here, in front of my eyes, this was a real war. In the morning, big slices of bread and jam were handed around and mugs of tea, and nobody tried to exclude me on the grounds that I wasn’t a soldier. Nurses had arrived, which surprised me; they must have slipped in on their way home from night duty.
On Tuesday morning, we knew that the English had begun to address the situation afresh. Through the windows, we could see barricades going up, and all the buildings across Sackville Street being emptied of people. Some of the folk over there were as touchy as hornets, and they called the soldiers and police every name they could think of for disturbing them.
Some time later, I was standing about five feet away from Mr. Connolly; his uniform was a darker green than the others, and he had feathers in his hat. I heard him say, “I think, boys, we can expect a bit of a tantery-ra”—meaning commotion. A minute later, a shell landed on the roof above, and big guns began to pound us. I was never so frightened in my life—I didn’t want to die. And I don’t want you to think that I was ashamed of that feeling; I wasn’t; in fact I began to chide myself for not having had the sense to keep out of this danger. But a few minutes after that, I stopped worrying about myself and began to worry about someone else.
During a lull in the shelling—and I must tell you, there was furniture cracking and glass breaking and sounds on the roof like the end of the world—someone opened a side door. To the alarm of everyone who saw them, a woman and a young child slipped in; I was near that door and I too was consternated. The young rebel who let them in was too concerned with the door to pay them any attention, so I went over to them.
The woman was about thirty, I’d say, brown-haired, pretty as a garland, and the child, a small girl, wasn’t any more than six or seven, a little blond girl, with her thumb never far from her mouth.
The child looked up at me with big eyes. And so did the mother. I think she guessed that I was about to say to her, “This is no place for women and children,” and she forestalled me.
She said, “Sir, I’m looking for Jerry Quinlan, do you know him? I’m fairly certain he’s here.”
I said to her, “If he’s here, he’s all right, because so far everybody’s all right. What does he look like?”
“He’s easy to find—he’s tall, with a head of straight black hair.”
“Does he wear very big boots?”
“Big as boats,” she said.
“Then he’s over here,” I told her, and I led her across the floor to a group of men who were cleaning guns and laying out belts of ammunition.
“Jerry Quinlan,” I said, and when he turned around, I knew that I had already marked him out; he was the one man in whom I had seen real fear. When the gunfire started with the Lancers, he hadn’t known what to do with himself, and there was a moment in which I felt he was about to burst out into tears. And that was the last thing he should have done, because he’d have been mocked to high heaven by the others—who were probably just as afraid themselves, but had managed the knack of not showing it. As I was watching him the previous day, he grabbed his gun and held it crosswise across his chest, as if putting a bar across his heart to protect it.
Now, when he looked at me and then saw the woman and the girl behind me, I understood why he was afraid. This was his wife and their little daughter, and he’d feared he’d never see them again, and that if he died, they’d starve without him to support them.
The wife didn’t run to her husband’s arms, like they do in books; instead she said to him, “Jerry, in the name of God come home out of this.”
The little girl, however—she ran over to her father, and he bent down and picked her up. She planked her face right against his cheek and kept it there as though it were glued. He kept patting the child on the back, saying, “Well, well, what’s this, what’s this”—because of course the child had started to weep.
“Jerry,” said the wife, “can you come away home with us?”
“I can’t, Noreen, I told Mr. Connolly I wouldn’t let him down.”
Their accents told me they came from Dublin city, which is where James Connolly had recruited his Citizens’ Army.
“But what about letting us down?” she said.
I stepped back a little, not wanting to intrude on their privacy, but, God forgive me, I stayed within earshot—I’m a storyteller, and a story’s a story.
“Noreen, if there’s one thing you know, it’s that I’d never let you and Ivy down.”
Up to that moment I had never heard the name of Ivy—who grabbed her father even tighter around the neck and tried to wrap her little legs around his chest.
“Well, what’re we going to do, Jerry? The people down the street, they’re saying youse’re all goin’ to get killed.”
“Noreen, sure there’s too many of us here to kill us all. They’d need an army.”
“Isn’t that what they have, an army?”
“No, I mean a big army.”
“Jerry, the king has the biggest army in the world, everyone knows that.”
“But Mr. Connolly told us, he told us, Noreen, most of that army’s over in Germany.”
At that moment, an almighty shell hit the building, and everybody ran to some kind of shelter. Little Ivy started screaming, and not even her father could calm her down as the bits of the ceiling fell down all around us and terrible gray dust billowed everywhere.
Noreen Quinlan was a steady woman, so steady not even the cannon of the king of England could knock her off her stride. She confronted her husband again.
“And who d’you think is doing that, Jerry, only an army?”
I intervened and said, “You should be looking to stand somewhere safer.”
Noreen Quinlan looked at me and said, “Where’s safer? If we go under a table, it could fall on us and crush the life out of us. If we stand by a wall, the wall could come down on us. We’d be safer outside.”
“There’s nowhere safe this minute,” I said. “But I’m going to move over to one of these pillars, they seem to me strong enough.”
She followed me, and so did her husband, still carrying little Ivy. The group of us stood there; I’d say we looked like something in a painting. Three more shells landed on or near the building; one wall shook very badly; a main window crashed in—the glass came in like a wave breaking over a rock, all green and glinting. Nobody, anywhere, moved; everybody was hunched down, crouching, huddled. At least as far as I could see that’s what they were doing—the dust was like a fog that had gathered grit.
When I look back on that moment—and there were other moments I’ll come to presently—I remember it for two things. It brought home to me the experience of fear, not so much for myself, though I was very frightened indeed, but as seen through the eyes of others. And it told me a principal fact about revolutions—they truly do come up from the people. I’ll talk about the fear first, and then I’ll come back to the revolution point.
Many times in my life, I have been afraid. Before the nineteen-sixteen rising and the GPO, I had been afraid for moral reasons, when I wanted to do something others didn’t want me to do. I had also experienced physical fear. In my home village of Ballinamore, when I was twelve years old, a horse bolted one day
, pulling its cart, which had high sides on it, for ferrying calves. Like a mad chariot it went tearing down the main street, the cart swinging from side to side. Someone later said it was a goose that had flapped across the horse’s eyes and scared it.
I was crossing the street and got nearly paralyzed with fright, but I managed to find my legs, and I ran into a doorway. The poor creature—its head was rolling and its mouth was foaming and it was altogether going crazy.
The next thing I saw was a man at the side of this horse, running along with it. He had to run fast, I can tell you, because this horse was fairly galloping, but he got hold of the trailing reins and, clever fellow that he was, he dragged it down until eventually his weight slowed the horse.
It came to a full stop, and the man walked up to its nose. The creature reared its head, and the man did a very clever thing—he untackled the horse’s blinkers. That caused a lot of debate later; many people said it was the wrong thing to do to quieten a horse—but the horse calmed down, and then the man rubbed its nose and led it back to its owner.
I’ve two surprises for you in that story. When they found the owner, a farmer from Drumsna, he went pale in the face and ran to the cart, brushing everyone aside. And when he opened the back, we saw his little child in there, lying curled up in a ball. We thought the child had been knocked unconscious by bouncing off the sides or something. Not at all; the child had slept through the whole ordeal.
Here’s the second surprise, which nobody found out for some time—and it’s my main point; the man who caught the reins and brought the runaway horse under control had been dismissed from the British Army on suspicion—never proven—of cowardice.
Now, was he a coward? Or was he someone who overcame his fear that day? Because, perhaps, he could no longer live with the accusations of being a coward? I’m told he used to see people looking at him in an odd way, because however much people disliked the king’s soldiers, to be a coward was worse than anything. Nobody ever thought that man a coward again.
Ireland Page 55