1916

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Plunkett paused, coughed apologetically, and went on. “Drier climates are better for me, but I always come back here because I’m not happy anywhere else. Life inflicts so many blows that we’re obliged in the interests of natural justice to extract all the happiness we can. So I live my life with a passion.” A smile played around his lips. “Have you a sweetheart?”

  Caught off guard, Ned stared down into his glass.

  “I’m sorry, forgive me. Sometimes I speak without thinking.”

  “It’s all right. I asked you a personal question too. And I do have a sweetheart. Sort of,” Ned amended. Mary was everything a sweetheart should be, pretty and proper and pure. But…

  Joseph Mary Plunkett was a sophisticated man from a background of money and privilege. He had traveled extensively and spoke several languages. Would he understand about Síle?

  “I asked that question,” Plunkett was saying, “because I want to read you something. Poetry is a conversation you have with yourself in the secret places of your soul. Much of what I write is never intended for anyone else, but this one is. I’m thinking of giving it as a Christmas present and I would appreciate your opinion—if you have a sweetheart yourself, if you know what those feelings are like for a man.”

  He took out a small copybook with a tooled leather binding, hunted through it for a few moments, then began to read. His hoarse voice was little more than a whisper, but curiously compelling.

  The day I knew you loved me we had lain

  Deep in Coill Doraca down by Gleann na Scath

  Unknown to each other till suddenly I saw

  You in the shadow, knew oppressive pain

  Stopping my heart, and there you did remain

  In dreadful beauty fair without a flaw,

  Blinding the eyes that yet could not withdraw

  Till wild between us drove the wind and rain.

  Breathless we reached the brugh before the west

  Burst in full fury—then with lightning stroke

  The tempest in my heart roared up and broke

  Its barriers, and I swore I would not rest

  Till that mad heart was worthy of your breast

  Or dead for you—and then this love awoke.3

  “I live my life with a passion,” Joe Plunkett had said. The passion leaped from the poem.

  Ned was overwhelmed.

  That was how one should feel love: as a tempest in the heart! Anything less was unworthy.

  IN December the newspapers Sinn Féin and Irish Freedom were officially suppressed. A few days later soldiers raided the offices of the Irish Worker, the socialist newspaper founded by Jim Larkin, and destroyed its machinery, but James Connolly was soon running a private printing press in Liberty Hall. A new socialist paper titled the Workers’ Republic appeared. The masthead bore a quotation from the French journalist and revolutionary Desmoulins: “The great only appear great because we are on our knees; let us arise.”4

  The publishing operation was protected by armed members of the Citizen Army—including Constance Markievicz, a recent recruit. Even women were being allowed to join the organization, to the outrage of many Dubliners.

  “Nothing frightens Madame,” laughed Thomas MacDonagh when he heard. “Bedad, I pity the policeman who challenges her!”

  By the end of 1914 the British army stood at 720,000 men. In spite of Dublin Castle censorship, however, it was obvious to the Irish that the war was not going well. Britain and her allies had badly underestimated Germany.

  On New Year’s Day a German submarine sank H. M. S. Formidable in the North Sea.

  A drill was planned for the Dublin Brigade on the following Sunday. When Seán Heuston met Ned there, he greeted him with a single word: “Conscription.”

  Ned drew a sharp breath. “Are you serious?”

  “Everyone’s talking about it. They say it could come within weeks now.”

  “Rumor isn’t good enough. You forget I work for a newspaper. We’ll be the first to know if conscription is introduced; until then it’s nothing but speculation.”

  “You sound like a reporter,” Seán said.

  Ned shrugged. But he was increasingly certain of the future he wanted. He enjoyed everything about the newspaper business, from the clattering banks of modern Linotype machines to the morning coats and striped trousers some of the older journalists still wore.5 When he had the time, he loved to linger in the printing plant and watch the presses running. The sound was hypnotic, the smell of ink intoxicating. The thunder of the machines drowned out all thought, leaving only an impression of massive power.

  The newspaper staff, Dublin men for the most part, shared a bawdy, earthy humor that was truly Irish but which had not been allowed at Saint Enda’s. The younger reporters competed vigorously to see who could invent the most original profanities.

  Ned began adding colorful new phrases to his vocabulary.

  The Independent was at the heart of a broad information network. The events of the day were its lifeblood. Items of Irish interest predominated, but international news was also covered. In January the Mexican Pancho Villa signed a treaty with the United States, ending a bitter border war, and Alexander Graham Bell successfully placed a telephone call between New York and San Francisco, setting a new distance record.

  Ned was intrigued by the latter item. “Rural Ireland has no electricity,” he said to Henry, “yet someday I might actually hear my sister’s voice all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.”

  His friend replied, “It’s called progress, lad. A mixed blessing, I suspect. We live in an age when the small print in newspapers destroys your vision, but at least you can buy good reading spectacles.”

  A Russian army of 80,000 men was marching on West Prussia. A new weapon called tear gas was used for the first time against them.

  And in the Irish Sea, three British merchant ships were sunk by German submarines.

  In February the Marquess of Aberdeen left Ireland and a new lord lieutenant, Sir Ivor Churchill Guest, Baron Wimborne, moved into the Viceregal Lodge. The Dublin social set, which had languished under the drab Aberdeens, was excited by the prospect of a younger, more energetic viceroy.

  In February also, America’s President Wilson protested the policy of British-owned ships such as the Lusitania flying U.S. flags in order to dupe the Germans. “America’s neutrality is not to be used as camouflage,” he stressed.

  Lord Kitchener’s office announced that total United Kingdom casualties had reached 104,000. Germany proclaimed a sea blockade of the British Isles intended to destroy the United Kingdom’s economy. A Norwegian ship was the first target, torpedoed off Folkestone.

  The war had taken to the high seas with a vengeance. The implications for an island nation were obvious. Ireland was now on the front lines.

  The British army raised its recruiting efforts to fever pitch.

  The pages of Sinn Féin responded with increasingly strident antirecruitment editorials.

  On a hoarding on Parnell Street was a British recruitment poster emblazoned with the slogan “Remember Belgium!”

  Across it someone had painted, in bold red letters, “Remember Bachelor’s Walk!”

  IN March, Pádraic Pearse issued instructions that every Volunteer company was to provide itself with an Irish flag.6 The customary flag with its gold harp surmounted by a crown was to be replaced by one displaying a plain gold harp on a green background. No crown.

  ON those evenings when Ned was not involved with the Irish Volunteers and Henry was not going back to the paper to file copy for the early edition, they often went down to the pub for a pint together. Ned considered these hours as akin to a class in journalism. “Here’s how I plan to write about the troopships arriving with the wounded,” Henry would say. “For this article I want to focus on the hospitals, how they’re coping with the casualties flooding in, how the doctors feel when they see all these broken young Irish men…”

  Ned listened eagerly. The craft of writing took on sculptural dim
ensions in his mind. There were some basic rules to follow, but there was also a tantalizing, elusive magic that could not be described but was instantly recognizable on the page. The books he loved had furnished his mind with a treasury of words. As he listened to Henry he found himself shaping descriptive words into paragraphs and columns in his mind.

  Someday he might see them in print. The idea was seductive.

  While Ned learned the newspaper trade, the republican movement was fully occupying Pádraic Pearse. He employed a former pupil, Desmond Ryan, a member of the IRB, to help with the mounting volume of correspondence.7 Ned felt a pang of envy, but as he told Henry, “If I were Mr. Pearse’s secretary I would have no time to work for the paper, and I think I’ve already got printer’s ink in my veins.”

  Busy as he was, he never missed a drill with the Dublin Brigade. Few of its members had enlisted in the British army, at least so far. But they were all conscious of the missing faces.

  No one said anything about them. There was no point. Each man had his own reasons; that was understood. Life forced choices.

  Thomas MacDonagh never missed a drill, either, until March. When he appeared at the next one he announced joyously, “It’s a daughter! We’re calling her Barbara.”

  His friends crowded around to warm themselves by the heat of his happiness. “Good man yerself,” they cried, pummeling his shoulders.

  War and death and babies being born. Ned tried to stretch the horizons of his mind to encompass them all in one world vision. It was the babies, he decided, who made the rest of it bearable, who redeemed the horror adults could perpetrate. A child like Precious or the MacDonaghs’ new daughter was created by the same species that manufactured guns and submarines—but with one added element: the Divine spark, an immortal soul.

  Like a transatlantic telephone conversation, the family he would have someday took on a distant but certain reality.

  His daydreams were of Mary. Mary as wife, mother, Madonna. He envisioned her and a bevy of laughing children in a cottage on Howth with a view of the sea.

  In spite of himself, at night he thought of Síle. The tempest in my heart.

  What spare time he could find during the week he spent with Precious. She needed him the most.

  The spreading conflagration in Europe was extinguishing innocence. The elaborate facade of nineteenth-century social mores was crumbling. Young men about to fight and perhaps die might dream of marrying nice girls after the war, but in the meantime they wanted something more immediately life-affirming.

  Business at Mrs. Drumgold’s had quadrupled since the outbreak of the war. It was impossible for Síle to slip away in the afternoon or evening, but in the early mornings she could leave the house for a few hours while everyone else was asleep.

  After visiting Precious one morning, Ned accidentally met Síle in Tom Clarke’s. He did not ask why she was there; he only knew there was a certain inevitability about it. He and Clarke had just concluded an exchange of messages when she entered. Tom Clarke gave a polite cough and excused himself to the rear of the shop, leaving the two young people alone.

  “I’m on my way to work now,” Ned told Síle regretfully. “I’m a copyboy at—”

  “The Irish Independent. I know.”

  “You do? How? Did Mr. Clarke tell you?”

  Instead of answering, Síle turned to gaze out the window at the street. “Everything’s happening very fast now. Do you feel it too, Ned?”

  “The war, you mean?”

  “Life. It’s running by like water poured out of a jug.”

  “Indeed. It seems like only a few days ago I was a schoolboy. Now one lad I knew at Saint Enda’s is working as Mr. Pearse’s secretary, and another friend, Seán Heuston, has just been promoted to leader of D Company, First Battalion of the Irish Volunteers. And I’m at the Independent. We’re all doing men’s jobs.”

  “Not all of us,” said Síle softly.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…but actually some women are doing the work of men these days. Take Constance Markievicz…You know who she is?”

  Síle raised one eyebrow. “I know who she is.”

  “Madame’s a crack shot and as good a soldier as any man. I’m not sure I approve; she’s a wife and mother, after all. Yet…it suits her, somehow. Mr. Pearse says we should use our talents to become the best of whatever we can be.”

  Síle looked dubious. “That’s all very well for a countess, but not for an ordinary Irish woman. No matter what talents we have we’re supposed to live the lives our mothers lived—or be disgraced forever, like me.

  “We must be virgins until we marry. Fetch and carry and obey the husband, never mind if he drinks and beats us. Produce at least one son for the priesthood. Then that’s us done. Nothing left but to get old and die. If we don’t marry, we’re expected to stay home and take care of our parents until they’re dead and we’re too old to live. Done and finished again.”

  “‘Thou shalt not’ is half the law of Ireland, and ‘Thou must’ the other half,” Ned quoted. “And each of these is a tyrant.”8

  “Who said that?”

  “Mr. Pearse again.”

  “I think I like your Mr. Pearse.”

  Ned enjoyed talking to Síle. He saw her frankness as an expression of intellectual freedom. Most women were as circumspect as their men. The Irish relished conversation as an art form, but it was often style without substance, a way of protecting the secret inner self.

  Síle was different. Talking with her was almost as pleasurable, in a different way, as making love to her. One seemed part of the other; it was all Síle.

  “I have to go to work or I’ll be late, but can I see you again?” he asked hopefully.

  “You can meet me here at about this time most mornings. I come for the papers.”

  Only later did Ned wonder if that was the only reason Síle visited Tom Clarke’s shop. There were news agents much closer to Mrs. Drumgold’s house in Faithful Place.

  A new element was somehow fitted into his morning. Up at dawn while Henry still lay snoring, throw on his clothes in the unheated room, splash his face with water from the pitcher on the washstand, a hasty shave, a swift bicycle ride to the orphanage, half an hour with Precious, another hurried ride to 75A Parnell Street, where Síle was waiting for him.

  They had neither time nor opportunity for anything but talking.

  To his surprise, Ned found himself telling Síle about the Titanic. He had never been able to tell Mary. The only time he mentioned it she had put her hands over her ears and cried, “Oh, don’t talk about that, it’s too terrible!”

  Mary was delicate, she must be protected, so he never mentioned the subject again.

  But Síle listened.

  He told her about Precious, too, and his sister in America and his family back in Clare. He spoke at length of Mr. Pearse and Saint Enda’s and the things that mattered to him. She told him of her own life, with neither self-pity nor apology.

  They talked as if they could never get enough of conversation. When the weather allowed, they strolled around Rutland Square, past the Rotunda Lying-In Hospital, with its peripheral buildings and park. Since the onset of war the Union Jack was prominently displayed in the area, as blatant in its message as the recruiting posters. But Ned was, for a while, able to ignore them.

  I’m walking out with Síle Duffy, he thought to himself.

  It was ridiculous, of course. A decent Irish man did not walk out with a girl like Síle Duffy.

  He had to keep his life compartmentalized: Síle in one section, Mary in another, and no cross-referencing. His two jobs were equally separate. A copyboy saw the news of the day before it ever reached the streets, but he was ordered not to divulge what he knew ahead of the next edition. It was still more imperative that he tell no one about messages he was relaying. As preparations for the Rising gained momentum, an air of almost total secrecy prevailed. “Everything must be on a ‘need to know’ basis,” Tom Clarke told Ned.

 
; Early in April, Ned was summoned to Larkfield. A maidservant led him into a drawing room where he was soon joined by Joe Plunkett, who looked as pale and delicate as ever. He was shivering in spite of a cheerful fire in the fireplace.

  Within moments another maid entered carrying a decanter and two glasses on a silver tray. When she had gone Plunkett went to a writing desk between two of the tall windows, unlocked a drawer, and took out a sheaf of documents. Putting these into a manila envelope, he sealed it and gave it to Ned.

  “Take this to Tom for me, will you? It seems I’m off to Germany to help Roger Casement.”

  Ned put down his glass. “Casement’s in Germany? I didn’t know.”

  “No reason why you should until now. I’ve arranged a code with my sister Gerry so I can send messages through her to Seán or Pat. But if anything happens I want you to be available as a backup conduit for information. Do you agree?”

  Ned nodded.

  Plunkett said, “For a long time Casement has insisted that Germany’s goodwill could be a great asset to Ireland.”9

  Ned felt a sudden, inexplicable chill, as if he knew what was coming next. The mention of Germany was innocent enough; Ireland had always enjoyed amicable relations with Germany. But with the outbreak of war Germany had taken on the sinister image of imperialist aggressor, and Ireland had seen far too much imperial aggression.

  We should not trust Germany, Ned thought with the prescience that occasionally troubled him. A strange vista opened in his imagination, a road stretching through the years into dark and deadly territory.

  But who was he to disagree with Roger Casement?

  He bit his lip and kept silent as Plunkett continued, “Although he’s treasurer for the Volunteers, Sir Roger’s not a member of the IRB. But he believes so strongly in this German idea of his that last year he went to America to persuade Clan na Gael to petition the kaiser.