More cheers went up every now and then, and when Maeve returned, her news came as no surprise. The rising was back on. Everything planned for today would now take place tomorrow.
“I’m going to be busy this afternoon,” she said, “but later—”
“You don’t need a houseguest at a time like this,” Caitlin said. “I’ll go to a hotel.”
“Don’t be silly. Once it starts, heaven knows when I’ll be home, and you can look after the place. Here, I’ll give you my key. I’ll pick up the spare tonight.” She sat down, then stood up again. “I can hardly believe it,” the Irishwoman said, her expression suddenly serious. “I haven’t felt this frightened since I was five and my father put me up on a horse in Phoenix Park. I’m excited, too, of course I am. But oh, Jesus, I’m frightened.”
Caitlin put an arm around the other woman’s shoulders but could think of nothing useful to say. “You could always walk away” was pointless and “You’ll be all right” just fatuous. Truth be told, she felt frightened herself, and unlike Maeve, she wasn’t going to war.
Georges and Didier
McColl hadn’t harbored much hope of sleep, but he woke with a start stretched out on the earthen floor. Turning his watch toward the one small window, he discovered it was almost five o’clock. His neck and back were painfully stiff, but he told himself there was good news, too—the Germans hadn’t shown up in the night, and, as far as he could tell, their precipitate flight hadn’t caused his leg any further damage. He had hardly eaten on the previous day and felt really hungry now, but his bowels seemed unaware they should be empty.
After relieving himself in a bucket that he’d failed to spot the night before, he settled down to wait, eyes on the brightening window, ears cocked for signs of life upstairs. It was half past seven when the bolts were thrown back and his friend from yesterday reappeared, wrinkling her nose as she came down the steps.
“I had to relieve myself,” he said apologetically.
“Of course. Are you ready to go?”
“Oh, yes.”
There was no one to thank in the house upstairs, and McColl felt absurdly guilty for leaving them a bucket of shit. Outside, the streets were dry, the sky threatening rain.
“How far this time?” he asked her.
“Cinq minutes,” she told him. Today a red beret was perched on her dark brown hair, but the long black skirt and sturdy shoes were the same.
Their destination was a backstreet milk depot. As they arrived, a cart full of churns was coming out through the gates, and many more were parked in the yard. Several of the attached horses were stamping their hooves on the cobbles, as if eager to be gone.
They walked across to the office, where two men greeted McColl’s companion with kisses on the cheek. One was the depot foreman, the other a dairy farmer. All four of them watched through the window as the yard slowly emptied, until only the farmer’s cart remained.
After the foreman had closed the gates, he and the farmer removed what had looked like the floor of the cart, to reveal a hidden space beneath in the shape of a shallow coffin.
The farmer waved a hand, inviting McColl to climb in. “Just until we get clear of the city,” he promised.
McColl turned to the woman. “Thank you,” he said. “And please thank the people who own the house.”
She nodded.
McColl clambered up and laid himself out in the narrow space. Once the false floor had been replaced, it was only an inch from his nose, and he endured a momentary flash of panic when the empty churns were lifted on, causing his new ceiling to noisily creak with the strain.
He felt the farmer climb onto the seat and heard him gee the horse into motion. As they rattled out onto the street, he decided to look on the bright side and dwell on how impressed his grandchildren would be when he told them the story of his daring escape from Belgium.
If he escaped. The journey out of Liège seemed to take forever, and each time the cart halted without releasing him, he felt like crying with rage. When the first churn was finally lifted off, he could have wept with gratitude. Once the planks had been removed, he painfully extracted himself from his hiding place, gingerly lowered himself to the floor, and leaned, somewhat unsteadily, against the side of the cart. They were parked by the side of an empty road, the horse serenely munching on a clump of wild grass.
The farmer put his cart back together, and the two of them loaded the churns.
“About a kilometer in that direction,” the Belgian told him, pointing down the road, “there’s a house that nobody lives in. It’s the first one you come to. On the left. The husband and son are with the King’s army, the wife is with her sister in Brussels. And this is the key,” he said, taking it out of his pocket. “Now, listen. In the main room downstairs, there’s a big stone fireplace, and on either side of that there are big cupboards. If you go into the one on the right and push hard against the bottom of the opposite wall, it will swing open and let you into the secret room. There are regular patrols on this road,” he added, glancing up and down it, “so you’d be wise to hide yourself in there until the passeur comes to pick you up.”
“And when will that be?” McColl asked.
“There’s some bread and water waiting for you,” the farmer answered. “And if he doesn’t come tonight, someone else will bring you more.” He gave McColl an encouraging thump on the shoulder. “Now I must be getting home.”
After watching the man turn his cart and drive it back the way they’d come, McColl started walking, keeping close to the trees that bordered one side of the road. He’d been walking ten minutes when he saw another cart in the distance and crouched down in some bushes to watch it go past, loaded with spring cabbages. Continuing his journey, he came on the house quicker than expected, let himself in with the key, and found the door to the secret room. The bottom flew back when he shoved it, causing the top to come down on his head. A detail to spare the grandchildren, he decided, rubbing his scalp and looking round the room. It was empty, save for the bread and the bottle of water in the middle of the floor.
He relocked the front door, closed the secret entrance, and settled down for another wait. The Belgians had all been wonderful, but the life of a human parcel was somewhat undermining. He had only the vaguest idea where he was—the Dutch border could be one or fifty miles distant, and heaven knew in which direction.
The hours dragged by with few diversions. He heard vehicles and voices on several occasions, but none of the latter were German, and the light seeping through the boarded-up windows slowly began to fade. With the bread and water long gone, he felt increasingly hungry and thirsty, and when the passeur arrived just after midnight, McColl almost fell on the food he brought.
“Call me Jacques,” the man told him. He was probably in his forties, with stubble for hair, sharp blue eyes, and the general demeanor of a theatrical villain. “What’s your name?”
“Jack,” McColl told him.
“Two Jacks!” the man said, clearly amused. “I have two friends outside who will come with us.”
“How far is it?” McColl asked.
“Ten kilometers. But no need to hurry. The moon will not be down for several hours.”
The men outside were younger. They greeted McColl with smiles but didn’t introduce themselves. One was holding a canvas haversack, which he passed to Jacques.
The first stage of the trek took them across numerous moonlit fields and through several moon-dappled woods and would have been enchanting in other circumstances. No one talked, and Jacques, in the lead, would occasionally stop to listen, then offer up a reassuring nod before moving on. McColl had questions he wanted to ask—were there patrols this far from the border?—but managed to restrain himself. No one liked a talkative parcel.
They came to a wide stream. According to Jacques it marked the boundary of the “verboten zone”—anyone found between here
and the frontier would be shot on sight. The four of them waded across and were soon out in the open, traversing a broad stretch of heathland. After a while McColl noticed shifting patterns of light on the distant horizon. Searchlights.
They entered another stretch of woodland, walking along a well-used path until they reached a large clearing, where Jacques’s two helpers started rummaging among the pile of dead branches that lay in one corner and eventually pulled something clear. It looked like a window frame.
“We will wait here until the moon is down,” Jacques told McColl. “Maybe half an hour,” he added, gazing through the trees at the sinking yellow disk.
A breeze had risen, and the noise it made in the branches above was loud enough to mask their conversation. “Tell me about the frontier,” McColl asked. “How well guarded is it?”
“A man every hundred meters, lights every four hundred.”
Wonderful, McColl thought wryly. There wouldn’t be a section out of eyeshot.
“And then there’s the electrified fence.”
“And how do we get through that?”
Jacques smiled. “You will see.”
With the moon gone, the last lap was difficult, but the deeper darkness at least offered hope of an unseen approach. Or so McColl thought until they arrived. When they reached the edge of the trees and looked out across the fifty-yard strip that the Germans had cleared, one of the searchlights was bathing it all in a pale yellow glow. When the beam moved on, the light dramatically faded, but the resulting darkness was far from complete.
Two sentries were visible, one quite close, now walking away to the left, the other much farther away but apparently approaching. More worryingly, McColl had noticed two dark shapes on the glinting wires. Human shapes.
“What’s that on the fence?” he asked in a whisper.
“Georges and Didier,” was the terse reply. “The Germans leave bodies on the wire to discourage the rest of us, so of course we cross as close as we can. Just to show the bastards we’re not afraid.” As he talked, the Belgian had taken two balls of string from his haversack and started winding an end around each wrist. That done, he handed a ball to each of his two partners, both of whom gave McColl a friendly pat on the shoulder before slipping away in opposite directions, trailing string behind them. “You’re lucky you’re on your way out,” Jacques said.
“Why?”
“Because coming in, you can’t afford to be seen, or the Germans will hunt you down. Going out, even if you have to shoot a sentry, once you’re across, there’s nothing more they can do.”
Gazing at the fence and its victims, lit again by the moving light, McColl didn’t feel that lucky. “How do I get through the wire?”
Jacques reached for the window frame, which was actually four lengths of wood screwed together to form a square. Grooved strips of rubber had been fixed to opposite sides. “We slide this onto the bottom strand of wire and push down until we can slip the other side into the next strand up. Then you just squeeze through.” He took a pair of wire cutters out of one pocket. “You’ll need these for the second fence. It’s a hundred meters beyond. But not electrified. Or at least it wasn’t,” he added with a grin. There was a tug on one of the lines. “Maurice is in position. And so is Albert,” he added a few moments later. “They will tug each time their sentry is farthest away from us. When both tug within a few seconds, we go.”
“And the searchlight?”
“It only shines on this stretch of fence for a few seconds, and as long as we hold still, there’s a good chance of not being seen.”
Which all seemed reasonable enough, McColl reckoned, until you considered the corpses fused to the wire. Or had they just slipped?
“Sometimes we have to wait a long time,” Jacques warned him.
But not on this particular night. One sentry had been swallowed by the darkness much earlier than the other, but he must have stopped for some reason—a piss, maybe, or a chat with the next man along—because both strings tightened at almost the same moment.
“Let’s go,” Jacques hissed, and, picking up the insulated frame, he started toward the fence.
The light was swinging their way, and both men fell face forward into the grass, scrambling back up as soon as it receded.
The fence was about ten feet tall, the wires around nine inches apart. Having donned rubber gloves that he took from his bag, Jacques arranged one grooved side of the frame across the second-lowest strand and invited McColl to help push down. Both men put their weight into it, McColl realizing that if it slipped out, they would probably both fall onto the wires and join the two a few feet away.
When they had a half inch to spare, Jacques maneuvered the opposite groove onto either side of the wire above and slowly let them entwine. “Go,” he said.
As McColl stooped to squeeze himself through, the searchlight beam swept over the contorted faces of Georges and Didier and seemed to hover over himself and Jacques. There was a shout away to his right.
Refusing to panic, he inched his way through, petrified that any misstep might dislodge the frame. As he eased his head under, a shot rang out and there were more shouts father away. The moment he’d pulled his second leg through, he was off and running, pursued by the questing searchlight. More shots were fired without apparent effect, and he found himself back in darkness, approaching the second fence.
Jacques had assured him that this one wasn’t charged, but the first safe contact was still a relief. As he rapidly cut a flap in the wire, the searchlight was sweeping back in his direction, arriving just as he wormed his way through and slumped to the ground beyond.
The operator overshot, and McColl was up and running into Holland. As the yards flew by, he waited for the searchlight to pin him again; when it didn’t, he knew he must have passed beyond its range.
After another hundred yards, he felt able to stop, crouch down, and give his heart and lungs a chance to recover. Far behind him more shots cracked out. He hoped Jacques and the others had gotten away but knew he would probably never find out.
He walked on until he found a farm track, tossed a mental coin, and followed it northward. When dawn broke, he was overtaken by a Dutch farmer in a mud-spattered Model T and offered a lift into Maastricht.
Arriving home after midnight, Maeve was on her way out by eight, looking both nervous and proud in her Cumann na mBan uniform. “Be outside the GPO at noon,” she reminded Caitlin from the doorway.
It was a long morning. Soon after eleven, Caitlin secured a seat in the Imperial’s bar, which offered an excellent view across Sackville Street of the colonnaded post office, and settled back to watch and wait. Noon came and went, and she began to think that the rising had again been postponed. She felt disappointed and, much to her own surprise, even a little relieved. Maybe, as Maeve had feared, MacNeill’s intervention had confused or deterred too many Volunteers and the members of the Military Committee had decided they lacked sufficient men to implement their strategy.
But then Caitlin heard the clump of boots and, pressing her eyes to the window, could see a column approaching.
She hurried out onto the pavement.
There weren’t that many rebels—fewer than two hundred, she thought—and one small group broke away as she watched and marched off in another direction. Some men were in uniform, others not, and the weapons they carried ranged from modern rifles to crowbars and medieval-looking pikes. Patrick Pearse and James Connolly were at the front, and as they approached the GPO, Caitlin saw two other leaders she recognized—Seán McDermott and Thomas Clarke—climb out of a car nearby.
On the pavement a few feet away, a British soldier was laughing at them. “What a motley crew!” he cried out seconds before a raised Irish voice bellowed the order to charge. There was some hesitation, then another shout: “Take the GPO!” At which point they all turned and ran for the entrance, causing the lone p
oliceman on duty to throw up his arms in surrender.
Now there was silence out on the street, and faces full of surprise. What was happening here?
For more than a minute, those in the street just stood there, waiting for some sort of sign. And then a shot was heard inside the building, suddenly making it real.
Before too long, customers and employees were being hustled out through the doors at bayonet point, some clearly scared, others more bemused. Minutes later there were signs of activity on the roof, and then, one after the other, two new flags were raised in place of the Union Jack, the first one green with a golden harp and the words “Irish Republic,” the second a tricolor in green, white, and orange. On the street these received a mixed reception—cheers and jeers in more or less equal measure.
In keeping with this transfer of power, a rebel was tearing down those British recruiting posters that adorned the GPO façade and taking great delight in trampling them underfoot.
The watchers, still no more than a couple hundred strong, waited and wondered. What was happening inside? Would anyone come out to tell them? Surely a speech was called for.
At around twelve forty-five, the doors opened and Patrick Pearse stepped out, a single sheet of paper in his hand. James Connolly followed and took up position at Pearse’s shoulder, one hand on his holstered gun.
The crowd fell silent as Pearse began to read. He was speaking, he said, for the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic and to all the people of Ireland. “Irishmen and Irishwomen,” he began. “In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.”
As he read on, explaining and defending their action, Caitlin, almost despite herself, found herself falling under his spell. She had never felt more Irish; she could almost feel the joy of those dead generations, whose struggles had finally come to fruition. How happy Colm would have been to witness this, how proud her father would be.
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