Rebels

by Peter De Rosa

  After clearing the reef, the Aud still had a two-hour battle with the storm.

  There were times when Spindler thought the cargo was shifting and they would all be drowned. But they made it. As if to confirm their escape, the compass started acting normally. It was like seeing Lazarus rising from the dead.

  By 5.30 on that Tuesday evening, they were clear of the eastern edge of the bank and he was able to lay a course normal for a tramp steamer, SSE. They were on schedule. Next stop, Ireland.

  As soon as he arrived in Limerick, Sean Fitzgibbon passed on his instructions. Colivet was amazed. So far, Pearse had told him he was to hold the line of the Shannon in the event of hostilities. These new orders were not in the least hypothetical.

  ‘Don’t you agree, Sean, that this sounds like a rising?’

  Worried even more, Fitzgibbon said, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘If it is, I’m telling you, we’re not ready. If arms are landed, I don’t even have the men with the skills to fire them.’

  Fitzgibbon now strongly suspected that MacNeill was having the wool pulled over his eyes.

  ‘If I were you, Mick,’ he said, ‘I’d go to Dublin tomorrow and ask Pearse straight out.’

  Tuesday 18 April began as normal in the advertising agency run by Wolf von Igel, an attaché at the German Consulate in New York. The offices were on the top floor of a skyscraper. There was no security in spite of Devoy’s constant nagging.

  But Igel had at last got the message. He was under suspicion for complicity in attempting to blow up the Welland Canal connecting Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, west of Niagara Falls. If his involvement were proven, he was liable to prosecution for infringing American neutrality.

  In the States, there was much ill will towards the Germans for allowing their submarines to sink neutral shipping. Captain Hall decided it was a good moment to try and influence the President. He gave the Americans a tip-off.

  Igel was in his office, removing papers from the safe for a more secure hiding-place when half a dozen burly, neatly dressed men appeared outside. Their chief asked briskly of a male assistant for Igel’s office. He had pointed before he realized something was wrong. They pushed past him.

  Igel, a strapping former Lieutenant in the German army, was standing next to the open safe. The table was littered with dossiers marked ‘Top Secret’. Before he could move, two men pinioned his arms while the rest gathered up the documents.

  ‘Crooks!’ von Igel screamed, kicking out.

  Von Skal, an elderly assistant at the German Consulate, rushed in from his office and there was a scuffle.

  Momentarily, Igel managed to wrench free and slam the safe door shut. Skal, picked up the phone and was trying to call the operator when one of the men broke the connection.

  ‘I’m an American citizen,’ yelled Skal. ‘I am going downstairs to phone.’

  The Chief took out a gun and levelled it. ‘Try it, sir, and it’ll be the last thing you do.’

  ‘Shoot and be damned,’ Skal said defiantly.

  The pistol was lowered. ‘We are acting on the orders of Mr Marshall, the United States District Attorney.’

  ‘You mean,’ gasped Igel, ‘you are Secret Service?’

  The Chief did not answer. He merely motioned towards Skal. ‘Let him go. We’re almost through here.’

  As Skal went to alert his Embassy, the agent left.

  Back at base, they found among the documents the message just received in code from Dublin on the 15th and wirelessed to Berlin via Buenos Aires and Stockholm. They had no difficulty in reading it because attached to it were a copy of Devoy’s covering message and a code-book.

  The Military Council in Dublin requested that the goods, obviously arms, should not be landed on the Kerry coast until the night of Easter Sunday/Easter Monday, five days hence.

  When Marshall, the DA, read this, he whistled, ‘This is most peculiar.’ There was a prima-facie case for thinking that this in itself was proof that the Germans had infringed President Wilson’s Proclamation of Neutrality. He thanked his lucky stars. It was no small thing to risk infringing any country’s diplomatic immunity.

  The State Department passed this information on to the New York World whose editor was an Anglophile. He, in turn, handed it to a British Embassy official who put it on the desk of his Ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice.

  From the British point of view, the jigsaw lacked only one piece. They did not know that the Aud had no wireless and, therefore, never would receive the message. Thus they had no more idea than Clarke or Pearse that the boat was likely to turn up at Tralee days before anyone was ready for it.

  In Berlin, Bernstorff’s 15 April telegram No 435, sent on from Stockholm, arrived at 1.25 on the morning of Wednesday 19 April.

  It read: ‘Delivery of arms must occur precisely on Sunday 23 April in the evening.’

  Captain Nadolny read it with a certain detachment. For ten days the Aud had been out of contact with land, somewhere on that immense sea. His detestation of Casement came out as a general condemnation of ‘Those damned stupid Irish.’

  The Admiralty coolly informed Devoy that the arms ship had no radio and there was nothing more they could do. The Aud’s Captain had his orders and would abide by them.

  Devoy was left fuming that in this emergency he had no simple code for communicating to Dublin the mess they were in.

  In Dublin, Pearse and his colleagues on the Military Council went on with their preparations. They did not know that Casement was on his way in a submarine, hoping to call the rising off. Nor that the arms ship was being tracked all the way.

  They expected the ship or ships to appear off Inishtooskert on Sunday night, after the rising had begun. The arms would be unloaded at Fenit and distributed early Monday throughout Cork, Tipperary, Limerick and the west. By then 3,000 well-armed Volunteers would have risen in Dublin. Thousands more, many with German arms, would rise in the provinces and pin the British down so they could not relieve Dublin. It would be the most impressive rising in Irish history.

  ‘Our security’s been so damn tight,’ Tom Clarke said, ‘I really believe the English haven’t caught a smell of the rising.’

  Joe Plunkett was not present; he was recovering from major surgery. But he had made plans to send three specialists to Kerry to set up their own transmitter in a remote spot near Tralee. This would enable them to communicate with the arms ship as it sailed down the west coast.

  The Council were so sure Berlin had received their change of plans that Pearse did not bother to tell Stack to keep watch from Good Friday, just in case.

  Stack himself had known the precise date of the arms landing for a month. He took it for granted that the Germans knew. Curiously, though he lived in the west of Ireland where even trains from Dublin rarely ran on time, he expected a boat coming from Germany in wartime with British patrols everywhere to be dead on schedule.

  In Dublin, Clarke at last gave the order for MacNeill to be handed a complete copy of the Castle document.

  He read with horror that General Friend was planning to arrest Volunteer leaders and confiscate their arms. He let it be known, to Pearse’s satisfaction, that if the British tried anything of the kind, his men were ready to resist unto blood.

  At 11 a.m. Pearse met Michael Colivet, Commandant of the Limerick Brigade in the lounge of the North Star Hotel near Amiens Street Station.

  ‘Now, Michael, what is on your mind?’

  ‘These instructions which Sean Fitzgibbon gave me, Mr Pearse. It seems the arms from Fenit will arrive at Abbeyfeale.’ Pearse nodded. ‘I’m to take charge of my share and send the rest on to Galway.’

  ‘Correct,’ said Pearse, and sniffed to indicate that a waiter was within earshot.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Colivet, raising his quacky Limerick voice, ‘I may just be a plain farmer from the west but I know when I’m being diddled over the price for my wheat.’

  ‘ ’Tis a perfectly fair price I’m offering you, Mr Rya
n,’ said Pearse, in an agricultural accent that did not suit him.

  When the waiter took the order and left, Colivet whispered, ‘After the distribution of arms, the outlying battalions are to march on to Limerick City and then east to Dublin.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Pearse said. ‘Where is the obscurity in that?’

  ‘None. It is plain as a pikestaff that you and MacNeill mean Sunday’s manoeuvres to be a rising.’

  Pearse said, ‘A Republic is to be proclaimed, yes. So make sure there is no clash with police or troops before then.’

  For the moment, Colivet was lost for words. Then: ‘I take it the Germans are coming in force.’

  ‘I am not in a position to answer that.’

  ‘So they are coming,’ Colivet said triumphantly.

  ‘Please,’ implored Pearse, whose right foot tapped the floor, ‘I am not in a position to say that.’

  ‘No need, sir. Tell Mr MacNeill we’ll do our best.’

  They stood up, shook hands and left just as the waiter was bringing coffee.

  Colivet walked alone in O’Connell Street. He took in the trams, the people passing to and fro in their day-to-day activities and fell to wondering what it would be like on Sunday. There was no time for day-dreaming. He had to plan a rising in Limerick and there were only four days to go.

  While Colivet was at Kingsbridge Station waiting for a train home, Dublin was buzzing with activity.

  At a meeting of the Dublin Corporation, a Sinn Fein alderman, Tom Kelly, was reading the Castle document to his colleagues. They were furious. It seemed to them the British were hell-bent on provoking the Volunteers.

  ‘They want bloodshed on the streets of the capital,’ Kelly said, ‘to prove that we Irish are a rebellious lot and not worthy to govern ourselves. As if the Volunteers would be so daft as to take on the British army!’

  Meanwhile, in the next street, a corporation employee handed Sean Connolly, the Abbey actor, a duplicate key to the City Hall, which overlooked Dublin Castle.

  In another part of the city, Pearse gave de Valera of the Volunteers’ Third Battalion details of the rising for the first time.

  James Connolly and MacDonagh made a thorough inspection of all the buildings they intended to seize on Sunday.

  Afterwards, MacDonagh addressed B Company of his 2nd Battalion.

  ‘That Castle document, men, must be taken very seriously. It may mean that when we go out on manoeuvres on Sunday, some of us might not be coming back.’

  John Dillon, in his home north of O’Connell Street, was picking up all sorts of rumours. He was sure, he wrote to Redmond in London, that elements in the separatist movement were planning some devilish business.

  *

  The excitement was even getting to John MacNeill, the most unflappable of men. He called a meeting of the Volunteer Executive at his house that evening to discuss the document.

  ‘If the authorities try to disarm us, gentlemen, I want you to take the necessary counter-measures. We must preserve our arms and our organization at all costs.’

  ‘We will, sir,’ Pearse assured him.

  The O’Rahilly chipped in with, ‘You do mean us to take only defensive measures?’

  ‘Naturally,’ MacNeill said. ‘It would be madness for an amateur force like ours to take on a regular army.’

  In spite of this reservation, Pearse was pleased. His last major problem seemed to have been solved. The manoeuvres now had the full backing of the Chief of Staff and would be taken very seriously by all the men. Within the hour, the newly alerted Volunteers were buying up food and supplies, and oiling their rifles.

  Back at St Enda’s, Pearse went to a room where Liam Mellowes was hiding. Nora, Connolly’s daughter, had recently been to England where Mellowes had been deported and helped smuggle him back, disguised as a priest.

  ‘It looks to me, Liam,’ Pearse said, ‘that nothing can stop us now, not even MacNeill. In a couple of days, you will be in Galway, leading the rising there.’

  Not everyone in MacNeill’s Executive was taken in.

  Back at Volunteer HQ, Bulmer Hobson and Captain J. J. O’Connell went through the Castle document with a fine-tooth comb.

  ‘I don’t like it one bit, J. J.,’ Hobson kept muttering.

  Raiding Archbishop Walsh’s House in Drumcondra was particularly suspicious; the British knew that would raise a riot. Further, a swoop on the scale envisaged in the document would mean blood flowing in the streets.

  Hobson looked at O’Connell. ‘It makes no sense,’ he concluded. ‘Not the slightest.’

  ‘If it’s mere scaremongering,’ asked O’Connell, ‘who’s responsible for it and who stands to gain?’

  ‘I detect in this the hand of Joe Plunkett and his cronies.’

  They drove back to MacNeill’s place.

  ‘Are you saying,’ he asked them, ‘that I’m the victim of some plot?’

  He dredged his mind for clues he might have missed. He had recently been on tour in Tralee and Stack’s officers there seemed surprised that he knew less about some of Pearse’s orders than they did. But Pearse was so honourable.

  MacDonagh? But Thomas was his colleague at the University. A more upright and conscientious man he had never come across.

  ‘You have been used,’ insisted Hobson, ‘as a pawn in a wicked conspiracy.’

  O’Connell chipped in with, ‘There may be more to those Sunday manoeuvres than any of us realized.’

  MacNeill sat back in his chair. Whether the Castle document was a forgery or not, and on that he suspended judgement, he had a premonition that something terrible was about to happen.

  That evening at Liberty Hall, the Citizen Army was drilling when Connolly invited three officers, McCormack, Doyle and Frank Robbins, to join him and Mallin in his room.

  ‘Listen, lads,’ he began, ‘the rising is fixed for Sunday at 6.30 p.m., 7 p.m. in the provinces.’ Seeing their enthusiasm, he went on: ‘Our main job is to take and hold St Stephen’s Green.’

  Mallin put a map on an easel.

  ‘Our first aim,’ he said, ‘is to check any advance of the military from Portobello Barracks. The Green covers several main streets’ – he pointed – ‘Grafton, Harcourt, Leeson, Kildare, Dawson and so on. To hold on to the Green, we’ll have to take over some of the buildings on the north side, like the Shelbourne Hotel, and build barricades across the main approaches.’

  Connolly pointed at Doyle.

  ‘You, Joe, with sixteen men will take Davy’s pub, here, at Portobello Bridge. When troops from the Barracks get in range, let ’em have it.’

  Doyle’s eyes gleamed. He was a bartender in Davy’s pub and he had one or two scores to settle with the landlord.

  Nathan was working late in his office when he was told that the informer in MacDonagh’s B Company was outside.

  ‘Show him in.’

  The skinny, shifty-eyed fellow, running his cap through his hands, said that MacDonagh had told them they were going out on Sunday and some might not come back.

  After dismissing him, Nathan put the police on increased alert. He also issued an official denial that the Castle had any intention of disarming the Volunteers. He had the impression that someone or some group was trying to stir up trouble.

  In London, Birrell finally had to call off his trip to the west of Ireland, the only place he felt he would find peace. John Redmond was threatening fire and brimstone over the appointment of a Protestant and a Unionist as Attorney-General.

  Birrell consoled himself with the thought of curling up in his flat in St James’s Street and reading a new romance about the French Revolution. There was nothing like history to take the mind off the gloom and doom of Anglo-Irish politics.

  That night at St Enda’s, Pearse found his mother so sad, he put his arms around her.

  ‘Something’s bothering you?’

  She admitted to thinking he would perhaps be killed.

  ‘Is that so bad, little Mother?’ he said, smiling.

  �
�If Willie is left behind, yes.’

  ‘That would be terrible for him,’ he had to agree.

  ‘Do you think, Pat,’ she said, in a sobbing voice, ‘you could write something for me, a kind of souvenir, if you get the time?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if ever I get the time.’

  At sea, it had been a day of splendid spring weather. In the course of the evening, the Aud had sighted two more cruisers. Neither of them took the least notice of her.

  Spindler felt his luck was uncanny; he was like a punter in a dream picking the winner in every race.

  He began saying to himself, What if the English know we are coming? If so, they don’t need to engage us at sea, merely wait for us to go ashore and trap us on terra firma.

  Spindler was on the watch when a third cruiser loomed out of the darkness 300 yards off with its lights screened. No more substantial than a silhouette, it gave no sign of recognition. Thinking this was the last cruiser of the line from the Hebrides chain, he turned in at midnight.

  Three hours later, he was woken up by a shrill whistle in the voice-pipe next to his bunk. ‘Another auxiliary cruiser, Herr Kapitän, five miles to port.’

  He was no sooner up on deck than it, too, veered off.

  They were due at the rendezvous in two days’ time. Puffy-eyed, he measured the chart. At their present rate, they would arrive a day early, incredible in view of what they had been through. He ordered reduced speed in a south-easterly direction.

  Battermann called out, ‘Another cruiser, Herr Kapitän. Three miles to starboard.’

  It was emergency stations once again, with everything pouring into the Conjuror’s Box while Hector barked furiously. All these swift changes were becoming tedious.

  The ship was a 6,000 tonner of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company with two guns pointed in their direction. Her crew took a good look at the Aud’s starboard side, crossed to her stern, then veered off eastwards.

  Spindler was more baffled than ever. Enemy ships kept looking; but not once, as the law of the sea demanded, had they asked where the Aud came from and was headed.