French did not wait for explanations. He was making arrangements for two infantry brigades of the 59th Division to be sent over the Irish Sea, post-haste.
Birrell tried to telegraph Nathan but, ominously, the line to Dublin was out of order. The only incoming messages were over the Government wire from the Viceregal Lodge.
He wrote to Nathan for detailed information. He then phoned Redmond but there was no reply. He sent him a wire, instead, a kind of SOS. ‘Bad news from Dublin – a serious insurrection. It looks bad, though as the troops are coming in from the Curragh it can have, I suppose, but one ending.’
In Scotland Yard, Casement was seated in an uncomfortable armchair with tiny legs. Thomson liked towering over suspects. He used to watch them pathetically try to raise themselves to his level, realize their inferiority was more than physical, subside and then answer all his questions.
Not that Casement was likely to be cowed. Thomson and Hall, knowing his heroic history, were aware that he fitted none of their usual categories.
The phone rang. Thomson answered it with, ‘Yes?… Yes … I see.’
Afterwards, the mood of the interrogation became blacker, though Casement had no clue as to why.
In the GPO, The O’Rahilly was cheered by the arrival of Desmond Fitzgerald. He, too, had been opposed to the rising.
The O’Rahilly took charge of the upper floors, chiefly to distance himself from the other leaders. Pearse was trying to be friendly but Clarke and McDermott stayed cool. Fitzgerald was put in charge of stores. He sent youngsters out to forage for food, medicines and bedding.
‘Give a receipt,’ The O’Rahilly said, ‘and promise them the new Republic will pay them later.’
The youngsters went for bedding to the Metropole next door where the manager greeted their promises of compensation with uglier, more realistic promises of his own.
In the Post Office lobby, the policeman taken prisoner had been put out of action by the removal of his boots. He sat in a corner clutching a bottle of Guinness, embarrassed because those brightly polished boots had hidden a pair of dirty grey socks full of holes. Next to him, Lieutenant Chalmers, released from the telephone booth, was rapidly consuming a bottle of brandy to calm his fears. When it was empty, with tears in his eyes, he asked for another.
A burly workman pushed up to Fitzgerald. ‘I’m one of Jim Larkin’s men,’ he said in a boozy voice. ‘Is there no drink for one of Jim Larkin’s men?’
Fitzgerald told a girl to fetch him a glass of water. Jim Larkin’s man promptly withdrew his support for the revolution.
The Scottish Sergeant returned with his head bandaged, only to be locked up in the basement with his men.
An elderly man came into the foyer and called out a girl’s name. ‘Your mammy wants you, darlin’. Will ye come home this instant like a good girl.’
Outside, a number of priests in cassocks and stove-pipe hats linked hands across O’Connell Street. Moving like a black tide up and down, they tried to persuade the crowd to disperse. Even threats of eternal damnation had no effect.
‘Dear God,’ one of them sighed, ‘even St Pat with a belt of his crozier could not knock a splinter of sense into ’em.’
At the river end of O’Connell Street, a fifty-strong party of Lancers passed by, escorting five ammunition trucks from the North Wall to Marlborough Barracks. The outposts of the GPO on the quays were itching to fire on them but, since their own defences were not yet complete, they let them pass.
The Lancers rode blithely on along the Liffey towards the Four Courts. At Ormond Quay they ran into Ned Daly’s men who were building a barricade. They opened fire, bringing down eight Lancers whose horses, a lather of blood and sweat, panicked in the narrow streets. The rest galloped for cover and locked themselves in buildings in Charles Street.
A couple of Lancers, separated from the main party, went wild and let off their carbines, killing a little girl before being shot themselves.
A rebel grabbed the lance of one of them and, at the end of North King Street, wedged it in a manhole with the tricolour flying from it.
Colonel Kennard, Commander of the Dublin garrison, arrived at Portobello round about 1 o’clock, fresh from his vacation. The picket that might have escorted him to the Castle had just left and was pinned down around Davy’s pub.
The Barracks were in chaos. Few of the men had been under fire before and they were being sniped at from the north, from the towers in Jacob’s biscuit factory.
Unable to move, Kennard contacted Lewis, his adjutant, by phone and was relieved that the Castle had not fallen.
A woman in a shawl and long skirt appeared in the Barracks and the CO, Major Rosborough, said to a corporal, ‘Get her out of here.’
Throwing her shawl aside, she said, in a most unwomanly voice, ‘Sergeant MacAdam reporting for duty, sir.’
He had been visiting friends near the Green and been forced to come in disguise.
Minutes later, a second company of Lancers appeared at the top of O’Connell Street on perfectly groomed and caparisoned steeds. Their orders from Colonel Cowan were to flush out the rebels in the GPO.
They formed up near the Parnell Monument, carbines in their holsters, ceremonial lances at the ready. Their CO, Colonel Hammond, was not taking this too seriously. He saw pedestrians on the parapet of O’Connell Bridge and hanging from lampposts, waiting for the show to commence; and there were those preposterous flags flying from the GPO.
He ordered his men to fan out across the 154-foot boulevard. Then, with his raised sword aglow with the sun, ‘Fox-ward.’ This was a parade-ground exercise. No damned Irishmen would have the cheek to fire on his lads.
The troop, upright in their saddles, lances at the ready, nut-brown leather shining, gleaming spurs a-jangle, cantered southwards, before breaking into a gallop.
In the GPO the Republicans waited dry-mouthed for their first taste of battle.
‘Hold your fire,’ barked Connolly in the lobby, as his men peered through the windows over the sandbags.
‘Hold your fire,’ called out The O’Rahilly to the sharp-shooters on the top-floor and the roof.
Tom Clarke could hardly contain his excitement. The Irish were actually going to fire on British cavalry! He had dreamed of this in prison days.
The newly arrived Rathfarnam Volunteers chose this moment to rush across O’Connell Street to the side door of the Post Office, only to find it locked. Some of them smashed windows and hauled themselves in, gashing themselves badly. A stray bullet from a rebel sniper dropped a sixteen-year-old and, in the scramble, a Volunteer shot himself in the belly.
With horses’ hooves thundering on the cobbles and sparks rising off four sets of tramlines, discipline in the GPO broke down. The Lancers were level with the Pillar when ragged rifle fire broke out from the upper windows. Four of them fell spectacularly.
The Colonel, waving his sword, yelled, ‘Back! Get back, men.’
With a couple of riderless horses, they wheeled and galloped back to the Monument.
‘The Leopardstown Races,’ one wit called out.
The troop left four of their dead on the ground and a dead horse. Another horse was nuzzling his rider on the ground. There was another burst of firing and the great glossy beast collapsed like a broken spring with a ribbon of blood trickling from each nostril, dead beside its dead master.
The rebels were jubilant, with Clarke calling out, ‘Whoopee!’ but Connolly was furious that they had lost a golden opportunity of bringing down the entire troop. But at least the British knew they could not be dislodged by tactics that had failed even in the Crimea.
Even Connolly failed to realize that all the attack proved was how vulnerable HQ was from the north.
As Red Cross and St John Ambulance workers took away the dead, the Lancers at the Parnell Monument were surrounded by a crowd who stroked the restive mounts and said, ‘What a terrible thing for them madmen to shoot at our brave soldiers.’
A group of black-sha
wled women from the slums, their bad teeth looking like mouth organs, approached the GPO. They were utterly fearless, having nothing to lose but their lives.
‘Would you be moidering them poor men?’ they screamed, shaking shiny fists at rebels who were grateful for their barricades. ‘Dear God in heaven, is it you are not Christians at all, shooting them darlin’, feckin’ horses?’
From an upper window of the Mendicity Institute, Heuston’s men saw an entire regiment of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers leave the Royal Barracks and march four-abreast eastwards along the quays towards the Four Courts.
‘Looks interesting,’ said Heuston. ‘Wait for it.’
The troops on the other side of the Liffey were opposite the Institute when Heuston gave the order, ‘Now!’
The British, most of them raw recruits, panicked and ran for cover, leaving a large number dead or wounded. Some hid behind the quay walls and inside an abandoned tramcar. Others rushed for side streets, unsure where the firing was coming from.
*
Further to the west, Lieutenant-Colonel R. L. Owens, the Battalion Commander from Richmond Barracks, was in charge of about 200 men. Ahead of him was his infantry picket under Major Holmes who was moving slowly and circumspectly to relieve the Castle.
Holmes knew the GPO had been taken. Seeing uniformed men behind the wall of the South Dublin Union, he halted and sent Lieutenant Malone with twenty men to flush them out.
Kent’s men fired on them, wounding three, but Malone made it into the buildings opposite the Union and returned fire.
Owens reinforced the picket with another hundred men.
With the British beginning to encircle the Union, Kent already knew he had a real scrap on his hands when, 300 yards away, from the top of the Royal Hospital a machine-gun opened up sending his men bellying for cover. Some fled into iron sheds which bullets pierced like cheese, others into dormitories for the insane.
The rebels gave as good as they got.
A British officer, trying to scale the wall on the canal side, fell back shot through the head. Another, screened by a telegraph pole, felt it splintering in front of him from bullet after bullet till he finally copped it. Falling with a salmon-like curve, he thumped into the canal bank before splashing into the water.
The Portobello picket proved too strong for the rebels in Davy’s public house. As planned, they fell back to their base in Stephen’s Green.
Major Rosborough strengthened the picket to bring their number up to 200. The troops then pushed on north towards the Castle. They immediately ran into withering fire from MacDonagh’s outposts and the towers of Jacob’s which lay in their path.
Major Sir Francis Vane was in Bray, lunching with a former fellow officer of the Munster Regiment, Major Arthur Maunsell, when a toffee-nosed, white-gloved butler interrupted them.
‘Sorry to disturb you, sirs, but it seems that Dublin has been taken over by Sinn Feiners.’
‘Dammit,’ Vane exclaimed, ‘I left my gear at the Gresham.’
‘How utterly beastly,’ Maunsell said.
Vane drained his glass and jumped up. ‘Awfully sorry, old man, but would you mind if I said cheerio?’
Within minutes, he was at Bray station, where he ordered a train as if it were a taxi to take him fifteen miles north to the city.
*
At 1.30 p.m., British troops attacked the Mendicity Institute with a machine-gun. Bullets rattled against the walls, providing cover for soldiers to cross the bridge. Some of those who made it surrounded the Institute. The rest, numbering 130, pushed on to the Castle, arriving just before 2 o’clock.
Almost at once they were joined by fifty of the Portobello picket. These had avoided Jacob’s Factory by moving round by the South Circular Road. The rebels were already paying the penalty for immobility.
The outlook was now bleak for Sean Connolly and his men in the City Hall and other buildings overlooking the Castle.
At Portobello Barracks, Kennard realized how critically important was the Telephone Exchange in Crown Alley, just south of the Halfpenny Bridge. He asked Major Rosborough to send a detachment of twenty-five Royal Irish Riflemen to reinforce the guard on the Exchange. They left at precisely 1.45 p.m.
Liam O’Briain, after leaving MacNeill, met with a Volunteer friend, an Ulster Protestant named Harry Nichols. They were passing the Green when a burly Citizen Army man carrying a gun called out, in broad Dublinese, ‘If yer any bleddy use come in and foight for Oirland.’
It was too good an offer to miss.
As they scrambled over the high railings, the Citizen Army man introduced himself. ‘Oim Bob de Coeur. Me da was French, so ya see, revolution runs in me blood.’
The next voice they heard was in marked contrast.
‘Absolutely spiffing, chaps, but all you’ll get for your pains is a rope or a bullet.’ It was the Countess Markievicz. ‘Hold on a tick.’ She had sighted someone in khaki at the window of the University Club. She took aim and fired.
‘Good lord!’
She rarely missed but this time, fortunately, she did. Her target was Irish and not a soldier at all.
A scout came into the GPO to say the Castle had fallen. Tremendously excited, Pearse said, ‘We are the first revolutionary group ever to do this.’
He asked Fitzgerald’s wife to take a Republican flag to fly over it. Minutes later, she was about to hand it in through the Gate when she noticed the guards were in khaki. She sped back to the GPO.
Pearse took it as one more proof that they were undermanned. He and Connolly kept saying that they would have achieved so much more if only MacNeill had not interfered.
The Castle was already feeling secure with the extra pickets when, at 2.15 p.m., there was a call from Kingsbridge Station: the first reinforcements from the Curragh Training Camp had arrived. It was a mobile column under Colonel Portal, with another 1,500 to follow.
Their promptness suggested to Major Lewis that the rebellion was restricted to the city, otherwise the railway lines would have been up.
He ordered some of Portal’s men straight on to the Castle.
British professionalism was not matched inside the GPO, where Red Cross personnel were bandaging up self-inflicted cuts and gun-shot wounds.
Lieutenant Clarke was examining a home-made bomb when it went off in his face. A pal, who wiped the blood off for him, seemed disappointed.
‘If your head wasn’t blown off, Liam, the damned things don’t work.’
Some tested a few bombs on Nelson’s Pillar. Apart from being a hated obstruction, it was a landmark for enemy fire. Attempts to blow it up ended in nothing but noise and smoke. The Lord Admiral, leaning calmly on his sword, did not even shudder. To wipe the smile off his face, a marksman on the roof interrupted his saying of the rosary to take potshots at him. He succeeded in chipping the big white nose before The O’Rahilly forbade him to waste any more ammunition.
In the lobby, a couple of Scandinavian sailors, with almost no English, conveyed to Connolly their desire to fight for Ireland until their boat left on Thursday. He sent them up to the roof – ‘Up there. Good place. Bang-bang’ – where The O’Rahilly issued them with rifles.
Helena Moloney came from City Hall with a message from Sean Connolly. ‘The Castle is being reinforced, we are desperate for more men.’
‘Sorry,’ James Connolly said, ‘I can’t give you any at present. Do your best.’
In Dame Street, on the way back to City Hall, Helena ran into Skeffy. He told her he found the whole thing horrifying.
Having seen rebels smashing the GPO, hordes of Dubliners decided anything went. They were encouraged by rumours that the police had been ordered off the streets.
They had gathered in their thousands in O’Connell Street in 1913 when Jim Larkin had spoken to them briefly from a balcony of the Imperial Hotel. The police had retaliated by mowing down men, women and children with their truncheons. Hospitals, that night, had been full of people with broken bones.
The po
or had long memories; it was time to take revenge. Anyway, with the Sinn Fein bastards holding the GPO, women were not able to collect their ‘separation money’. They had tried and a Volunteer had thrown a bomb at them. They were not to know the fuse had been ignited by a radiator and the lad had only tossed it out the window to get rid of it.
‘What are we to live on, then? How feed our bleddy kids?’
With sticks and iron bars, the destitute began to emerge from their hovels.
From the splendour of the Viceregal Lodge, Wimborne had issued his own Proclamation and troops had pasted it round the city. A reckless few in Dublin, he said, had started an insurrection.
Now, we, Ivor Churchill, Baron Wimborne, Lord-Lieutenant General and Governor-General of Ireland, do hereby warn all His Majesty’s subjects that the sternest measures are being, and will be taken for the prompt suppression of the existing disturbances, and the restoration of order. Given under our Seal, on the 24th day of April, 1916, WIMBORNE.
A rebel soldier pulled a copy off the wall and brought it to O’Connell Street where he read it to his comrades on the Post Office roof.
Their response was, ‘Bloody grand, all right, Seamus. Will you be now sending us up some more of them bloody bombs?’
The Bray train got only as far as the city outskirts. Vane had to walk the last couple of miles to the nearest Barracks.
Portobello’s main force was a 300-strong unit of the Royal Irish Rifles, an Ulster Regiment. Vane’s rank and years of service made him automatically second in command.
The Barracks were big enough to house two battalions. Soldiers and civilians were presently streaming into it, many in a state of panic. Vane’s priority was to reduce the perimeter to defendable proportions. Next, he headed a task-force which went through the houses at the rear to make sure they were not harbouring snipers. He entered each house to apologize personally. ‘Frightfully sorry,’ he said, touching his battered peaked cap, ‘for the inconvenience.’
Rebels Page 33