Rebels

by Peter De Rosa

  ‘They’re the biggest damned nuisance of all, Lieutenant.’

  When Skeffy heard they intended holding him overnight, he asked if his wife might be contacted to stop her worrying.

  ‘Permission refused,’ the Adjutant said.

  Skeffy was put in the charge of the Captain of the Guard, Lieutenant Dobbin.

  Most men in the Barracks were recruits who hardly knew how to load a rifle. Many had been separated from their units. Tempers rose as more and more wounded soldiers were brought in, some complaining that they had been shot by rebels without uniforms.

  Every new arrival brought a fresh rumour: 600 German prisoners had escaped from detention and were marching on Dublin; an arms depot had been captured by a rebel force that was heading their way.

  Rumours apart, the sniping from Jacob’s Factory was real enough. The end result was that discipline in the Barracks had practically broken down.

  Trying to keep some semblance of order was Major Sir Francis Vane.

  Pearse walked into the street to read a communiqué to the citizens of Dublin. The crowd was slightly bigger than the day before.

  Since he knew from Jim Ryan and The O’Rahilly that the main centres like Cork, Limerick and Tralee were unlikely to join the rebellion, his message was further proof that the first casualty of war is truth.

  ‘The country is rising to Dublin’s call,’ he said, his right leg trembling. ‘The British troops have been firing on our women and on our Red Cross. On the other hand, Irish regiments in the British army have refused to act against their fellow-countrymen. Such looting as has occurred has been done by hangers-on of the British army.’

  *

  As darkness fell in comparative tranquillity, General Lowe at Military HQ was able to look back on a successful day. His troops, all Irish, had remained loyal. The cordon was complete around the Post Office. The big guns were in place. Trinity College was heavily fortified.

  Martial law had been declared in Dublin City and County. The curfew would make it difficult for rebel scouts – women mainly, he suspected – to move around. With a news black-out, the rebel HQ would lose contact with its outposts and be forced to surrender. The other outposts would follow suit, hopefully with little loss of life.

  With massive troop reinforcements in Liverpool due to arrive at Kingstown in the morning, the squeeze could soon begin. There really was no need to hurry.

  The Castle was quiet. Crown troops had stormed the buildings housing the Daily Express and the Evening Mail. Only a few rebel snipers remained.

  Hospital beds were filling with wounded brought in from other areas. A nurse was posted in the gallery to give advance warning of ambulances or stretcher-bearers arriving in the Yard, where watch-fires had been lit again.

  Many of those who had warmed themselves round last night’s fires were either dead or dying.

  In Boland’s, de Valera was very tired. A mathematician, he had made detailed studies of angles of elevation, noted the best places to snipe from. He had breached a wall in the Bakery to give access to the railway.

  With few men, he occupied places and soon abandoned them. Like the schoolmaster he was, he believed that his lads behaved themselves when there was plenty to do. But the tactic of being constantly on the move also led the enemy to think his force was several times bigger than it really was.

  In the GPO, to Collins’s disgust, the Republicans again sang rebel songs.

  During the day, women scouts had reported that things were going well in other commands.

  Outside, on a street corner, a bugler was playing national airs, which passers-by rewarded with a few coppers.

  In Portobello Barracks, Captain Bowen-Colthurst appeared. His family owned Blarney Castle. He was very tall, with a pronounced stoop and an expression that made him the embodiment of the wild Irishman.

  During his sixteen years in the Royal Irish Rifles he had fought in the Boer War, been in the retreat from Mons and was wounded at the Battle of the Aisne. At Mons, he had at first refused to obey the order to retreat and insisted on his right to advance on his own, regardless.

  He had been out on several raiding parties since the rising began and inspired his men by his utter disregard for personal safety. Unknown to them, he was fighting his private war against Sinn Feiners, who, he believed, were trying to destroy the entire country.

  Late at night, he approached the Captain of the Guard. ‘Dobbins, I want the Sinn Fein prisoner. Hand him over.’

  The Lieutenant, though recently out of school, knew this was illegal without written orders from the CO. The prisoner was under his care in ‘the King’s Peace’. Yet there was something in Colthurst’s demeanour that made him obey. It was bad enough fighting the rebels without fighting a senior officer who had once been aide-de-camp to the Viceroy.

  Colthurst towered over the diminutive Skeffy.

  ‘This,’ he said to Lieutenant Leslie Wilson, his second in command, poking the prisoner with his stick, ‘I’m taking this with us on our raiding party.’

  One of his men bound Skeffy’s hands behind his back.

  ‘Listen, Skeffington,’ Colthurst said, ‘if there’s trouble from anyone, if we’re sniped at from any quarter, I’m going to shoot you.’

  The forty-strong party left the Barracks about 11 p.m. In nearby Rathmines Road, Colthurst got immense enjoyment out of firing at anyone who appeared at a window.

  When two lads came out of Rathmines Church after a sodality meeting, Colthurst grabbed one of them, aged about seventeen, by the scruff of the neck.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Coade,’ the boy answered. ‘J. J. Coade, sir.’

  ‘Don’t you know, Coade, that martial law has been declared? Which means I can shoot both of you like dogs.’

  Skeffy knew this was a lie but he hoped it was only a bluff on the Captain’s part. As Coade wriggled free, Colthurst said to a private, ‘Bash him.’

  The soldier raised the butt of his rifle and broke Coade’s jaw. As the lad hit the ground, unconscious, Colthurst drew out his revolver and shot him in the head.

  ‘Right, men, let’s go,’ and they moved off, leaving him lying in a pool of blood.

  Skeffy found it hard to believe that there could be anything inside a human being to make him do such a thing.

  ‘This is wicked, this is—’

  ‘Say your prayers,’ the Captain said, ‘you’re next.’

  The party went another hundred yards to Portobello Bridge. There Colthurst handed Skeffy over to Lieutenant Wilson who ran him close in cruelty. Before leaving with twenty men, Colthurst leaned over Skeffy and prayed, eyes to heaven and in a shaky voice, ‘O Lord God, if it shall please Thee to take this man’s life, forgive him, for Christ’s sake.’ He turned to Wilson, saying, with bizarre normality, ‘If anyone snipes at you, Lieutenant, shoot this.’

  ‘Understood, sir,’ Wilson said smartly.

  Colthurst went from there on a killing spree. One of the houses he sacked and bombed belonged to Alderman James Kelly, whom he mistook for a Sinn Feiner called Tom Kelly. With the Alderman were two editors, Dickson and McIntyre, who had taken refuge with him because of the curfew.

  McIntyre was burly and of medium height. Dickson was only 4 feet 6 inches tall and a cripple. He looked an incongruous figure in a black coat and a bowler hat. The writings of both men proved they were intensely loyal to the Crown.

  ‘I’m taking all three of you back to Barracks,’ Colthurst shouted, deaf to anything they said.

  Norway was in bed when Nathan called, asking him to go to the Castle at once. Norway tried but failed to get a car or an ambulance. The drivers said that if they were stopped by rebels, with him inside, they would all be shot. He rang Nathan back and explained.

  ‘Very well,’ Nathan said, irritably. ‘I will talk to you in French in case we are overheard.’

  His conviction that only the Irish did not know French was immediately overturned.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Norway said, ‘but I don’
t speak it.’

  ‘Are you having me—? Oh, very well, I’ll just have to give you instructions in English.’

  In Norway’s opinion, what Nathan said was not helpful in any language whether to friends or foes. He went back to bed at 1 p.m. to the sound of sniper fire.

  The firing came from the roof of the College of Surgeons where the Countess was keeping watch under the rain-drenched tricolour. Beside her were two lads.

  One was Tommy Keanan. When he got home, his father had locked him in a bedroom but he escaped. The second was a youngster who was going blind; the Countess had taught him ballads and encouraged him to practise singing so he would earn some sort of a living. This boy had a rifle in his hands which the Countess pointed for him in the direction of the Shelbourne.

  ‘The enemies of Arland, sonnie, are over thar, and I reckon you have as much right as anyone to take a few pot-shots at ’em.’

  As the lad pulled the trigger, a smile of joy passed over his face.

  Below, the rest of the Republican army, wrapped like mummies in rugs or pieces of carpet, were trying to sleep. Michael Mallin was on his knees, saying the rosary for his wife and children.

  In the GPO the men were no sooner asleep than a group of over sixty Republicans, forced to retreat from the northern suburbs, came in. Pearse thought it merited a speech.

  ‘Dublin, by rising in arms, has redeemed its honour forfeited in 1803 when it failed to support the rebellion of Robert Emmet.’

  He then led them upstairs to the Commissary where they were handed big slices of cake before being divided into three groups. One went to the Hotel Metropole, one across the street to the Imperial, the third stayed in the GPO.

  Before the men could settle down again, reports came in of British forces massing for a bayonet charge.

  ‘This is it, men,’ Connolly said to his exhausted army.

  They took up their positions, on the roof, at the peep-holes. There they remained, without rest and in a state of alert, until the morning light.

  WEDNESDAY

  Back at Portobello, Colthurst threw Skeffy, his hands still bound, into a tiny cell and swore at him through the bars.

  Skeffy, used to such language as a result of his soap-box oratory, took it without a word. Running out of abuse, Colthurst left to spend the rest of the night in prayer. For hours, he pored over the Bible by lamplight in the mess. Demented, his snorting breath kept coming in irregular gulps. Ever since his service in India, he had involved his men in impromptu Bible services. The Good Book, he told them, had all the answers.

  At precisely three in the morning, he came upon Luke 19:27: ‘But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.’

  His eyes rolled in his head. This was the word he had sought from the Lord. It expressed the righteous protest of the British Empire against all loathsome beasts who refused it their loyalty. Like his three prisoners.

  He dropped to his knees. ‘O Lord God Almighty,’ he said in a swift croaky voice, ‘Thou hast called me to slay Thine enemies. I thank Thee for choosing me as Thine instrument.’

  Long after dawn, passers-by or stragglers at street corners, in the democracy that rebellion brings, exchanged rumours with one another. Even reports of the war in France had dried up, though the thousands dying there had somehow cheapened life everywhere.

  Most swore at the Sinn Feiners, but a few said with a hint of pride, ‘They’ve lasted three days. It would’ve been awful if the English had quashed them in the first hour.’

  To the west, in North Brunswick Street, Ned Daly’s men were falling in before going out on patrol.

  The convent of St John’s bordered on the North Dublin Union. Almost alone among Dubliners, the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul, with their billowing habits and head-dresses built like French sailing boats, supported the rebels. They prayed them out and pleaded with God for their safe return. Father Albert, a saintly Capuchin, was also there to bless them.

  Daly’s men now knew the nuns by name. Sisters Brigid, Agnes, Patrick, Monica, Louise.

  One Volunteer, Sean Cody, said, ‘The Germans are on the Naas Road,’ and Sister Agnes called back, ‘You will put a grain of salt on that.’

  In bright early sunshine, two 18-pounders were taken from Trinity and manhandled to the mouth of Tara Street.

  The Helga, a small armed fisheries patrol boat, its one funnel belching out smoke, edged up the Liffey, to anchor opposite the Custom House next to a Guinness boat.

  Inside the Custom House, troops were grouped by the main doors. The order came, ‘Fix bayonets’, and they awaited the word that would send them charging across Beresford Place to Liberty Hall.

  On the Custom House roof and on the tower of the Fire Station next door, on the roofs of Trinity and of Burgh Quay Music Hall south of the river, machine-gunners peered down their sights.

  The Helga’s skipper sighted their big gun on Liberty Hall. On the stroke of 8, he gave the order: ‘Fire.’

  The first shell hit the awkwardly placed Loop Line railway bridge, a structure so ugly that it was the only bridge over the Liffey not called after a person of note. It caused a clang that could be heard halfway across Dublin.

  In the Custom House, the troops were told, ‘Get ready to move!’

  In the Pro-Cathedral, the noise interrupted the Introit of Father O’Flanagan who had just gone to the altar for Mass.

  In the GPO, the rebels looked at each other wonderingly. Connolly smacked his fist into his hand, delighted that the British Empire was treating them seriously at last. He had never dreamed that artillery would be used by a capitalist army against a capitalist city.

  ‘By God,’ he roared, ‘they’re beaten.’

  Willie Pearse said, ‘The Germans must be about to land. That’s why they’re desperate to finish us off.’

  The bridge and Guinness’s boat obscured the Helga’s view of Liberty Hall. As her gunners raised their sights, an 18-pounder opened up from south of the river.

  ‘Fire.’

  This time the shell from the Helga, lobbed over the bridge, scored a direct hit on the Hall’s roof.

  ‘Fire.’

  Another caused the main door to shoot outwards in a belch of dust and smoke. Through it a lone figure emerged, shading his eyes at first, and running like crazy on a zigzag course across Beresford Place. Machine-guns opened up on him from three angles. The paving sparked as bullets smacked into it, throwing up slivers of concrete. And still the runner kept his feet until he reached a doorway and safety.

  Peter Ennis, the caretaker, had made it.

  The machine-gunners gritted their teeth in annoyance. They took aim again. Next time, they wouldn’t miss.

  For a whole hour, the bombardment went on. The sides of the Hall were pitted and scarred, the roof blown away, the whole interior collapsed.

  Fr O’Flanagan’s Mass was over half an hour before the pounding ended.

  The troops in the Custom House were at ease. They had long grasped that the man who, by some miracle, had eluded their batteries was the only one in the Hall.

  Because of Trinity’s strategic value and the numbers of troops billeted there, General Lowe chose it as military HQ in central Dublin. That morning, he was doubly confident. Reinforcements had come by steamer into Kingstown Harbour. They would strengthen his forces in the Royal Hospital and in Trinity.

  He went on tightening the cordon around the rebel HQ from the Royal Canal in the north to the Liffey which was just south of the GPO. Already, his marksmen on rooftops were raking rebel positions in the vicinity of the Post Office.

  Lowe was cautious. He felt he had to be. The British had no experience of house-to-house fighting since the Indian Mutiny. The scrap ahead would be quite different from trench-warfare. He thanked God that the rebels lacked artillery. They did not appear to have even a machine-gun. The troops from England would complete his massive superiority.

  He checked his watch. If all went well, they sho
uld arrive in Trinity in about four hours.

  At nine thirty, Connolly sent a typed message to Lieutenant Malone, Adjutant of the 3rd Battalion, who was posted on the direct route from Kingstown to Dublin. At least 2,000 troops had landed and were marching along the Blackrock Road.

  De Valera had detailed only thirteen men to stop them passing over Mount Street Bridge into the city. They had had plenty of time to dig in and plan their campaign. Their only other advantages were surprise and knowledge of the terrain.

  On the city side, with a perfect view of the bridge that spanned the canal, seven rebels had taken over Clanwilliam House. George Reynolds had under him Patrick Doyle, Richard Murphy, the brothers Tom and Jim Walsh, James Doyle and Willie Ronan.

  North-east of the bridge, a hundred yards nearer the approaching army, were four men in the Parochial Hall, behind which de Valera’s main force was stationed. Paddy Doyle was in charge of Joseph Clarke, Bill Christian and Pat McGrath.

  Almost opposite the Parochial Hall, in 25 Northumberland Road, a big three-storeyed private house on the corner of Haddington Road, were two solitary snipers, Michael Malone and James Grace. Malone was worried that the two of them only had single-shot rifles. He buttoned up his smart overcoat and, carrying his umbrella, went in search of his battalion commander.

  De Valera was in the dispensary next to the Bakery. When Malone explained his problem, he unbuckled his treasured Mauser pistol and handed it over with 400 rounds.

  ‘Sorry I cannot do more for you.’

  The slight, fair-haired Captain Mahoney, RAMC, captured the day before, visited the GPO infirmary. Two patients were in a bad way. One had been shot in the back. The other had been shot in the eye, the bullet travelling freakishly along his cheek and chest and lodging in his leg.

  Mahoney said, ‘These men must be hospitalized at once.’

  ‘Impossible,’ Fitzgerald said.

  ‘But those wounds are bound to become infected.’

  Fitzgerald, knowing his own men lacked medical skills, was relieved that the Captain’s professionalism was aroused. He closed the door on him and left him to it.