by Jan Morris
The other conspirator was Erskine Childers, a popular Dublin writer and man-about-town. Like Casement, Childers had come to Irish nationalism by way of the English Establishment. A Protestant too, the son of an eminent Anglo-Irish oriental scholar, he was educated at Haileybury and Cambridge, and had started life as a clerk at the House of Commons at Westminster. He had fought in the Boer War, and had made himself famous with an imaginary account of a German plot to attack Britain, The Riddle of the Sands.1 It was as a militia soldier in 1904, during the first peacetime visit of British armed soldiers to the United States, that he had met and married Miss Mary Osgood of Boston, and he had written three books on military subjects, to one of which Lord Roberts himself, that potential Marshal of Ulster, had contributed an introduction.
But the Boer War had made a liberal of him; the passing years made him an Irish patriot; and gradually love of his country, a feel for its past and its tragic passions, a generous yearning for its liberty, turned him into a revolutionary. For him Home Rule would never be enough. By 1911 he was advocating full dominion status for Ireland, and when in 1914 the Clydevalley brought her guns into Larne, he volunteered to match the feat for the patriot forces of the south. So there enters our story a second fateful vessel, the 49-foot gaff ketch Asgard.
She had been given to the Childers as a wedding present. Built at Larvik in Norway, she was modelled upon Nansen’s Arctic exploration vessel the Fram, and was very strong, and exceptionally seaworthy. Childers loved her dearly. Though his wife was a cripple, the two of them sailed the Asgard on long oceanic voyages, frequently to the Baltic, and their seamanship was expert. In April 1914 they took her to Hamburg, where Irish emissaries had already bought a consignment of arms. With them went a crew of four men and the Honourable Mary Spring-Rice, another fervent Anglo-Irish patriot. The voyage home was complex. The boat had no engine and no radio, they had to evade frequent Royal Navy patrols, they ran into a terrible storm in the Irish Sea. Off Devonport Childers brazenly sailed his yacht, deep in the water with German guns, clean through the vessels of the British Home Fleet. But all went well, and on July 4, 1914, early in the morning, the Asgard sailed into Howth Harbour, five miles north of Dublin itself.
The setting was lovely, and ironically rich in imperial association. Howth harbour had been built as a packet-boat station for the English crossing, but had silted up at the bar, and was now used only by small craft. On the hill above it, though, was the fort-like terminus of the Irish Sea underwater cable, and all around were symptoms of the Ascendancy—a castle, pleasant villas, a lighthouse inscribed G III R AD 1818, a coastguard station at the end of the mole. Beyond the harbour lay the island called the Eye of Ireland, to the north there stood the high Hill of Howth, open country in those days, haunted by rabbits and seabirds. The day was fine, the tide was high, sea and shore, headland and promenade glinted with the peculiar brilliance of an Irish summer day, whose dazzle is tempered always by something opaque in the atmosphere—moisture perhaps, or sadness.
The yacht tacked with some difficulty into the harbour entrance, and tied up within the mole beneath the lighthouse. The coastguards took no notice, and within an hour a detachment of Irish volunteers, soberly dressed in hats, caps and suits, marched on to the quay to collect the guns. No Simla strategists directed this operation. No 12-cylinder Lanchesters back-fired their way to Howth. The volunteers had marched out that morning from the city, and along the way they had been joined by an eager rabble of sightseers and hangers-on. With more enthusiasm than organization they unloaded the crates of weapons and ammunition, some into handcarts, some into taxis. Everyone helped. There were excited schoolchildren from the village, and Fianna Boys, and fishermen from the boats across the harbour, and one small girl was astonished to see her own teacher, a gaunt and bespectacled scholar, working manfully there among the volunteers.
It has all gone into legend, and was to be described over and over again, with growing embellishments and disagreements, and a deepening sense of veneration, as the years passed. But it was only a small episode really. There were no more than 1,000 rifles, and within an hour they were all off. Childers and his crew sank back limp but satisfied in their cockpit, the volunteers set off for Dublin with their weapons, on their shoulders or in their carts. The coastguards, belatedly realizing what was happening, had fired a couple of distress rockets into the sky, but nobody had interfered with the unloading, and as the column marched back along the Dublin road a priest blessed it from the top of a passing tram.1
When the volunteers approached Clontarf, around the curve of Dublin Bay, they found a force of Scottish soldiers and policemen blocking their way. There was a fierce little engagement. Shots were fired, bayonets fixed, the police made a baton charge, and when the soldiers withdrew towards Dublin they were jeered and stoned by an angry crowd. In the confusion some of the Scots opened fire, killing three civilians and wounding thirty-two in what was to become notorious as the Bachelor’s Walk incident. When the victims were buried vast crowds of Dubliners attended the funeral in a gesture as much of anger as of mourning.
But the guns had got through anyway, only nineteen rifles being seized by the British at Clontarf, and were hidden away in clandestine armouries in the shabby labyrinth of Dublin. Now the Catholics of the south, like the Protestants of the north, could fight if the need arose.
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Few of them expected to use their guns to seize their independence. They were satisfied with the promise of Home Rule, and they needed weapons, they thought, only to prevent the Ulster Protestants from wrecking it. When war came, John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalist Party at Westminster, at once declared his party’s support for it. Half a million southern Irishmen fought with the British Army, in eighty Irish battalions, and Redmond’s own son was killed. Childers himself went off to the Royal Navy, and was decorated for his services. The Ulster volunteers had mostly joined the army too, so that the threat from the north seemed to be suspended, and though Home Rule was postponed again, this time for the duration of the war, most Irishmen accepted the delay as reasonable. Ireland grew prosperous in the war—unemployment was down, farm products got high prices, and the vast majority of Irish people, north and south, were loyal to the Crown. ‘The one bright spot in the very dreadful situation’, Sir Edward Grey told the Commons, ‘is Ireland. The position in Ireland…is not a consideration among the things we have to take into account now.’
But the fiercest of the patriots were not mollified. In August, 1914, the Supreme Council of the Republican Brotherhood, still so secret that most people in Ireland had never even heard of it, resolved that there must be an Irish insurrection before the end of the Great War. The Citizen Army was also plotting a rising, and its allied newspaper, the Worker’s Republic, bitterly opposed Irish participation in the war—
Full steam ahead John Redmond said
That everything was well chum;
Home Rule will come when we are dead
And buried out in Belgium.
Among these irreconcilable patriots one now emerged to prominence who believed in Irish independence in fantastical terms, and saw in the preoccupations of wartime England the perfect realization of his dreams. Patrick Pearse, an IRB man, was half Irish, half English, a poet and a kind of patriotic voluptuary. His instincts were ritual. His pudgy face, loose-lipped, round-jawed, had the melancholy intensity of a true zealot, and he really did believe that the cause of Irish liberty was more sacred than life or human love.
More than that, he believed that it depended, spiritually, upon the shedding of blood. Peaceful Home Rule would itself be a kind of of betrayal, or desertion. Those were years of blood, of course, the blood that was soaked into the soils of Flanders or Gallipoli, blood being shed for causes of varying merit and conviction in every corner of the world. ‘The old heart of the earth’, Pearse wrote of this terrible spectacle, ‘needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God…
.’ That blood must be shed in Ireland too became an idée fixe to him—‘from the graves of patriot men and women’, he wrote, ‘spring living nations.’ He was not speaking figuratively. He believed in the regenerative power of death: to die was to rise again refreshed. With these philosophies Pearse was the inspiring genius of an IRB cell within the Irish volunteer movement: so secret was this group, so muffled were its activities, that even the commanders of the volunteers, mostly Gaelic enthusiasts of innocuous intent, did not know of its existence.
By now Roger Casement was in Germany, where he was trying to enlist German support for an Irish revolution, and to recruit volunteers for an Irish Brigade among the prisoners of war taken in France. He did not have much success in his recruitment, most of the Irish prisoners being old sweats of the British Army, impervious to subversion, but by 1915 he had persuaded the Germans to back a full-scale Irish rebellion. He arranged that he himself should be taken by U-boat to the west coast of Ireland, and that a shipload of weapons would run the British blockade. The plan was coordinated, via America, with the leaders of the IRB in Dublin. The rising would take place at Easter, 1916, throughout Ireland, and it was hoped that the Germans would help by diversionary Zeppelin raids on London, by submarine attacks on shipping in Dublin Bay, and by providing German officers to stiffen the revolt. Dublin Castle would be seized, and an Irish Republic would be declared with Pearse as its first President.
It was a desperate, almost ludicrous plot—the Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George to be deposited by dinghy on the Galway coast, the half-mad poet-patriot calling to arms a people more content than it had been for generations, the deliberate shedding of blood in that placid corner of Europe, at a time when men were dying in their millions—Irishmen themselves in their thousands—in the most titanic of all battles. Nothing went right. Admiralty intelligence in London had been privy to the plot almost from the start. They knew the number of Casement’s U-boat, they knew about the arms shipment, they reported that the rising was planned for April 22, 1916—Easter Sunday. Trawlers, sloops, destroyers and a light cruiser were deployed to intercept the arms ship, the Norwegian trawler Aud: inevitably she was caught, and scuttled herself with all her arms off Queenstown, in Cork. Casement himself tried to cancel the rising, but he was too late, and coming ashore from the submarine U20 at Banna Strand, near Tralee, was picked up almost at once by the local constabulary, and shipped away to England, where he was held in the Tower of London and presently tried for treason.
The Germans provided no officers and no diversions, and the grandiose plan for a revolution throughout Ireland fizzled out. Only about a thousand patriots rose to arms in Dublin and raised the green flag of an Irish Republic—not over the Castle indeed, where the Viceroy remained impregnable, but at least over the General Post Office.
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The significance of the Easter Rising is debated to this day. The British in Ireland were unprepared for it, thanks to Birrell’s easy-going optimism, and for intricate reasons of security the Admiralty’s intelligence had not been passed on to Dublin. Many senior officers and officials had gone to the Bank Holiday races at Fairyhouse, twelve miles away. The Army commander had gone home to England for the weekend. Still, such a toy revolution had no hope of success. Casement’s mission had aborted, the British Army surrounded Dublin in overwhelming force, and the ordinary Dubliner regarded the whole enterprise as treasonable madness. If there was one sure way of preventing Home Rule, most people thought, it was by stabbing the British in the back at their moment of greatest peril.
Yet in a genuinely mystic way it succeeded, for its power lay in the idea of it—as W. B. Yeats wrote,
when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
After the Easter Rising nothing in Ireland was the same again, and perhaps nothing in the British Empire either. We shall never know whether Home Rule would in fact have come to Ireland after the war, if events had been allowed peaceably to unfold themselves—whether the Ulstermen would have fought a civil war to prevent it, whether the Irish themselves would long have been satisfied with limited sovereignty or Dominion status. The Easter Rising made these speculations worthless, and in the long run made it inevitable that Ireland would break from the British Empire altogether. It was the breath of death, thought the dramatist Sean O’Casey, that brought the seeds of new life. ‘God is not an Englishman,’ sang one of the Dublin balladeers, ‘and truth will tell in time.’
We will not trace the course of the Rising, so petty by the terrible standards of 1916—the seizure of key points across Dublin, the inexorable massing of British troops, the agony of Pearse and his men in their besieged headquarters, the GPO in Sackville Street. It lasted only five days, and ended inevitably in the suppression of the rebels. Let us instead stand upon Carlisle Bridge, at the bottom of Sackville Street, on the evening of April 27, 1916, two years to the week since the docking of the Clydevalley, and look at the scene around us. The central city is half in flames, and flickers and crackles horribly. Sackville Street, one of the most splendid streets in Europe, with O’Connell’s bulky statue at the southern end, Nelson’s column half-way up, and the green mass of the plane trees beyond—Sackville Street, that pride of the Dublin Wide Streets Commission, is absolutely deserted, a no-man’s-land. Rubble and litter from looted shops are scattered over it, and here and there in the half-light human bodies are sprawled. Two horse carcasses lie near the northern end of the street, and up there by the Rotunda we may dimly see the line of a barricade, with sandbags and barbed wire. Sometimes there is a spatter of rifle-fire down the street. It is like a bull-ring, part in brilliant light, part in shadow, and beyond its perimeters, beyond the sandbags, down the darkened side-streets, on rooftops all around, dim shapes of men are crouched or prowling.
To our right, down-river, lies the dark silhouette of a ship, the Royal Navy’s Helga, now and then erupting into gunfire.1 Behind our backs from Trinity College, from Liberty Hall the trade union headquarters, from Boland’s Flour Mills to the east, upstream from the Four Courts, come sporadic sounds of fighting, rifle-fire, bursts of machine-gun fire, the thump of artillery. The smell of war hangs over Dublin, compounded of dirt, death and explosive. The night sky glows with fires, and we may hear heavy lorries moving about somewhere, shouting from hidden alleys, an occasional scream, the sudden crash and rumble of masonry.
In the very heart of all this hideousness the Post Office stands scarred, scorched and blackened. Tattered above its classical portico there flies the green, white and yellow tricolour of Ireland, and perhaps we may just see, still tacked to its barricaded door, a torn and dirty scrap of paper. It is the Irish Declaration of Independence.
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Irishmen and Irishwomen: 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 … We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible … We hearby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and wepledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-at-arms to the cause of its freedom its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations
If there was something callow to this announcement, with its absurd claim to immediate authority, at least it had actually happened. This was the real thing, after all. From the Marconi Radio School across the street, rebel operators had already broadcast to the world the news that an Irish Republic had been declared, and everywhere lovers of Ireland were watching events in Dublin with wonder and despair. Pearse had achieved his blood sacrifice, and his fantasy had become fact.
For within the Post Office the leaders of the
Irish Revolution, the first true revolutionaries of the British Empire, were trapped and doomed. They had no chance. There was Pearse himself, radiant with the prospect of martyrdom. (‘Any hope?’ somebody once asked him. ‘None at all’, he cheerfully replied.) There was the Marxist Jim Connolly, who was fighting from dual convictions, nationalist and ideological. There was Tom Clarke, a wispy, bespectacled little figure, and there was Joseph Plunkett, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, foppish with his ringed fingers and the sabre always at his side, twenty-four years old but dying already of tuberculosis. There was Sean MacDermott twisted by polio, and Michael Collins, ‘The Big Fellow’, gigantic and relentless.
With them a small band of men and women fought back uncomplainingly as the cordon closed. It was blazing hot in the Post Office, the wounded lay all about, upstairs the women were always at work bandaging, typing orders or cooking food. Nobody could relax for an instant. Now and then foraging parties crept out, but almost from the start there had been a sense of entombment in the building, as the Helga’s guns boomed from the river, as the unseen masses of British troops waited and watched behind their barricades—and most eerily of all, perhaps, when one of the British Army’s improvised armoured cars, a steel boiler on a lorry chassis, rattled slowly down Sackville Street like a messenger from the grave.