by Jan Morris
By the evening of April 28 much of central Dublin was in ruins, and the toppling walls of offices and stores, the barbed wire and the empty streets, the piles of rubble everywhere, the looted shops, the patrolling soldiers, made it look like a city enduring some much greater war. When, on April 29, Pearse and his dazed survivors emerged from the scarred Post Office to surrender, they were greeted with contempt by the British, with hostility by their fellow-countrymen. Stones and vegetables were thrown at them as they were marched away, angry Dubliners jostled them with obscenities. They were called traitors to their own country and even to their own cause.
But over the next fortnight fourteen leaders of the rising, among them Pearse, Connolly, Plunkett and MacDermott, blindfolded against a courtyard wall in Kilmainham Prison, were shot in ones and twos by the British Army. It was done in the utmost secrecy, the city being under martial law, after macabre rituals of justice. The patriots were court-martialled within the prison, and only in later years did the details of the proceedings become known. The dying Plunkett was given permission to marry before his execution: the ceremony took place at midnight, in the prison chapel, and the condemned man and his bride had about fifteen minutes together before his execution at dawn. James Connolly, who had been severely wounded in the fighting, was court-martialled in his bed and taken to his death in a chair. The men were shot in the tall narrow execution yard of the prison, only a few yards from Inchicore Road outside, in the one corner of the prison that was not overlooked by the cells of other prisoners. The men were shot, their bodies removed, the blood cleared up from the yard, before Dublin realized what was happening: they were dead before their families knew of their court-martials.
Thousands of other patriots were arrested, and 2,500 were sent to prison camps in England and Wales. The retribution of the English was swift and terrible, and when the Irish realized what was happening the Easter Rising acquired a new meaning. Trust in the British was shattered once more, and the very citizens who had thrown rotten tomatoes at the patriots a few weeks before now mourned their memory in horrified remorse. It was, wrote the Countess of Fingal, one of the great Irish chatelaines, ‘as though they watched a stream of blood coming from under a closed door’. The promise of Home Rule, which might have been a reconciliation, now became a mockery, and many a loyal Dubliner wondered for the first time if the English had really intended it at all.
‘We seem to have lost’, Pearse had told his court-martial. ‘We have not lost…. You cannot conquer Ireland, you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it with a better deed.’ This was a true prophecy. Tactically the Easter Rising was a pitiable failure, but it changed everything in the end, and if the blood shed at the Post Office and in Kilmainham Gaol led to more blood in later years, to more sacrifices, more tragic ironies, still Yeats was right to see in the story a terrible beauty too.1
10
During the fighting in Dublin a small English girl, Pamela Nathan, was staying for the Easter holidays in a house in Phoenix Park. From there the sound of the gunfire from the city was easily heard. The child was urged to regard the rising as an excitement, something like a Zeppelin raid for instance, but she was not persuaded. ‘This is much worse,’ she sobbed. ‘This is in the Empire.’
It was the fact of Empire, the imperial illusion, which had, through all these events, dictated the British attitude to Ireland. ‘I think it very unwise’, Queen Victoria had said, ‘to give up what we hold’, and it was an ancient conviction of the English that Ireland must be theirs. The instinct of imperialism had inspired the Ulster Unionists; to the British soldiers who put down the Easter Rising, it was hardly more than a species of colonial riot—‘All quiet but the ’ill-tribes’ replied a sentry in the city, when a passer-by asked him how things were going. The man who ordered the Kilmainham executions was General Sir John Maxwell, one of Kitchener’s promising young men at Khartoum all those years before—‘Conkey’ Maxwell, who had once put down a mutiny of Sudanese askaris, and had spent twelve years in Egypt, where he was known for his posture of ‘patriarchal militarism’.
Yet perhaps even the soldiers felt some presentiment. It rankled with the English, and disturbed them, that the most persistent threat to their omnipotence should come from this sister isle, whose people were not even black, brown or yellow, nor even exactly pagan. That they should have chosen to rebel at the very moment of England’s greatest peril made their attitudes more disquieting still, for it demonstrated even to the most unimaginative English mind that the deepest Irish loyalties were altogether alien to their own. ‘Nobody in Ireland,’ said Lord Wimborne the Viceroy, ‘North or South, is, or has ever been, loyal to England in the true sense of the word.’ Irish patriotism might be nonsense, was certainly treasonable, but was evidently true. Could it also be just? It was George Bernard Shaw who described the rising as ‘a fight for independence against the British Government, which was a fair fight in everything except the enormous odds my people had to face’.
The Easter Rebellion was soon overshadowed by the vaster events of the Great War—a few weeks later the Battle of the Somme began, and 20,000 British soldiers died on its first day. Ireland relapsed into a sullen resentment. Birrell resigned, broken by ‘the horrible thing’;1 nobody believed any longer in a peaceful transition to Home Rule when the war was over. The events in Ireland were to play a seminal role in the slow retreat of the British Empire. The militancy of the Ulstermen was copied by white settlers in Kenya and Rhodesia, when they felt the imperial government to be neglecting their interests: the example of the southerners was watched with admiration by nationalists everywhere. Violence might not win freedom in itself, but its effect could be cumulative: not only Patrick Pearse, but a host of unknown comrades across the Empire believed in blood-sacrifice as an instrument of liberty. Here for instance is the Nyasaland rebel John Chilembwe, a contemporary far away, expressing his version of the argument in a last exhortation to his men:
This very night you are to go and strike the blow and then die….This is the only way to show the whiteman that the treatment they are treating our men and women was most bad and we have decided to strike a first and a last blow, and then all die by the heavy storm of the whiteman’s army. The whitemen will then think, after we are dead, that the treatment they are treating our people is almost bad, and they might change….
The whitemen did not as a rule consider the treatment they treated their subjects bad, but the Easter Rising gave them cause to think more deeply about it, and slowly over the years it dawned upon many of them, as they contemplated the deaths of many another Patrick Pearse, many a nameless Chilembwe—as they struggled first to subdue, then to understand, finally to make friends with subject patriots across the world—gradually it occurred to them that perhaps their opponents were right after all, and that the idea of Empire itself, the very conception of one race having the right to rule another, was unjust.
The concept of fair play was the truest ideology of the English, and it had been violated too often in Ireland. Herbert Asquith the Prime Minister soon realized that the British had gone too far, in their savage response to the Easter Rising. He sacked General Maxwell, and, hoping to undo some of the harm done, went over to Dublin himself. There he visited some of the prisoners of the Rising, held by the British Army in Richmond Barracks, and found them ‘Very good-looking fellows, with such lovely eyes…’.
11
The Ulster Volunteer Force, volunteering almost to a man when war broke out, went to France virtually in toto as the Ulster Division, wearing the Red Hand of Ulster as its shoulder badge, suffering fearful casualties and fighting with a stubborn gallantry to the end of the war. After the armistice, when British Governments turned their attention to Ireland once again, Ulster was rewarded for its loyalty, or its contumacy, was specifically excepted from Irish independence arrangements, and became a self-governing province of the United Kingdom.
So the Irish won in a way: but they lost too, for they never made friends with themselves, and Asgard never sailed in consort with Clydevalley.1 The old enmity of sect and loyalty was to simmer on, sometimes latent, sometimes murderous, until the British across the water no longer much cared what happened to Ireland, and the British Empire itself, the cause of all these sadnesses, was hardly more than a memory.
1 Three Irish chapters trace this melancholy story through the previous volumes of this trilogy.
2 And he should know. As a violent Irish nationalist he was indicted for treason in 1848, but the jury disagreeing, he emigrated to Australia, where he became Prime Minister of Victoria and a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George.
1 I use the term ‘Ulster’ in shorthand. Of the nine Ulster counties, four were overwhelmingly Protestant, two were about equally Catholic and Protestant, and three had Catholic majorities. Six of them now form the province of Northern Ireland.
1 Derived from a legendary boat race between an O’Neill and a McDonnell. The O’Neill was losing, so he cut off his own hand and threw it ahead of both boats to the winning post.
1 ‘It is not desirable’, he darkly added, ‘to be too explicit….’ In fact he probably had in mind a plan to block in the House of Lords the passing of the annual Army Act, which had since 1689 provided Parliamentary authority for the maintenance of the standing army. It never happened, if only because the Army presently made it clear that it would not fight in Ulster anyway.
1 Some of the Clydevalley’s rifles, stamped with the Red Hand, were still being used in Ulster in the 1970s, and Larne’s opinions have not changed. When I was there in 1974 somebody had just blown up the Catholic church. ‘Not again have they?’ said a man at the docks. ‘One of these days they’ll make a proper job of it.’
Carson remained at the head of the Ulster Unionist Party until Ulster separatism became a legal fact in 1921. He became Lord Carson of Duncairn, is buried in St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast, and stands uncompromising as ever in effigy outside the Northern Ireland parliament buildings at Stormont—unless, that is, be has lately been blown up.
1 ‘I feel odd’, White once wrote to his father, while serving in the British Army, and asked for his advice. ‘My dear boy’, the Field Marshal admirably replied, ‘I should be a little less odd, if I were you, and get on with your work.
1 ‘If not more so.’
1 Whose hero bequeathed his name, Carruthers, first to the imperial myth and later to the imperial self-mockery:
Old Etonian braces gleam through a match-seller’s rags. An Authentic? blazer shows for a moment in the noisome portals of an opium den. A beachcomber quotes Horace between hiccoughs.
‘Don’t look, my dear,’ says the hero, thrusting his new-won bride into a taxi, or a rickshaw or a dhow.
‘Why not,’ she asks (girl-like) as they get under way.
‘That was Carruthers,’ replies the hero, in a husky voice. ‘I didn’t want him to know we saw.’
—Variety, by Peter Fleming (1933).
1 Captain Nicholas Reid, harbour-master of Howth, most kindly introduced me to these scenes, and showed me the commemorative text from Virgil which was put on the harbour wall beneath the lighthouse: HOS SUCCESSUS ALIT: POSSUNT, QUIA POSSE VIDENTUR—To them success was good, and the appearance of power gave power indeed. It was Captain Reid’s Aunt Mary who saw her teacher among the volunteers: the teacher was Eamon de Valera, one day to be President of the Irish Republic.
1 Generally described as a gunboat, she was actually a 300-ton yacht of the Navy’s Auxiliary Patrol, armed with two 12-pounders.
1 The scenes of these tragedies may still be visited, though Sackville Street is now O’Connell Street and Nelson’s statue has been exploded from his pillar. The statue of O’Connell the Liberator, by the bridge, is still chipped from the shell-fire of 1916, and inside the reconstructed Post Office the dead are mourned by a figure of the legendary hero Cuchulain, who lashed himself to a post so that he might face his enemies even in death. Kilmainham Gaol is now a sad and shabby museum, where veterans of the republican movement direct tourists to the execution yard, or to the chapel where Plunkett and his bride were so pathetically united.
Casement was hanged in London, inevitably, but his body was returned to Ireland in 1964 and now lies at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, the Valhalla of modern Ireland. Childers’ end was perhaps sadder still. Returning from the Great War with a Distinguished Service Cross, he furiously opposed the creation of the Irish Free State, arguing for nothing less than full republican independence. When civil war broke out in 1922 he joined the republican insurgent army, was captured by Free State forces, and shot by a firing-squad of Irishmen in a former British barracks in Dublin. Such are the ironies of Ireland that his son Erskine Childers II, my kind mentor in Irish politics in 1960, later became President of the Republic.
1 Which ended his political career. He lived until 1933, and is perhaps best remembered for his agreeable collection of essays Obiter Dicta—for he was essentially, as everyone admitted, a very agreeable man.
1 Though both are still afloat as I write. The Asgard plays an honoured role as a training ship, and when I inspected her in 1974 was undergoing her annual overhaul by Portuguese shipwrights at Malahide, almost within sight of Howth Harbour. The Clydevalley has been less lucky. For thirty years she traded in Canada, between the Great Lakes and Nova Scotia, but in 1968, eighty-two years old, she was bought by a group of Ulster militants and sailed back to Larne to be a floating museum. Money ran out, and in 1974, by now the oldest registered steamship afloat in British waters, she was sold to a Lancashire scrap metal company and towed across the Irish Sea to Lancaster. There beside St George’s Quay I found her in 1975, her future uncertain, her hull rusted, her funnel and masts gone, her bulwarks scrawled with graffiti, while the Carlisle trains clanked over the bridge upstream, and the Sunday anglers fished stolidly among the mud flats of the Lune.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Anglo-Arabs
ELSEWHERE the Empire, like an old father of young sons, was finding a temporary new lease of life, for the conquered possessions of the Ottoman Empire offered fresh fields of enterprise. There was almost a new empire in itself out there, extending with territories old and new from the frontiers of Libya in the west to the hills of Kurdestan in the far north-east. Much of it was mandated territory, but in one form or another by the 1920s the British Empire among the Arabs comprised Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, much of the western shore of the Persian Gulf, most of the southern Arabian coast and the haggard port of Aden, considered by many imperialists the least desirable of all the imperial properties. It was a vast and vital region. A new class of imperialists, the Anglo-Arabs, came into being to administer it, and some people hoped it might one day mature into a new brown Dominion, standing loyal, grateful and useful in oil between India and the Mediterranean.
2
For centuries the British had dealt with the Arabs. The Levant Company had begun operations in Syria in 1581, twenty years before foundation of the East India Company, and for generations Britons had been familiar figures in most of the Arab countries. The British had governed Aden since 1839, had effectively ruled Egypt since 1882,
and had long been de facto suzerains of the Persian Gulf. In the Levant they maintained a special consular service, demi-imperial in character, and Cooks the travel agents so dominated the Middle Eastern travel market that even the Kaiser Wilhelm II availed himself of their services, when he took his white horse and eagle-helmet to the Holy Land. British merchants, explorers, surveyors, spies, had wandered everywhere in these countries: they ran the steamers on the Nile and on the Tigris, they controlled the Suez Canal and the Persian oilfield, and they had maintained their own Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem since 1841.
Inevitably, when war with Turkey seemed likely, they coveted this half-familiar territory for themselves. The implanting of British power there was one of the earliest and most consistent of their war aims—they might be past their expansionist prime, but every instinct told them that no other Power must dominate the land-mass between Europe and India. Anglo-Indians wanted to create an Arab province of British India, governed absolutely in the Indian manner; Anglo-Egyptians wanted to clinch their control of the Suez Canal; strategists and financiers eyed the Mosul oil deposits in Kurdistan; War Office planners dreamed of a Haifa to Basra railway line; men of God wanted to restore the Holy Land to Christian guardianship. Milner envisaged an enormous imperial protectorate to include the whole of Arabia and Persia—from India to the left bank of the Don, he argued, ‘is our interest and our preserve’. Fisher wanted a new canal cut from Alexandretta to the Persian Gulf, giving the Royal Navy an alternative route to India. Asquith was attracted by the idea of a new Viceroyalty of the Middle East, with its imperial capital at Baghdad. Kitchener wanted to be its first Viceroy.