Heart of War

by John Masters

  The Volunteer there was holding a handkerchief to his nose. He gestured outside with his free hand – ‘The Lancers’ horses, Lady. They dragged the soldiers away, but they couldn’t move the horses.’

  Margaret looked at the dead horses with distaste. She remembered her pang of sorrow for them when they had been shot, at the Volunteers’ second volley. Now they were visibly swollen, their legs sticking straight out from bloated bellies. The soft breeze blew the stench into every corner of the Post Office building.

  Margaret could not decide whether the fouling of the atmosphere was the main or only a supporting cause, but she soon saw that today the morale of the men and women in the Post Office was beginning to crack.

  The O’Rahilly came up and spoke a few words to Plunkett, then returned to Margaret. ‘The lads are getting down in the dumps, Lady. Let’s sing them a song!’ He raised his voice – ‘Come on, boys! Sing with us, the Lady and me … all join in! Let Lord Wimborne hear us in the Castle! Let the soldiers hear us in Kingstown, yet!’

  He began in his lusty baritone, bellowing out a song that he himself had written:

  Though knaves may scheme and slaves may crawl

  To win the master’s smile;

  And though thy best and bravest fall,

  Undone by Saxon guile;

  Yet some there be, still true to thee.

  Who never shall forget

  That though in chains and slavery

  Thou art not conquered yet!

  A few men joined in the singing, but not many, and those not with much enthusiasm, Margaret thought.

  When the-O’Rahilly had finished that one she muttered to him, ‘Sing one they know better … Rory of the Gael … The Wearing of the Green.’

  ‘That’s it!’ the O’Rahilly exclaimed and raised his voice again:

  O Paddy dear, and did you hear the news

  that’s going ’round?

  The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground;

  I met with Napper Tandy and he tuk me by the hand,

  And he said, ‘How’s poor ould Ireland,

  and how does she stand?’

  She’s the most distressful country

  that ever you have seen;

  They’re hanging men and women there for wearing of the green!

  The volume of the singing had hardly changed; but those who did sing sang with more enthusiasm. The Wearing of the Green was well known, and very popular; but Margaret thought that the concluding words were unfortunate in the present circumstances.

  They’re hanging men and women there for wearing of the green.

  Many of these young men seemed to be realizing for the first time that hanging by the neck until they were dead was indeed now a likely fate for them.

  A roaring conflagration occupied the whole block of Lower Abbey Street, and was threatening to cross Sackville Place. British soldiers were running up Sackville Street, shouting at the houses opposite the Post Office, ‘Come out, come out!’ trying to get people out, for the houses were doomed. No one on either side fired until the sad little stream of men, women and children, loaded down with a few belongings, had trickled out and away, and the soldiers had disappeared behind their barricades; then the artillery opened fire again, and again the Volunteers fired at anything that moved.

  The Republic flags on the roof of the Post Office were being scorched brown by the heat from across Sackville Street – which was a hundred and fifty feet wide. Inside, smoke filled the building, men coughed and choked and covered their faces with their handkerchiefs.

  At three o’clock Patrick Pearse, President of the Republic of Ireland, appeared on the main floor of the Post Office to read another statement:

  The forces of the Irish Republic which was proclaimed in Dublin on Easter Monday have been in possession of the central part of the capital since 12 noon on that day … I desire now, lest I may not have an opportunity later, to pay homage to the gallantry of the soldiers of Irish freedom … They have redeemed Dublin from many shames … They have established Ireland’s right to be called a Republic, and they have established this government’s right to sit at the peace table at the end of the European war.

  Margaret listened. Pearse always spoke well. Clearly, he had been trying to raise morale. A little, he had succeeded; but there was only one real way to do that – attack. No words, however noble, could obscure the fact that they were waiting like rats, to be taken, and executed.

  Pearse stalked away. James Connolly shouted, ‘I want thirty men who are not afraid to go out on the street. I’m going to take the Irish Independent building.’

  Men shuffled forward, leaving the windows or the places where they had been sitting in dejection on the stone floor. Margaret joined them. Connolly said, ‘McLoughlin, you command the troops, I will be with you. You can’t come, Lady.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ Margaret said shortly.

  Connolly hesitated; then shrugged and called, ‘Follow me!’

  Margaret, in the middle of the thirty men, her revolver now drawn and in her right hand, followed through the back door, across the courtyard behind, to the gate into Prince’s Street. McLoughlin swung the gate open and they all ran out, bent low.

  Connolly stopped, shouting, ‘First, we’ll build a barricade, here, in Prince’s Street!’

  Men ran back across the courtyard into the Post Office, returning laden with all kinds of machinery, junk, tables, wardrobes, filing cabinets. Connolly walked up and down, shouting encouragement. Margaret worked with the men, her revolver back in its holster to free her hands.

  Connolly stopped in the middle of a sentence and Margaret looked round. He muttered to her, ‘I’m hit – scratched – in the arm … not a word.’ He walked through the gate and disappeared into the building.

  Twenty minutes later he was back, and muttered briefly to Margaret, ‘Got Jim Ryan to bandage it, in secret … Now, lads, the barricade’s done. Follow me. We’ll get the Independent now.’

  They ran round the corner into Middle Abbey. Bullets smacked and whined all round, but no machine guns were firing, only British snipers from the Liffey and farther west on Abbey Street. ‘McLoughlin,’ Connolly shouted, ‘you take twenty to the Independent, there! Charge now … The rest of you, follow me.’ He ran toward the Lucas lamp and bicycle shop opposite the newspaper building, Margaret close on his heels.

  The bicycle shop was empty, but bullets were hitting the brick walls and smashing through the door. A man ran over from McLoughlin’s group and reported breathlessly, ‘We have the Independent building, general!’

  ‘Good, good!’ Connolly seemed transformed and Margaret, following him out of the Lucas shop, said, ‘We ought to have done this before, general.’

  They were standing on the kerb, she close to him, crouched, gesticulating energetically. Connolly said, ‘Lady …’ then suddenly gasped, and fell.

  ‘What …?’ Margaret began, stooping over him, when she felt a tremendous blow in the left shoulder, as though she had been hit full force with a sledge hammer. She pitched forward on her face onto the pavement a yard beyond Connolly. She felt numb on the left side. It must have been a bullet … there was blood on her chest now, not flowing hard, but beginning to soak her blouse. But Connolly … he was on his knees beside her, his left ankle a mass of bone splinters, and pouring blood. He whispered, ‘Prince’s Street …’

  He began to crawl along the pavement, a foot at a time, dragging the wounded leg behind him. Bullets smacked and clacked all round. None of the Volunteers in the recently captured building seemed to have noticed. Margaret struggled to her feet, pushing against the wall with her one good arm until she was upright. She swayed, gritting her teeth. If she were to move, it must be now. She followed Connolly, clinging to the wall, until they reached the end of the alley, then turned into Prince’s Street. Here Connolly collapsed into the gutter. Margaret slid inch by inch down the wall, until she was sitting at the foot of it, her head hanging. Gradually, darkness approached. Ju
st before it engulfed her she heard men’s voices. ‘Lift them up … the general under the arms – have to get a blanket for The Lady … Run, man!’

  She awoke to pain, but with full consciousness, lying on a cot in the ‘hospital.’ Connolly was stretched out on a table nearby, being worked on by Mahoney, the rebels’ captured doctor.

  Mahoney said, ‘Get me morphine, somebody. Wherever you can. There’ll be some in the chemists’.’

  Connolly groaned in continuous pain, and his face was wet with sweat. Mahoney came over to her and said, ‘You’ve been bandaged, Lady –’ that was the only name he had for her. ‘It’s a clean bullet wound through the scapula from behind, and out above the left clavicle. You must have been bending forward. All I had to do was irrigate it, take out some bits of cloth. I’m going to put it in a sling now … It’ll hurt for some time, I’m afraid, but it should heal cleanly. I’ll give you some morphine in a minute or two.’

  She closed her eyes, and clenched her teeth against the pounding ache in her shoulder.

  It seemed a moment later, but was actually over an hour, when she heard a voice calling – ‘Lady! Lady!’ She opened her eyes carefully. Patrick Pearse was by her cot. He said, ‘Can you hear me? Good … I’m sending you out of the Post Office tonight, with two girls from the Cumann na mBan. You’ll have to walk a quarter of a mile, to a house where you’ll be safe, until you can be got out of Dublin.’

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ she said.

  He lowered his voice – ‘We’ll be going tomorrow or the next day. Besides, I want you to live – you and the Madame – to show the men how Irish women can fight. And to guide the leaders when they make plans for the next rising. Who’s Laurence?’

  ‘My son. Why?’

  ‘You kept muttering his name, when you were coming out from the morphine. You must miss him.’

  She said nothing. She thought she had suffocated everything in her that could interfere with her dedication to Ireland; but in what they were calling the subconscious nowadays, she obviously had not succeeded.

  Mahoney said, ‘That’s enough, general. If you want her to be able to walk even a hundred yards at midnight, she must sleep now.’

  Margaret sank back, almost but not quite below consciousness, aware still of the stench of the rotting horses, the sounds of artillery shells, the smoke, the lurid light from the fire across Sackville Street … she had had a message from her father … it had hurt to receive it, to answer … took her mind, her thoughts away from Ireland … to Stella … Laurence … he would be home for the holidays now … his favourite holidays, for it was the time he could find birds’ nests in every tree and hedgerow, and he’d count the eggs, and watch the nestlings grow, with as much love as though they had been his own children … almost his last holidays, these would be, before he left school and joined the Army, that army, out there, coming closer through the streets of Dublin.

  The house was a big one, outside Drumshambo, in Leitrim, on the bank of the Shannon a mile below Lough Allen. The owners were Anglo-Irish landed gentry, like Constance Gore-Booth, Countess Markiewicz; and, like her, passionate members of the Irish independence movement, but secretly.

  It was May 15, and Margaret was sitting in an armchair by the bed in a second-floor guest room. She was wearing no disguise, and anyone who knew her, or had a good picture of her, would have recognized her; but her hosts were above suspicion, and no one came, except, this day, Colleen Fitzgerald, one of the girls who had helped her escape from the Post Office. The girl was sitting in a chair opposite, her hands twining and wringing, tears in her eyes.

  ‘They’ve done it,’ she said, ‘Pearse and his brother Willie, Connolly, Plunkett … he was married to Grace Gifford, four hours before, in his cell … Tom Clarke, MacDonagh, Edward Daly, O’Hanrahan, John MacBride, Eamonn Ceannt, Michael Mallin, Heuston, Colbert, Caffin, Mac-Dermott … all shot. Connolly in a chair, because he couldn’t stand … Not all together. Spread out over days.’

  ‘Not de Valera?’ Margaret asked quickly.

  ‘No. He told them he was an American citizen … and they don’t want to upset the Americans, do they?’

  Margaret’s arm and shoulder hurt, though not as badly as they had the first week; but she had been barely conscious for much of that time. A doctor with republican sympathies had been brought to see her the second day and told her there was nothing to do but wait; she was healing well by first intention, but it would take time. He would come again in a month to make sure the healing process had continued as it should.

  She said, ‘It’s what was to be expected … even to the British doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. These executions will turn the people to us … Things would have been different if Sir. Roger Casement had not been caught … if we’d had men to unload the Aud when it arrived in Tralee, as we were supposed to … if MacNeill hadn’t cancelled the Sunday rising … if they’d done what I wanted them to do – attack everywhere, in small groups, instead of barricading themselves into buildings, in large groups.’

  ‘They’re saying there were only two thousand British soldiers in Dublin over Easter.’

  ‘It’s probably true … The executions are sad, but what we three saw, you and I and Bridget, in that house, was worse.’

  The girl said nothing, hanging her head. The house they had taken Margaret to, after working through the British cordon, stood on the route by which the prisoners had been taken to gaol after the formal surrender of Saturday morning, the 29th of April. Half hidden by curtains, from a little room on the upper floor of the brick house, one in a poor row, they had watched the Volunteers being marched down the street, Plunkett dragging one foot after the other, while the crowd gathered ever thicker, and the filth flew ever faster – tomatoes, eggs, potatoes, dirty water, mud from the gutter, spit spewed in their faces – the air full of furious screams, ‘Filthy, murthering shiteheads! Scum, now ye’ll get what ye deserve! … Ye’ll all be hanged! … hanged! … hanged!’ Only the escort of British soliders prevented the Volunteers from being lynched.

  The girls beside her, without her sad experience of age, had broken down completely, wailing and crying uncontrollable tears, turning away, covering their ears with their hands. But Margaret, in grim agony, had watched and listened until the last of the procession had passed.

  Now, looking out over the gleaming Shannon, she said quietly, ‘So in the end, only one of all those men in the Post Office was killed in action – the O’Rahilly – and he not there, but outside trying to fight up the street.’

  The girl said, ‘But Lady, would you be wanting more of the poor boys dead?’

  Margaret said with force, ‘Next time, it won’t be an affair of a week, with flags flying, but of two, three years, with secret signs, private signals, hidden weapons, burning cottages, men found dead at cross roads and no one knowing how … War, not defiance.’

  The Daily Telegraph, Wednesday, May 10, 1916

  FINAL SCENES AT THE FALL OF KUT

  From Edmund Candler. Mesopotamia, May 3. The last communications from General Townshend were received on the morning of April 20, at 11.40 a.m. He sent them by wireless:

  I

  Have destroyed my guns, and most of my munitions are being destroyed, and officers have gone to Khalil, who is at Madug, to say am ready to surrender. I must have some food here, and can not hold on any longer …

  II

  I have hoisted the white flag over Kut fort and town, and the guards will be taken over by a Turkish regiment which is approaching. I shall shortly destroy wireless. The troops go at two p.m. to camp near Shamran.

  A prearranged signal from the wireless indicated at one p.m. that General Townshend’s last message had gone through. On the same day the Turkish General, Khalil Bey Pasha, received our parlementaires. He was anxious, he said, that the garrisons should be well rationed, and that General Townshend, especially, for whom he expressed the most profound admiration, should receive every possible comfort after the privations he had
so gallantly endured. He welcomed the proposal to send them stores, and regretted that the supplies at his command were not more plentiful.

  Cate read on gloomily. A British force had suffered a stunning setback in a part of the world where ‘face’ was so important – and at the hands of the Turks, whom everyone had so heartily sneered at, when they came into the war on Germany’s side. There would be repercussions in Egypt, Afghanistan, Persia perhaps – even in India, where a large Muslim population had been unhappy from the start that the Commander of the Faithful, the Turkish Khalifa, was on the other side. Such Muslim leaders as the Grand Sherif of Mecca and the Aga Khan had done their best to support the Allies by belittling the position of the Khalifa as the spiritual leader of all Muslims, in modern times; but the danger was always there.

  This disaster in Mesopotamia, coming on top of the failure at the Dardanelles – also at the hands of the despised Turks – made one appreciate more fully that the war was not confined to France and Russia. The main battlegrounds were indeed along the Russo-German border, where Poland used to exist, and the Franco-German border; and it seemed obvious that that must be so. Such huge forces were engaged there, such furious conflicts being fought there – look at the struggle for Verdun, which was bidding fair to become the most important battle of the war so far! Yet, was it really so, that the war had to be won on these two borders? Was it inevitable? Did some law of nature demand that the combatants must grapple there, two crazed elephants facing each other in a narrow pit? Was there no way round? What did sea power mean, in the end – beyond the ability to import food and munitions for survival – if it did not give the Allies the power to choose their point of attack … and vary it, at will?

  He put down the paper, longing unreasonably for movement … the war would seem different if one could read of, and imagine, brigades of cavalry sweeping across great plains … dusty columns of infantry marching day and night to strike the enemy in flank … horsed artillery galloping down long green valleys. It had been like that, for a few weeks in 1914, and he, like everyone else, had felt the excitement of war … the maps, the flags, the pictures of the guns rolling through shattered villages. Not now. Now, only the casualty lists.