The same day London was ‘awash’ with shamrock, and three million Irish flags were distributed in the metropolis by leading society figures and their helpers, such as Lady Sligo at the Berkeley Hotel and Lady Limerick on London Bridge. The aim was to remind British people of the Irish contribution to the war effort. In the same spirit Queen Alexandra visited the depot of the Irish Guards and presented the regiment’s reserve battalion with shamrock. She was accompanied by the King, Lord Kitchener and John Redmond. King George v paid lavish tribute to the ‘heroic endurance’ of his Irish troops. As the Irish Times would acknowledge next day, the royal visit was intended to make some amends for the ‘contemptuous oblivion in which the deeds of Irish troops in the western battlefields and on the Gallipoli heights were for a long time condemned to remain owing to the neglect or prejudice of officers in high command.’ These were strong words for the leading organ of unionism in Ireland. Ironically, it was one of the worst offenders, Lord Kitchener, as colonel of the Irish Guards, who responded to the King’s speech with a declaration that Irish soldiers would never forget their monarch’s kind words and remained ‘ready to respond to every call of duty.’
Newspapers reported that Redmond was allowed a few private words with the King and a handshake. That evening he attended a concert at King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers and told wounded Irish soldiers they could take consolation in the knowledge that they were fighting for ‘the protection of small and weak nations against the most wicked oppression that had ever been attempted in the world’s history.’ It all appears to have gone down well, not least with soldiers in France, who received consignments of shamrock and pieces of green ribbon from the champion of small nations and constitutional nationalism.52
By now there seemed to be a significant divergence between the mentality of ordinary soldiers at the front and events at home. This was understandable, given the small amounts of leave granted to enlisted men. The difficulty experienced in obtaining leave was a recurring theme of letters from members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in France to Monica Roberts, founder of the Band of Helpers to the Soldiers. She lived in Stillorgan, Co. Dublin, with her father, the Rev. William Ralph Westropp Roberts, a senior fellow of Trinity College. She devoted herself to providing comforts for the Fusiliers, including handkerchiefs, shirts, boracic ointment, Vaseline, chocolates, dried fruit, trench torches, gloves, watches, playing cards, pipes, tobacco and cigarettes.53
One of her pen friends was Sergeant John Brooks, a regular soldier who had been in France almost from the beginning of the war. He told her in December 1915 that it was hard for NCOs to get leave, ‘for they can‘t spare us.’ But private soldiers were no better off. Private Kirwin was more than eighteen months in France before he received home leave. Other soldiers were unfortunate enough to discover that their first visit ‘home’ was a trip to hospital in Britain to be treated for serious injuries, or trench fever. This still counted as ‘leave’, and they would have to join the back of the queue when they returned to the front.54
Monica Roberts’s own letters to the soldiers asking them what they needed were bright and caring but could become gushing on occasion, or ill-timed. ‘Everyone in Ireland is very proud of all our brave Dublin Fusiliers,’ she told Private J. May in a letter dated 10 July 1915.55 It was returned: May had been killed in action a few days before.
Soldiers rarely mentioned politics, but when they did they assumed nothing had changed since the outbreak of war. There was a touching naïveté to Sergeant Brooks’s comment as Christmas 1915 approached that ‘things at home must be very quiet as everyone has someone out fighting for King and Country.’56 Yet Brooks had little time for unionists, scoffing at the ignorance of things military shown by ‘Carson’s army’, as he described former members of the Ulster Volunteer Force.
We had to take a lot of them for to show them what work was to be done in the trenches … as they knew nothing about soldiering … We had to be with them night and day, which was very weary on us.57
The preoccupations in the trenches reflected the harshness of the conditions. Private Edward Mordaunt of B Company, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers was one of the first Irish soldiers in France. From Upper Rutland Street in the inner city, he had enlisted in February 1911 and landed in France on 25 September 1914. Recounting his experiences, he wrote:
The worst of it was the winter out here. We were both frozen and up to our chests in water. Dear Miss Roberts I think if I was made of iron I would not stick it out as well as I am doing.58
A month later he was thanking her for a parcel,
especially my favourite cigarettes Woodbines, and I need not tell you my Dear Friend that your socks are very useful, especially when I come out of the trenches … There is nothing like a change of clean socks for a reprieve with a cigarette.59
Another correspondent from the same battalion, Private Joseph Clarke, had different priorities.
The most essential part of a parcel sent to the trenches is the food stuff … Dainties … although very palatable are not what the fighting man really wants. The most suitable parcel is the one which contains good, solid food stuffs such as short-breads, tins of sardines, small bottle sauce, café au lait and home made cakes.60
While politics barely featured, support for Redmond’s policy at the front seemed firm in 1915 and the spring of 1916. Writing about an impending attack on German positions in late August 1915, Edward Mordaunt said: ‘For those we love I am not afraid to die tomorrow because I know it is in a good cause’. (Emphasis in original.)61 Nor did another Christmas in the trenches unduly upset him.
We are having a very hard time of it now … between rain, frost, snow and slush. It has us near dead … but still Are We Downhearted—NO.
Like all her correspondents, he told Monica Roberts that the platoon parcels helped raise morale. In January he took up her offer of a pair of leather gloves. ‘The gloves would be very useful when I go on patrol at night with a few bombs to share among the Huns.’62
Many soldiers were buoyed by the hope that the war would end soon. Private Harry Loughlin of the 1st Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, wrote from the Dardanelles: ‘We have gained a very worthy name for ourselves and the country we were sent from and showed the fighting quality of the Irish soldier.’ He concluded: ‘We soon shall finish up here with victorious honours.’63
On 8 April 1916, a fortnight before the Easter Rising, Private Thomas Finn wrote: ‘It is the weather for beating the Huns.’ But he added: ‘I wish myself it was over.’ Ten days before the rising Sergeant Heafey of the 8th Battalion wrote that his unit expected to be in action again soon and would
show what Irishmen are made of and keep up the credit of our Ould Country as we done in days gone by. One consolation we have, we can see by the news daily that the Hun is done for on all sides.64
There was no conflict between such belligerence and the politics of home rule, for the Irish Party had never opposed physical force on principle, only on pragmatic grounds. The party’s support for the British war effort was based on the notion that Irishmen could fight for their country and the right of all small nations to self-determination by defending Belgium. Queen Alexandra’s presentation of shamrock to the Irish Guards and William Field’s addresses in James’s Street and Dolphin’s Barn were manifestations of this convoluted endorsement. In contrast, the Irish Volunteers’ message was simplicity itself. A short pamphlet by Joseph Plunkett, distributed by Volunteers in College Green, tackled Redmond’s position head on: he argued that it made as much sense for an Irishman to join the British army to defend his country as for a Belgian to defend his country by joining the German army.65
Even on St Patrick’s Day casualty lists were published in the newspapers, to remind young Irish men of what awaited them if they joined up, and cinema newsreels carried even more graphic warnings.66 As Sir Henry Robinson, vice-president of the Local Government Board, remarked, the war films showing
big shells exploding in the m
idst of a lot of troops ‘going over the top,’ though interesting enough, were not the kind of thing calculated to encourage young men to leave their peaceful and comfortable homes.67
Indeed the news from the front and the casualty lists underlined the eminent sense of staying at home. By early 1916 Young Ireland went so far as to claim it was probably a good thing home rule had not been granted in 1914, as an Irish government headed by Redmond would probably have sent even more men to the front.68
But the Irish Volunteers’ St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin was more than a riposte to the Redmondite war policy: it celebrated the ascendancy of the IRB in the Volunteer organisation, particularly in Dublin. The organisation was now being directed by a secret Military Council within the IRB. Its members dominated the headquarters staff of the Volunteers and the Dublin command structure. The commanders of all four city battalions (Ned Daly, Thomas MacDonagh, Éamon de Valera and Éamonn Ceannt) were IRB men, as was the commander of the recently formed 5th (Fingal) Battalion, Thomas Ashe. The weak link in the chain was the need to spin a conspiratorial web around the Volunteers’ chief of staff, Eoin MacNeill, to make sure he had no knowledge of the planned insurrection.
MacNeill was of the view that a rising was justifiable or capable of winning popular support only if it was undertaken against the imposition of conscription. The conspirators’ hope was that, faced with a fait accompli, he would endorse the Military Council’s plan.69
Most IRB members, such as Richard Mulcahy, were unaware of what was being planned; yet their political conditioning, through their involvement in the Volunteers and various cultural organisations, was such that they would not be found wanting on the day. Mulcahy was typical of the emerging Volunteer officer class. The son of a civil servant in Waterford, he had gone from the Christian Brothers’ school to the Post Office. In 1908 he was transferred to Dublin and in 1916 became a member of the Engineering Department. He had earlier turned down a scholarship to the College of Science after the Post Office refused him three years’ leave of absence—no doubt a source of resentment. His interest in things national had led him to join the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League. Its president was Cathal Brugha; another member was Michael Collins, recently returned from England to avoid conscription.
Like Mulcahy, Collins was a member of the IRB, having been sworn in while a young emigrant in London. Mulcahy was sworn in as a member of the Teeling Circle at a regular Dublin venue for such meetings, the National Foresters’ Hall, 41 Rutland Square. He recalled later that the circle was almost moribund and usually met once a month for about twenty minutes, when members paid their dues and suggested potential new recruits.
There were no matters for discussion … The members had no routine duties, nor responsibilities of any kind, nor any drilling. On one occasion an elderly member of our circle came one night with a rifle under his topcoat and explained to us the parts.70
Mulcahy had no difficulty reconciling membership of the IRB with a belief in the efficacy of home rule. The only specific order he ever received from the IRB was to join the Volunteers. He quickly progressed through the ranks of C Company of the 2nd Battalion, which covered the north-east quadrant of the city between Sackville Street and Fairview. By the eve of the rising he was a first lieutenant, in charge of signalling and communications, owing to his Post Office expertise. He took part in the Howth gun-running in July 1914 and remained loyal to the Volunteer Executive when the split came with Redmond. Between his summer holidays in 1915, which he spent at the officers’ training camp in Athlone, and Easter 1916, Volunteer activities occupied most of his spare time.71
Liam Archer was another young professional with an interest in all things national. He was a civil servant and a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. He joined the Volunteers only after the Howth gun-running. His initial hesitation was due to the AOH advising members against joining the Volunteers, ‘because the new body was not under the control of the Irish Party.’ This changed after the Volunteer Executive accepted Redmond’s nominees, and Archer drilled at the AOH Hall in Claude Road, Glasnevin. It was a brief involvement, because the AOH advised members to support the National Volunteers after the split over Redmond’s pro-war speech at Woodenbridge. The majority of AOH members accepted this advice, but
a number, confused and disappointed, ceased membership. I was amongst the latter group and I severed my connection with the AOH at the same time.
By early 1915 he decided to rejoin the militants and soon became a section leader in F Company of the 1st Battalion. Like Mulcahy, he was an active member of the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League, but he was inducted into the IRB only shortly before the rising.72
Michael Staines was a shop assistant and treasurer of the Colmcille Branch of the Gaelic League. He had no time for politics or politicians, and he joined the Volunteers because it was ‘non-sectarian and non-political.’ Like Mulcahy, he belonged to the 2nd Battalion. He owed his rapid rise to quartermaster of the Dublin Brigade not alone to ability but to the fact that he worked in Thomas Henshaw and Company’s ironmongery and engineering works at Christ Church Place, which sold revolvers and shotguns. Through his employer he could buy weapons and ammunition from gunsmiths in the city, while his brother Humphrey, a seaman, smuggled revolvers on the transatlantic liner Baltic to Glasgow. The brothers were inducted into the IRB at least partly to facilitate smuggling Humphrey’s revolvers through the IRB’s network in Britain. Staines was one of the few Volunteer officers to be given early warning of the rising. He handed in his notice to Henshaw’s on 16 March to work full-time augmenting the Dublin arsenal.73
The man designated to command all rebel forces in the city came from a very different background to the apolitical lower middle-class activists who were coming to dominate the Volunteers. James Connolly was the son of Irish emigrants and grew up in the appalling poverty of Edinburgh’s Cowgate district. A lifelong socialist, he had no qualms about his involvement in preparing for armed insurrection and had always believed the struggle for socialism was intrinsically linked with that for national freedom, although he had been scathing in his critique of the ‘physical force party’ in the past and the Fenians’ exaltation of political violence into a principle.74
As we have seen, the outbreak of war and the dislodgement of old certainties that it brought led Connolly to rethink his position. He was determined not to let the conflict pass without seizing the opportunity to strike a blow for national and class freedom. One of the recurring themes of his main work, Labour in Irish History, is that ‘only the Irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland,’ the only class that had stood resolutely by the struggle for independence in every generation.
In January 1916 the IRB approached Connolly, for fear he would rise prematurely and destroy the prospects for a successful insurrection. He spent three days closeted with members of the Military Council in intensive discussions, by the end of which he had agreed to throw in his lot with the physical-force party he had once despised. The alliance allowed the IRB to keep control of events; in return it gave Connolly a leading role in the direction of the national revolution. The physical-force men and the revolutionary socialist appear to have earned each other’s respect.75
The accession of Connolly also gave the Military Council somewhere safe to meet for its final deliberations. After the abortive raid on Liberty Hall by the DMP in March, Connolly maintained a permanent Citizen Army guard on the building. While the council continued to meet from time to time in other places, such as Wynn’s Hotel in nearby Lower Abbey Street, it was in Liberty Hall that the final arrangements for the rising were made; it was to Liberty Hall that senior officers in Dublin reported during the hectic hours leading up to the rising; and in Liberty Hall, while military business was being conducted upstairs, the Proclamation of the Irish Republic was being printed in the basement.
On Easter Monday morning, 24 April, when a combined force of Volunteers and Citize
n Army men eventually formed up at Liberty Hall to march on the GPO, a bemused onlooker is alleged to have wandered in and asked Lieutenant Constance Markievicz76 if they were rehearsing for a play.
‘Yes,’ said Markievicz.
‘Is it for children?’
‘No,’ said Markievicz, ‘this is for grown-ups.’77
Chapter 5
‘A SCENE OF GREATER SPLENDOUR … NEVER BEFORE WITNESSED, NOT EVEN IN THE REALMS OF CINEMATOGRAPHY’
Much emphasis has been placed on the more theatrical aspects of the rising and its ‘blood sacrifice’ dimension, personified by the religious predilections of the revolution’s poets, Pearse, Plunkett and MacDonagh. But Eoin MacNeill accepted that the Military Council’s plan was feasible when it was finally disclosed to him on the eve of the insurrection. This move coincided with the only event that linked Dublin Corporation with the drama about to be played out on the city’s streets.
A British military memorandum had been given to the IRB’s Military Council by Eugene Smith, a policeman who worked in the G Division (intelligence branch) of the DMP. Smith can lay claim to being the first rebel ‘spy in the Castle,’ long before Michael Collins reorganised the Irish Volunteers’ intelligence system during the War of Independence.
The document was doctored so that it appeared to be a plan for the imminent arrest of senior members of the Irish Volunteers, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and, for good measure, Redmond’s National Volunteers.1 Attempts to place it in the national newspapers failed, because editors either doubted its authenticity or feared the repercussions from publishing it if it was genuine. Eventually a long-serving Sinn Féin stalwart, Alderman Tom Kelly, who was chairing a special meeting of the corporation that day to adopt the poor rate and the police rate, tried to read the document, now entitled Secret Orders to Military Officers, into the record.2
A City in Wartime Page 13