Rebel Ireland/Scenes from the Rebellion

Euston Station was crowded with soldiers, and one might have imagined it to be in the hands cf the military. Very few civilians were to be seen. Only single tickets were being issued to Holyhead, and boat tickets were not being sold at all.

In the train to Holyhead a dark young soldier with an Irish accent said he had enlisted to help the Belgians, and he did not want to fire on people who were fighting for their country. The stewardess on the boat was pale-faced and serious. Her eyes were red with crying for the rebellion. She feared it was really all over and a failure. "It will be like the Germans in Belgium," she said; "and they’re beginning already."

While I waited at the Town Hall, Kingstown, for my pass to Dublin, a woman, who had been detained there for more than a week, told me she had seen nothing of the fighting. All the time that she and her family had heard firing they had been so much occupied in trying to get food and a place to sleep in, and had succeeded so badly, that she connected a revolution with hunger and personal discomfort and nothing more. A man who owned a motor car, offered to try to drive her into Dublin for £10, or if she could get others to share, for £2 10s. each, but she could not afford t. She was English, and thought the Irish people were inconsiderate, as usual, to start their revolution when other folk were beginning their holiday. A red-cross nurse had come over to seek for friends, from whom nothing had been heard for a fortnight. These and the others I met there were solely occupied with their own grievances. I was glad to be rid of them.

The Dublin train was crowded with soldiers, all talking of the trouble, with a complete absence of bitterness. Many hoped they would not be ordered to fire on the rebels.

Westland Row Station, in Dublin, was guarded by police, and on coming out one saw at once the shops all smashed and broken.

​The barricades were still across the streets and soldiers guarding them. Men required a pass to go anywhere at all. Women needed them to go out of the city. In O’Connell Street and along Eden Quay the dust was still thick upon the ground, the air was heavy with burning, and dense clouds of smoke obscured the ruins. Even when the rain came, and after three days of it, they were still smouldering. Strangers talked quite openly to each other in the streets at first, as they viewed the damage. "Could the Germans do worse to us?" one said, and another: "They tell us to pity the Belgians; it’s ourselves need pity, I’m thinking." The affair at the Post Office aroused great horror: "To turn machine guns on them and they running away!" "The English papers talk of Louvain; what'll they say of Dublin?" But after the first few days people became more cautious; everyone suspected his neighbour of being a spy or informer. Soldiers and police stood all along the pavements preventing people from going into the ruins or down the side streets. The soldiers looked like dwarfs compared with the police. Bodies were being brought out. It was more like a nightmare than reality. Women walked along, tears streaming down their cheeks. One woman spoke to me. She was elderly, dressed in black, her eyes swollen from weeping, and she stumbled against me. Her only son was a Sinn Feiner: he had been killed in the fighting. She was not grieving for the houses which had been destroyed, but for the brave young lives which seemed to have been thrown away. She did not grudge her boy to Ireland, if only she could feel that the sacrifice had not been wasted. As much ammunition was being used for one sniper as would wipe out a German regiment, she said, adding bitterly: "But then the English don’t hate the Germans the way they hate us."

In the midst of the desolation the statues of Parnell and O’Connell, and the hideous Nelson pillar, remain uninjured.

Along Eden Quay the damage is not evenly distributed. The paper shop next to Liberty Hall is untouched. The windows of Liberty Hall are smashed, and on the side facing the Liffey a small portion of the wall is broken. ​Soldiers could be seen inside. It is said that its position near the railway and the Custom House saved it from being entirely destroyed.

I went one morning to get my pass at Trinity College, where a pale, nervous-looking young man talked to me and urged me to do my best to get a pass at once, for I might be prevented from leaving at all. Two soldiers took me into a room on the left-hand side of the quadrangle. I was told to go upstairs, and stood for a moment on the landing with two prisoners, one a boy of 17, very thin, poorly dressed, but holding his head erect and looking far away. The other was a mild-mannered man with clumsy clothes and restless hands. We smiled at each other, then the door was opened and I was motioned forward. I stood in the doorway, a soldier on each side of me. An elderly officer, short-necked, red-faced, with bulging blue eyes and carrotty hair, sat at a table. A younger officer, tall and slim, stood by the fire at the other end. He looked angry.

"Pass or prisoner?" shouted the officer at the table.

The soldier on my left stammered with nervousness. "P-p-pass, sir," he said.

Then my cross-examination began. When did I come over? Why did I come? Why did I travel alone? Who were my people? How long had I been in England? Who were my relations in Ireland?

I answered them all.

"Was I connected with the Sinn Fein or any other political organisation?"

Before I answered the officer by the fire took a step forward. "I object to this bullying," he said; "the question is unnecessary."

He spoke in a low tone, the officer at the table heard, turned and glared at him; but the question was not repeated.

The bull-like gentleman at the table looked for a form, found it, and a pen which he appeared to have some diffculty in using. He filled in my name, Dublin address, London address, and signed and stamped it.

"Countersigned at the Castle," he bellowed at me.

"I'll send someone with you," said the other.

​As we went out I heard him say that he would see the prisoners on the landing after lunch—his lunch, I suppose.

I was marched round different departments of Dublin Castle with my pass. The soldiers were very civil, the police haughty. One official told me they were having a terrible time at the Castle, and God only knew when it would be better. After four hours I came out again into Dame Street with my pass completed.

In the restaurant where I had my lunch a waitress, pale-faced, haggard-eyed, told me that her sweetheart was a prisoner: she feared he would be shot. "They don’t shoot German prisoners, although they call them 'Huns' and 'baby-killers': they only shoot our brave Irish boys."

The charwoman at the house in which I stayed told me that, without warning, the soldiers had commenced firing at her tenement house. She lived with her four children in the cellar, and all the other inmates of the house came flocking down and huddled together during the night on the stone flags under the staircase. Afterwards they were told that it was thought there were snipers on the roof, but no one in the house knew anything at all about it. None of them were Sinn Feiners, or knew how to shoot, and if the snipers were on the roof, wasn’t it queer to riddle the front of the house with bullets? But everything seemed hard on poor people. They weren't allowed out of their houses, except for a few moments in the morning to fetch milk and bread. Some who had no money, because they were prevented from earning it, had to go without unless they could share the little that their neighbours had. The step from semi-starvation to absolute starvation is so slight to these dwellers in one-room tenements that they regard it with a measure of indifference.

Another woman who worked in the same house had been in slightly better circumstances. She, with her family, had a two-roomed flat in a turning off O’Connell Street. The Sinn Feiners turned them out of it, and the military blew it up. She could not make up her mind which party had served her worst. She hoped the Government would give her compensation, but doubted it: "They'd more likely give it to the landlord, and he a rich man," though she had lost her home, her clothes—everything.

​A girl living near the North Wall, has one brother fighting at the front, another in the Irish Volunteers. The latter, when the revolution started, went off without being at all aware of what was on hand. Before he reached his destination he met a friend, who told him that ammunition was being served out, and that fighting was going to commence. He returned home, and in order to protect his family from any unpleasant consequences, gave himself up to the police at once. His sister has heard nothing of him since. She is afraid that he may be taken to England and forced to join the army.

Another young man was an ordinary member of the Sinn Fein organisation; he did not even drill, but he was arrested while out walking, together with a boy of 15 who was with him, and neither have been released.

I saw that in Ireland the attitude towards the rebels taken by many, even of those who condemn the rising, is one of esteem, admiration and love. One young woman, who had a knowledge of first aid, told me of her experiences. She lives near Merrion Square. When the firing began she went out to see if she could help, but was ordered back by the military. All night she remained alone with a dog, listening to the shots passing over the house and praying for those who were killed. But she longed to care for the wounded. Towards morning she went out, meeting another woman bent on the same charitable errand. They went towards Mount Street Bridge intending to search the houses and gardens where the fighting had taken place. A young officer assured them that there were no wounded, but she persisted. They found a young soldier lying on his back, his hands flung above his head as though asleep. They returned twice to him before they could realise that he was dead. Further on they came to a soldier entangled in some wire. They had to cut away nearly all his clothes before they could get him cut. Then they found a little Sinn Feiner, barely 12 years old. He was wounded in the head, and his brains were showing. He was still conscious, and his pitiful white face, with its big dark eyes wide open with fear of the soldiers, wrung their hearts. At the women’s request a soldier ran for a priest. When he came, the child’s face lighted with joy, and his terror vanished, although he was dying.

​This same young woman helped to carry a terribly-iniured woman into a nursing home. They had scarcely put her down when a young girl was carried into the same room. She saw the woman and screamed out "Mother"; but her mother could not speak: she was dying. They told the girl she would see her mother after she had slept.

The young woman who told of these things chanced also to be present at the Battle of Boland’s Mill. It has been stated that De Valera was forced to surrender by his men. She says this is not true. They loved him so much they would willingly have died with him, but he did not wish to sacrifice them uselessly. The mill was so well defended that the soldiers thought there must be some hundreds within; yet when the defenders came out there were but 50 of them, and 30 dead. She said that De Valera looked like a king when he came out—defeated but unsubdued. Although she was his opponent, she told me that she was filled with grief when she heard the incorrect report that he had been shot.

Side by side with the generous-minded people who can admire their opponents, are those well-fed, well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who condemn the revolution because of the gas supply being cut off; they were compelled to go without toast for breakfast, or coffee for dinner. I heard one lady, who looked as if a little hard work and fasting would do her a world of good, speak most angrily of those poor women who exchanged their rags for silken dresses from ruined shops. She held up her plump, beringed hands in horror at the little boys who took sweets from the shops, and the others who put ladies' boots upon their bare feet and new suits upon their poor little bodies. I thought of her starved and naked soul, bare of all human kindness, and considered her more to be pitied than the poor looters.

I have seen the military search suspected houses; I have seen gangs of prisoners—mere boys and grey-bearded men, marched into Dublin Castle, wet, weary, haggard, but their eyes shining and their heads erect. I have seen the natural outbursts of feeling give way to caution as the fear of spies and informers grows, and I have listened to ​many reasons as to why the rebellion should have taken place at all. I will give the statements of the two most influential people who gave me their views.

^[1]The first to me is the strangest and the saddest. It is by one who has had years of dealing with officials and politicians:—

^[1]The rebellion was engineered by those who wish to rob Ireland of Home Rule; by those who feel that the way to destroy liberty is to goad those who worship it into open revolt. The leaders of the revolution—idealistic, pure-minded, high-souled, unpractical—are their unconscious tools.

Can this be true?

^[1]The other is the statement of a poet and philosopher—it is that Labour, neglected, oppressed, wronged, has allied its discontent to that of political enthusiasts. Poets and Dreamers alone cannot make a revolution. There must be popular unrest behind even the smallest revolt. In Dublin it is impossible for men and women of the working-class to live like human beings. The conditions under which they exist are more deadly than the trenches; out of every six children born one dies. The one-roomed tenements of Dublin are a scandal to civilisation. The wages of the women are an outrage, and all over the country it is as bad. In five years there have been two great labour revolts. For weeks men, women and children have voluntarily starved rather than be forced to half-starve all their lives. Yet their grievances, although acknowledged, remain unredressed. Give Labour a chance, said my informant, and there will be an end of armed rebellion.

In England people forget the politicians' last lie almost before he invents another. In Ireland we have long memories. We never forget a wrong, we always remember a kindness; but our history is one long story of wrong and oppression. English children know nothing of the ​Chartists; to Irish children the broken Treaty of Limerick, the horrors of the Penal Days, the misery of preventable famines, and the barbarities following upon the various nsings, are as fresh as the placing of Home Rule upon the Statute Book. Will the British Government never learn?

A heroic girl marrying her lover on the morning of his execution: a beautiful countess giving up the advantages of her position to live with the working people, and, if necessary, to die with them: these strike the imagination of a race of poets and idealists. If, besides that, we set wholesale imprisonments and shooting, the paying of spies and informers, then the verdict, even of those who support the British Government in the European War and in other ways, will be that remark which I have frequently heard in ruined O'Connell Street: "The Germans could not do worse!"

Is that what the British Government desires?