Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (30 page)

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.
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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.

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
un
fettered
control
of
Irish
destinies,
to
be
sovereign
and
indefeasible
…
We
hearby
proclaim
the
Irish
Republic
as
a
Sovereign
Independent
State,
and
we
pledge
our
lives
and
the
lives
of
our
comrades-at-arms
to
the
cause
of
its
free
dom
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
hap
pened
. 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.

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.
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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’;
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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: