Leon Uris (66 page)

What was desperately needed now was for the Irish people to make a smashing statement in the streets that our demands for freedom will no longer be deferred and that we are now ready to make the sacrifice and take the risk to win what is ours. WE WANT TO BE AT THE PEACE TABLE.

Otherwise the right of Irish freedom would again be passed over, and this time there could be a slide back into accepting underclass status in servitude to the Crown for another century or two.

The Irish have always had a surplus of opinions. Several different volunteer defense groups cropped up. The one that we are keenly concerned with was a fairly well-knit group whom, for all practical purposes, we shall call the Irish Home Army.

Its founder, president, and chief of staff was Eoin MacNeill, an Ulsterman of mixed religious background.
MacNeill was a straight-down-the-line Gaelic revivalist and republican. The extent of his military expertise was that he was a professor of history at Dublin University and an academic at the Royal Irish Academy.

In matters of a pending revolution, MacNeill steered a tenterhooks course with his Home Army, making certain it didn’t get mixed up in anything with live ammunition. MacNeill did arch up his back to warn the British he would fight any attempt to conscript his men.

Otherwise he stayed aloof from intimate contact with the aggressive Irish Republican Brotherhood, although he certainly realized the Home Army was riddled with Brotherhood people.

Chief among the Brotherhood infiltrators into the Home Army was Padraic Pearse, who rose to second in command behind MacNeill. Pearse, who likewise had earned his military qualifications as headmaster of a secondary school, was a prominent force on the Supreme Council of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood fully intended to use the Home Army as its instrument of a rebellion. The Supreme Council, therefore, secretly plotted the Rising without bothering to consult with Eoin MacNeill, Commander of the Home Army. They came to a decision that rebel Ireland would rise on Easter Sunday of 1916.

The gist of the plan was for Padraic Pearse to call up the Home Army for maneuvers on April 23, as was within his power to do. It was commonplace in Dublin these days to see the various volunteer groups holding maneuvers by storming buildings, throwing up barricades, and engaging in mock street battles, as well as marching through the town in close order drill.

Dublin Castle didn’t put much coin in all this. The Home Army was held in quite shallow esteem.

A simultaneous rising of the countryside was also planned. Sir Roger Casement, a retired Anglo-Irish diplomat of
Ulster Protestant origin, was a diehard Brotherhood man. He would travel first to America and thence to Germany to gain support. His plan was money from America and guns and possibly troops from Germany.

The German guns would be landed somewhere in the west of Ireland and put into the hands of republicans to support the Dublin Rising.

Many years ago Conor Larkin told me that this kind of coordinated operation was scarcely an Irish tradition. In utter confidence, he told me he felt it close to impossible to plan and execute a mission involving several thousand men—especially Irish men.

Sir Roger Casement learned bitterly that most Irish-Americans supported the Allies in the Great War, and a rebellion in Dublin would probably not sit well with them. Finding little support in America, he went on to Germany.

The German High Command was curious to learn how serious their involvement in Ireland should be. The wildest of scenarios might see German submarines using the waters off the west coast of Ireland, and possibly even some German troops or officers landing there. They offered Casement to form up an Irish Brigade out of their stockpile of Irish prisoners of war. When only fifty-two men volunteered, and most of them sleazy, German enthusiasm dimmed.

Nonetheless, Germany had to keep a hand in, should the rebels get lucky. Casement’s plea for a hundred thousand rifles was reduced to one shipload of twenty thousand.

In the beginning of April, Padraic Pearse, as second in command and chief of operations, issued an order from Home Army Headquarters, Liberty Hall, the Dublin trade union building. He called on the Dublin Brigades to
assemble with arms and ammunition for maneuvers on Easter Sunday, April 23.

The chief English representative at Dublin Castle, Lord Nathan, and his military commanders saw the document and did not seriously investigate the possibility of trouble.

In a stroke of something less than genius, Pearse issued a second order switching the maneuvers to Monday, April 24. He reasoned that because it was a bank holiday more men would show up at Liberty Hall. Also, the British officer corps would be out of Dublin for the opening of the horse races at the Fairyhouse Track.

The German ship
Aud
disguised as a Norwegian freighter, was at sea with twenty thousand rifles while Casement himself was slipped back into Ireland by submarine.

The
Aud
finessed its way through the British blockade and made into Tralee Bay, awaiting the signal to unload. It never came. There had obviously—and predictably—been a communications foul-up and the
Aud
soon became as conspicuous as a lighthouse. A British naval patrol was dispatched to investigate and, with all escape routes closed, the crew of the
Aud
scuttled her, sending the ship and twenty thousand rifles to the bottom of Tralee Bay.

Sir Roger Casement, hiding in the fields, was betrayed by an informer who had landed with him as a member of the defunct Irish-German brigade.

Meanwhile, in Dublin, Eoin MacNeill got wind of the Brotherhood plot to use his Home Army and issued a countermanding order, which was published in newspapers over the country.

With all this activity and more foul-ups building, Dublin Castle still failed to get overly concerned. As a matter of precautionary routine after the
Aud
incident, a sweep was made
to round up “known republicans, Sinn Feiners, Brotherhood, and other known trouble makers” in the rural areas.

As for Dublin, not so much as an extra soldier or constable was put on duty.

It was a leisurely day. The Brits were off at the races. Despite the conflict of orders a number of men of the Home Army, by bicycle, foot, and tram, assembled at Liberty Hall, which bore a banner with the battle cry: WE SERVE NEITHER KING NOR KAISER, BUT IRELAND.

A terrible moment of decision was at hand. In order to put up a battle long enough to gain world attention, the Brotherhood felt that a minimum of three thousand men was needed. Only fifteen hundred showed up.

Padraic Pearse, a poet, scholar, and keeper of Gaelic mysticism, reckoned we should get on with it, knowing it was now a suicide mission. “If nothing else,” he said, referring to Tom MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, and his good self, “Ireland would rid itself of three bad poets.”

On that note, the Rising was committed.

My job, of course, would be to come in with my partner, Robert Emmet McAloon, after the fighting was over and see what we could legally do to save our people.

As for Mother and Rachael, I was glad they were not to be intimately involved in the fighting. They had a number of duties to carry out from the message center and hideaways. The woman of record was to be Countess Constance Markievicz, an Anglo aristocrat much like Mother, who would command a unit at St. Stephen’s Green, a park in the center of the city.

So, off they went in their undermanned, underarmed little units to challenge the mighty lion who had come to
their shores and taken their land almost a millennium earlier.

What follows will not particularly be told in the order it happened, but should give one a clear picture of the kind of battle that took place.

Countess Markievicz’s total lack of military experience showed itself immediately as she planted her troops in the middle of St. Stephen’s Green, a small square park surrounded by three-and four-story buildings. British troops grabbed the buildings surrounding her and poured in rifle and machine-gun fire compelling her unit to withdraw to the nearby College of Surgeons, where they dug in and made a splendid fight.

Edward Daly, a slight, pale, mustachioed twenty-five-year-old in command of a “battalion” of a hundred-odd men, seized the Four Courts, from which the British had dispensed black justice on the Irish. He needed five times the troops he had in order to face the nearby array of British barracks holding twenty times his number.

Four Courts was of special meaning to me, for my father dropped dead there of a heart attack at the feet of a British judge. Daly got all sorts of documentation that could be destroyed and cause immeasurable confusion to the English in later months.

A very dour chap, Eamon de Valera, an American-born schoolteacher with a house full of kids, commanded the third “battalion.” He took over Boland’s Flour Mill, which bisected a key route from the port of Kingstown into Dublin. It was expected that he could intercept British reinforcements only an overnight boat ride away.

In the few days of the Rising, two god-awful blunders occurred, which, if they had been successful, would have
given us a momentary victory to emblazon our struggle to the world.

…In the first instance, a unit attacked the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park containing a large British ammunition dump. Had it been blown, it would have become Lettershambo II. However, with no Conor Larkin or Dan Sweeney to lead them, the unit wired the wrong building for destruction and barely rattled the windows of the main storage dump.

…The second foul-up was far worse. Scan Connolly, a young actor who commanded a couple dozen men, had the key to the City Hall across the street from Dublin Castle.

Seeing the main gate to the Castle wide open and guarded by a single unarmed constable, he investigated. He entered, saw that it was undefended and his for the taking!

The entire history of British perfidy in Ireland lay within the Castle walls: all the intelligence, all the names of informers, all secret agents, records of secret trials, double-dealings, contracted murders, land steals…all the symbolism was there! This was the Irish “Bastille”! What could be more daring and brazen than the capture of Dublin Castle! In a single moment, the Gaelic myth could be reinvented!

Moreover, the Viceroy, Lord Nathan, was sitting in his office, ripe for capture.

Alas, a confused rebel commander who had never before fired a shot was aghast at having killed the constable at the main gate and retired from the Castle.

The rest of the day was filled with many such incidents as confused discussion followed the seizing of a variety of pubs, a biscuit factory, and the nurses’ quarters of the insane asylum because of its proximity to the Richmond Barracks. From Richmond Barracks one could hear the military band practicing. Among the things we failed to
take was the telephone exchange, leaving the British with clear lines of communications. Another massive blunder.

The grand scheme was to storm the centerpiece of the rebellion, the great General Post Office building on the main boulevard, which the Irish called O’Connell Street and the British called Sackville.

A hundred and some Home Army in green uniforms and floppy hats, led by James Connolly the labor leader, were set into motion by the midday church bells.

His thin column was met by Padraic Pearse, Tom Clarke, a tobacconist and head of the Brotherhood, and Joe Plunkett, the chief of staff, a journalist.

This high command unit stormed the General Post Office, seized it, and barricaded themselves in. The moment of moments, reading a declaration of independence, was delayed when it was discovered that they had left the flag of the new republic back at Liberty Hall. The formality had to be delayed while one of the soldiers was sent by bicycle to retrieve and return the flag, which he carried in a brown paper bag.

The orange, white, and green banner was raised from the pediment alongside the traditional green flag with its golden harp and the words “The Irish Republic.”

Padraic Pearse stepped outside to a curious and baffled crowd of strollers.

“Irishmen and Irishwomen!” Pearse cried over the chattering. “In the name of God and 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.

“Having organized and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organizations…having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal herself,
she now seizes the moment and, supported by her exiled children in America and by her gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.

“We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and undefea table….”

Pearse continued to denounce the centuries of British misrule, six highly overstated Irish rebellions, and finally declared a republic and provisional government and, of course, petitioned God to our side. It was signed by Tom Clarke, Padraic Pearse, James Connolly, Eamonn Ceannt, and Joseph Plunkett.

Padraic Pearse was to be the provisional president and our various units renamed the Irish Republican Army.

I had looked over the declaration in advance for a legal opinion, which was neither wanted nor accepted. I certainly did not agree with the high state of readiness and skill of our forces, the support of America and, for God’s sake, referring to the Germans as our gallant allies.

Nonetheless it was a most moving and powerful expression of human longing for justice and liberty, and it was clearly destined for immortality, providing the Rising succeeded.

Success meant holding out long enough to bring world opinion to our cause.