Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

I

possible to conduct any rebellion, and
many high and chivalrous things were
done by them and their followers. They
strove to fight, as closely as they could, in
accordance with the laws of civilized war-
fare. But the killing of these policemen
at the castle and the Unitarian church
were acts of murder, for these civil ser-
vants were unarmed, defenseless, while
their opponents carried loaded rifles.
believe, indeed, that much of what we call
atrocity in warfare, civil or international,
is largely the result of fright and nervous.
strain, the panic act of men who are “rat-
tled"; and it is very probable that the
murder of the policemen was due to an
attack of nerves. But whatever the cause
of it may have been, it stained a singu-
larly clean record. The behavior of the
rebels to their prisoners was exemplary.
An old colonel who was in their hands
for the better part of a week subsequently
stated that he had been treated with ex-
ceptional kindness, and a subaltern who
was interned in the post-office asserted
that his captors were very considerate to
him.

It was while I was looking at the pool
of congealed blood that I saw Francis
Sheehy Skeffington. I had known him
fairly well for some time. He was a man
of immense energy and vitality. Once he
walked from Dublin into Wicklow and
back, covering fifty miles in one day. His
honesty was superlative, and his courage
was leonine. I think of him as a man
overruled by intellect. He was governed
by logic, and he seemed incapable of un-
derstanding that life is a wayward thing,
that men are moody, that humanity can-
not be scheduled or set out in terms of
an equation; and this submission of his to
intellect robbed him of any capacity to act
practically in affairs. Had he been a witty.
man, he would have resembled Bernard
Shaw. But he was not a witty man; he
was almost totally devoid of a sense of
humor. I think, too, he was completely
devoid of any feeling for tradition, any
sense of reverence. Once when I was
living in a Welsh village I met him. I
went with him one day to see a cromlech

outside the village, and when we reached
it, he looked at it for a few moments, and
then, to my disgust, took a bill out of his
pocket and stuck it into a crack in the
stones. "I may as well do a little propa-
ganda," he said. The bill had "Votes for
Women" on it. But when all the small
irritations one had in his presence were
accounted for, there remained this, that
he was a man of great integrity and cour-
age, and men of integrity and courage are
so rare in the world that it is a calamity
to have lost this man in the miserable way
in which he was lost.

He came up to me, and we talked about
the rebellion. I was full of anger, be-
cause I saw in it the wreck of the slowly
maturing plans for the better ordering
of Irish life; but his emotion was dif-
ferent.

"I'm against all this fighting," he said.
"More and more I am inclining toward
the Tolstoian position." He spoke of the
rebellion as "folly, but it 's noble folly,"
and declared that it was a hopeless enter-
prise. He went off, walking in that ha-
bitual quick, nervous way of his, which
seemed to indicate that he could never
walk with sufficient swiftness. I went
home, and sat in the window, looking out
on the park and the passing people. The'
dusk gathered about the trees in the green,
and a film of blue mist enveloped us. Be-
hind the College of Surgeons, which faced
my side of the green, the setting sun sent
shafts of golden light shimmering up the
heavens. There was hardly any wind, and
the tricolor on the college fluttered list-
lessly. The evening became quiet. The
crowds which had moved about the city
all day in a holiday mood, treating the
rebellion as a jolly entertainment provided
by benevolent persons for their amuse-
ment, had dispersed to their homes, carry-
ing with them not the mood of merriment,
but the mood of alarm, of anxious antici-
pation.

One could hardly have felt otherwise
then. All day the rebels had been in pos-
session of the city. The Government
seemed to have thrown up the sponge.
There was not a policeman to be seen, or

[merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][subsumed][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors]
[ocr errors][ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors][ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors][ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

neutral nations by

[ocr errors]

No.

what

[ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors]

to am.

There

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors][ocr errors]

the end wedes from theip

The

the difficulty of the mames to make ends meet, Now,

[ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors]
[ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

they et al

P

And not only would the Yahman have
sofisten to a cantant flow of speeches of the wart
he would find a respectabis offical Prem var ret
boughs or by the Government te way the wine
kind of things over and over, every day of the oval.
Cand wh.. Chaq

hame time school with news of beary..
They would a hm of it was true, that and the
Germans came Expand hapon an unruly
country, constantly engaged in civỀ Ngar.
The object of every book would he
the English child grow up in the necien that
bitory of bus county was going to forget,
the the one bright spex in is on the fact that
had been conquered by cultured Gera
-1t there was a revult, German Harvide a
delser grace speeches about

*reckiem agiaators who would ruis ther
sperity.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Photograph by Underwood and Underwood The official organ of the rebels

a soldier or any person in authority. At
ten o'clock that morning there had been
a Government and policemen and sol-
diers; at eleven o'clock all these had dis-
appeared. There was looting in O'Con-
nell Street, some of it extraordinarily ludi-
crous. There was one looter who had
stolen a dress-suit from a shop near
O'Connell Bridge. He went into an
abandoned tram-car, stripped his rags off,
and then put on the dress-suit. When he
reappeared, swaggering up and down the
street, he was wearing brown boots, a
dress-suit, a Panama hat, and he was car-
rying a lady's sunshade. The rebels tried
to prevent looting. I saw them making
the attempts; but their efforts were inef-
fectual, and all that day (Monday) and
all Tuesday the looting went on ridicu-
lously.

Although the Government had mysteri-
ously vanished, and there were no police-
men to arrest looters, one did not feel that
victory was with the rebels, nor did they
themselves think victory was with them.
That anxious, waiting look had marked
the rebels' faces all day, and now some-
thing of dread came to the larking crowd;
and as the night fell, the jokes ceased, the

laughter died out, and silence came. At
seven o'clock the streets were nearly
empty. I looked out of my window and
saw shadow-shapes moving swiftly home-
ward, huddling close to the houses. The
rebel sentries still guarded the gate of the
green which faced toward Merrion Street,
and through the gloaming I could detect
the figures of boys and women hurrying
about their business in the camp. A cab
came down the east side of the green, and
the sentries challenged the driver; but he
would not stop, though they called
"Halt!" a dozen times. Then they fired
on him. The horse went down instantly,
and the driver, abandoning it, leaped from
the box of his cab and flew down Merrion
Street. The poor beast, sprawling on its
haunches, tried to struggle to its feet, but
fell back as often as it rose. While it lay
there, struggling and kicking, a motor-car
came down that side of the green, and the
driver of it, too, was challenged, and he,
also, refused to halt, and again the sen-
tries fired. I was leaning out of the win-
dow to see what happened, and I laughed,
for the man who was in the car with the
driver yelled out the moment he was hit:
"Oh, I'm dead! I'm dead!"

The car stopped suddenly, grating harshly on the roadway, so that one's blood curdled for a few seconds. Then the wounded man was taken out. The sentries gathered round him. "Why did n't you stop when you were told?" they said reproachfully, and added, "Take him to Vincents'," the hospital a little way up the street. While they were supporting him toward the hospital, the man went on moaning: "Oh, I'm dead! I'm dead!" It was the worst imitation of death I had ever witnessed. They did not take him to Vincents'. They changed their minds, and took him into the green and treated him there. His wound was obviously slight; he could not have yelled so lustily or have walked so well as he did if it had been serious. There was no dignity in him, only a foolish bravado that speedily turned to squealing; and so one laughed at him.

After that there was a queer silence in the green. In the distance one heard occasional rifle-firing, but here there was this ominous quietness. It became difficult to see, and so I closed the shutters; but before I did so, I looked toward the wounded horse. It was lying in the middle of the street and was not making any movement. "Thank God, it 's dead!" I said to myself, and then I drew the shut

ters to.

There was a dreadful feeling of strain in the house, and I moved about restlessly. I got out the manuscript of a play on which I am working and began to revise it, but I could not continue at it long. I tried to read a book by H. G. Wells, called "An Englishman Looks at the World." I had opened it at the chapter entitled "The Common Sense of Warfare," but I found that the war outside proved conclusively that there is no common sense in warfare, so I put the book down and tried to play a game of patience. I played three games, and then I went to bed.

I slept in short dozes that were more exhausting than if I had not slept at all. The desultory rifle-fire had increased during the night, and it seemed to me that

shooting was proceeding from the Shelbourne Hotel. At four o'clock I got up and looked out of the window. I was sleeping in the front of the house, and I had left the shutters of my bedroom open. It was not quite light enough for me, who have poor sight, to distinguish things clearly, but I could see a huddled heap lying in front of the gate where the sentries had been a few hours before. And the horse was not dead. While I looked, it made a feeble struggle to rise, and then fell back again. "Why don't they kill it?" I said to myself, and I went back to bed. But I did not sleep. There were people moving about in the next room, fidgeting and fidgeting. I got up and began to dress, and while I was doing so I heard the sound of heavy boots on the pavement below, echoing oddly in that silence; and then I heard shots, followed by a low moan.

One's mind works in a queer way in moments of unusual happening. I knew that some one had been shot in the street outside my home, and if I had been asked before the thing happened what I should be likely to do, I think I should never have guessed correctly. I stood there counting the dying man's moans. He said, "Oh!" four times, and then he died. I went to the window and looked out. It was now about six o'clock, and I could see plainly. The huddled heap outside the gates of the green was the body of a dead Sinn Feiner. The horse in the roadway was now quite still. Just off the pavement, in front of the door of my home, lay the body of an old man, a laborer, evidently, who had been stumping to his work. I suppose he had not realized that the rebellion was a serious one, and had started off on the usual routine of his life; and then Death had caught him suddenly and stretched him in the road in a strangely easy attitude.

I came down-stairs, and the maids gave me breakfast, apologizing because there. was no milk. It seemed to them that one could not drink tea without milk. These minds of ours are amazing instruments. Outside the door lay the body of an old

man; a little farther off, wearing a fawncolored overcoat, lay the body of a dead Sinn Feiner; at the corner of the street a horse had died in pain; and we were wondering about milk. Had the milkman funked?

I THINK it was between eight and nine o'clock that the ambulance came and took away the two dead men. The horse was dragged, I do not know how, to the pavement, and it lay there, offensive to eye and nostril, for a week. People came to one and said, "Have you seen the dead horse?" In whatever way conversation began, always it seemed to end with that question, "Have you seen the dead horse?"

I remember now standing with a friend on the stairs, so that my eyes were on a level with the fanlight over the hall-door, and looking into the bushes just inside the green railings. I could see a young Sinn Feiner, rifle in hand, crawling on the ground; and then the soldiers in the Shelbourne saw him and let a volley at him, and he rose and ran, and we saw him no

more.

Later on people came out of their houses and began to walk about. No one was allowed to cross the road to look into the green, and it was impossible to say whether any Sinn Feiners remained in it. The foliage obscured the view. There were rumors that many of the Sinn Feiners had been killed in the night, and that those who remained had fled from the green and taken refuge with their comrades in the College of Surgeons; but there was no confirmation of these rumors, and it is doubtful whether they were

true.

Toward ten o'clock the streets filled. A few soldiers had been smuggled by back ways into the Shelbourne Hotel, and these commanded St. Stephen's Green. Other soldiers, few in number, were stationed in various parts of the city; but to all intents and purposes Dublin was as completely in the hands of the rebels on Easter Tuesday as it was on Easter Monday.

I went down to O'Connell Street and found that during the night the Sinn

Feiners had been busy. Each of the streets running at right angles to O'Connell Street was barricaded, in most instances ineffectively. Barbed wire was stretched across O'Connell Street in such a way as to form a barrier on each side of the general post-office. And on Tuesday, as on Monday, one saw the pale, "rattled," and very tired-looking young rebels preparing for attack. On the other side of the barbed wire, beyond the Nelson pillar, were some dead horses that had been killed while being ridden by soldiers One heard rumors of desperate fighting in other parts. of Dublin. Some of the veterans' corps, who had been drilling in the mountains on Monday, had been shot dead by Sinn Feiners when returning home in the evening. The lord lieutenant, the rumor ran, had been taken prisoner, and was now immured in Liberty Hall. The wildest talk was being uttered. It was said that the pope had committed suicide on hearing of the rebellion. It was said that Archbishop Walsh, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, had killed himself. It was said that the Orangemen were marching on Dublin in support of the Sinn Feiners.

It was on Easter Tuesday that the worst looting took place. Men and women and children surged up from the foulest slums in Europe and rifled the shops, stripping them almost bare. Some harsh things have been said about the looting, perhaps no harsher than ought to have been said, but I doubt whether in similar circumstances in any city in the world there would have been so little looting as there was in Dublin on those two days. One tries to imagine what London would have been like if it had suddenly been completely abandoned for two days to the mercy of the mob. I think a Whitechapel mob would have sacked London in that time.

While I was standing in O'Connell Street, Francis Sheehy Skeffington came up to me. He had half a dozen walkingsticks under his arm, and he said to me: "I'm trying to form a special constabulary to prevent looting. You'll do for

one," and he offered a walking-stick to me. I looked at the stick and I looked at the looters, and I said, "No." It was characteristic of "Skeffy," as he was called in Dublin, that he should behave like that. The pacifist in him would not permit him to use force to restrain the looters, though one might have thought that the logician

seen the day before, intently watching, while the girls chaffed him.

And while I was peering through the railings at the dead man, some one came up and said to all of us who were there:

"Poor chap! Let's get him out and bury him!" bury him!" There were three women from the slums standing by, and one of

at him and beat him with her fists and swore at him horribly.

"No, you'll not get him out," she yelled. "Let him lie there and rot, like the poor soldiers!"

in him would have regarded a walking-them, when she heard what he said, rushed stick as a weapon; but the hero in him compelled him, for the honor of his country, to do something to restrain them. On the previous day he had harangued them. from the top of a tram-car, reminding them that they were Irish, and bidding them not to loot for the sake of Ireland's honor; and they had stopped looting-until he had gone away. To-day his proposal was to overawe them with walking-sticks. Here indeed, I could not but think, was Don Quixote charging the windmills yet. another time!

I imagine that he was unsuccessful in his efforts, for later on in the afternoon I saw him pasting slips of paper on the walls of O'Connell Bridge. The slips bore an appeal to men and women of all parties to attend the offices of the Irish Suffrage Society in Westmoreland Street and enroll themselves as special constables to maintain order. I never saw Francis Sheehy Skeffington again. That evening he was taken by a lunatic officer and shot in Portobello Barracks.

By this time the soldiers in Dublin had been reinforced, and troops were already hurrying from England. All that evening, as far as I could see, there was no stir in the green; but the firing was heavier than on the previous day, and all over the city there was a persistent banging of bullets. The windows on the ground floor of the Shelbourne were full of bullet-holes, and the wall of the Alexandra Club on the west side of the green was covered with the marks of bullets. That afternoon I had seen a dead Sinn Feiner lying inside the gate of the green that looks down Grafton Street, lying face downward in a hole in the earth, and I wondered whether he was the man I had

That speech was typical of the general attitude of the Dublin people toward the Sinn Feiners. Popular feeling was dead against them. Here was a singular rebellion, indeed! Men had risen against a power which they could not possibly beat in behalf of people who did not wish for their championship! Wherever I went in Dublin in the first days of the rebellion I heard the strongest expressions of hatred for the Sinn Fein movement. There was a feeling of remarkable fury against the Countess Marckevitz, remarkable because this lady had spent herself in feeding and succoring poor people during the 1911 strike, and one would have imagined that some feeling of gratitude would have saved her from the insults that were uttered against her. A strange, incalculable woman, born of an old Irish family, she had thrown herself into all kinds of forlorn hopes. It was said of her that her most ardent desire was to be the Joan of Arc of Ireland, that she might die for her country.

ON Easter Tuesday night, about ten o'clock, the soldiers on the top floor of the Shelbourne began to use machine-guns, and the fire from them went on, I think, for an hour. Up to then we had heard only the sound of rifles, and it was a very unimpressive sound. If this was war, we thought to ourselves, then war is an uncommonly dull business. We became bored by bullets. When the surprise of the rebellion was over, most of us became irritable. We could not get about our

« AnteriorContinuar »