Redemption - Leon Uris [283]
Thus, at the age of forty, my career stands on the threshold of disaster. Apparently I am still of sufficient value to His Majesty’s Government to have been recalled from my regiment in France to become Munitions Minister, although I no longer have a seat on the War Council.
Can I overcome a half-million casualties of Gallipoli, or must I die with its stigma engraved on my tomb? I am determined, because of this disaster, to continue to find a way to serve. I shall serve so well that in the end Gallipoli will be a footnote rather than the name of my volume.
I do not know how leaders must bear the result of having caused death in battle. There is no textbook written to give one guidance on the subject. Every king, every general, every minister, every president must deal in his own way with the deaths that result from his orders. May God have mercy on him who ends up with a Gallipoli.
I shall do my best, in future writings, to precisely explain my role and my thinking. Can I ever cleanse the gnaw in me? Perhaps some future day will allow me to make a cleansing gesture.
WSC
Prelude
A Retrospective
on the Easter
Rising of 1916
By Theobald Fitzpatrick
Part One: Conor’s Wake
To refresh your memory, I am Theobald Fitzpatrick, the son of Atty and the late Desmond Fitzpatrick. I inherited enough of my father’s legal skills to carry on his life’s work as the barrister for the republican movement. His partner, Robert McAloon, is now my partner, though of an age where all motion is accompanied by a creak.
My mother had been Conor Larkin’s lover for several years, since he returned to Ireland from America after his prison escape. He lived life on the run, the most wanted man in Ireland, and brought the Brotherhood up to a very respectful fighting level.
He was killed leading the raid on Lettershambo Castle. Some say, and not without a touch of wisdom and truth, that Conor saw a torturous road ahead, bound to end in life imprisonment or violent death. He also realized he could not continue his function as a loner in a Brotherhood growing large with a cumbersome Supreme Council.
Finally, he could never live a normal life for a single day with my mother. So, Conor wrote his own amen by blowing Lettershambo Castle halfway to Scotland.
The death of Conor Larkin at Lettershambo Castle spelled a loss of will and strength in my beloved mother, Atty Fitzpatrick.
When my own father, the late Desmond Fitzpatrick, died of the heart while arguing a republican cause in the Four Courts of Dublin, Mother mourned in measured tones of dignified dignity with never a display of public desolation.
Such was not the case for Conor Larkin.
The British returned the bodies of Conor and Long Dan Sweeney. What followed, in defiance of British law, was a public lying-in-state followed by graveside oratory over Long Dan Sweeney that ascended them to martyrdom.
My mother accompanied Conor’s casket in a simple cortege over the breadth of Ireland all the way to Ballyutogue. At each crossroad, town, and village, a new honor guard of Home Army would accompany him to the next gathering. Children laid flowers on the roadway, women wept and prayed, and men were nudged by long-dormant stirrings for freedom.
When, at last, Father Dary Larkin put his brother to rest alongside their father in St. Columba’s churchyard in Ballyutogue, Mother flung herself on Conor’s grave as a spontaneous keening erupted from mourners from Derry and Donegal and then, from all over the land.
Mother’s lifelong posture of composure was flown as bitter-thorn wailers purged their grief through uncontrolled leaps in and out of madness. They spilled from the Larkin cottage and clogged the wee paths, dancing