Redemption - Leon Uris [288]
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.
Part Four: Easter Monday, 1916
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