Redemption - Leon Uris [291]
By morning it was all but done.
The British opted not to storm the rebel positions but simply to reduce them by shellfire. It was now a plain case of waiting until we ran out of food, ammunition, and water.
Only one skirmish of note occurred, when British reinforcements landed at Kingstown. These were young lads, scarcely trained, who bore the gallant name of Sherwood Forresters. They marched for Dublin right into de Valera’s men at Boland’s Flour Mill, and he did a right good job, stopping and capturing a number of them.
Otherwise it was an all-British mathematical reduction of some fine old buildings. Both sides had drawn a few hundred casualties, two minutes’ worth on the Western Front in France.
With nothing left to eat and no ammunition left to shoot, Padraic Pearse offered to surrender in less than five days. In a rather sad attempt to display honor, he offered his sword to a British general, who simply passed it to an aide in disgust.
* * *
All prisons were jammed to the gunwales and the holding pens filled quickly.
Our top echelon was taken to the illustrious Kilmainham Prison in Dublin, in business to hold insurrectionists since the French Revolution. Its roll call included our hallowed martyrs from Theobald Wolfe Tone, my namesake, to Charles Stewart Parnell. My partner’s namesake, Robert Emmet McAloon, had said in 1803, “When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, shall my epitaph be written.”
This time the British had made the catch of the centuries: scholars educated by Christian Brothers, some musicians, the omnipresent poets, and other such dangerous men.
My partner had been worn thin, as had my father, by a lifetime of defending pissed-off Irishmen. It fell to me to prepare a defense for several thousand men already incarcerated or being rounded up.
All of the traditional doors, as expected, were slammed in my face. The Four Courts had been badly damaged and all law for anyone connected with the Rising vanished. Ireland was under martial law, which meant the British could do anything they wanted without any accounting.
I appealed to John Redmond, but he and his Irish Party were impotent. Redmond was a defeated man.
I went to the Cardinal, but he had deftly removed the Church from the Irish struggle once again. While a number of priests, on their own, were republicans or silently applauded the Rising, the main body of bishops showed indifference.
Then came the most terrible moments of my life, when I realized that with tens of thousands of Irish lads in British uniform, the Irish public itself was overwhelmingly against us…“for going to bed with the Germans.”
With our meager resources, it was impossible to get our story across in the press. The truth of the Rising, that of Irish freedom after centuries of oppression, had nothing whatsoever to do with England’s imperial war in France.
The Irish had been a subject people for so long that the spirit to protest had been dulled. Their souls no longer cried for freedom. They had been sanitized and pacified.
Then the other shoe dropped. America, herself born of a revolution against the British, supported the British in crushing the Rising. And by America, I mean the Irish-American community as well.
Eventually, all of us, no matter what our past dealings with God, find it necessary to kneel before the altar and pray; soldiers on the front, condemned men on death row, agnostic barristers…
So I prayed, “God have mercy on Ireland.”
Part Five: The Worm Turns, Lovely
May 1916
I smelled a rat as soon as General Sir Llewelyn Brodhead was whisked into the country as special consultant to the Viceroy. Why would this particular officer be rushed to Dublin Castle as the dust settled on our pitiful little Rising? On the surface, it was chilling.
Brodhead, the Ulsterman, was out of a breed of super-officers spawned in that province whose imperial appetites were far greater than their military skills and whose inbred arrogance and sense of inherited privilege reduced their