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As the British army closed in, a Royal Navy gunboat on the River Liffey shelled the rebels' temporary headquarters, which bore a big sign: WE SERVE NEITHER KING NOR KAISER, BUT IRELAND. Insurgents barricaded in shops and factories fought on stubbornly, evacuating their wounded, when they could, through back doors and holes smashed in walls. Hit by an incendiary artillery round, the General Post Office began to burn and soon became a blackened shell whose outer walls still bear the scars of bullets today. Flames soared into the sky day and night. Women accused of carrying ammunition to the rebels were seized and carted off screaming. The last headquarters of the Irish Republic's short-lived army was Hanlon's fish shop on Moore Street.

According to the official count, the week of bitter street fighting left more than 400 dead and 2,500 wounded—among rebels, bystanders, and British troops—although some estimates put the figures higher. British military authorities court-martialed the leaders of the revolt, sentencing 15 to be shot. Some feared this would provoke a new round of uprisings, but French, in London, refused to overrule the general he had dispatched to Dublin. In dealing with the suffragettes, the British government had been careful not to create martyrs; French's failure to do the same would prove a pivotal mistake. The last of the condemned to be brought before the firing squad was James Connolly, so badly wounded that he had to be carried on a stretcher and then tied to a chair to be shot. People throughout Ireland were enraged, as were English supporters of Irish freedom like Sylvia Pankhurst.

Her Woman's Dreadnought became a rare source of news about the Rising, for its correspondent, 18-year-old Patricia Lynch, scored a coup when she evaded a government news blackout and managed to slip into Dublin: on the way there she met a politically sympathetic army officer who got her through roadblocks by identifying her as his sister. The issue of the Dreadnought that carried her report, "Scenes from the Irish Rebellion," promptly sold out and had to be reprinted several times. "The hopeless bravery of it," Pankhurst wrote later of the Rising, "the coercion and the executions which followed, to me were a grief cutting deep as a personal sorrow."

With some blocks in Dublin as reduced to rubble as war-ravaged towns in France and Belgium, the Easter Rising was a sharp blow to all who hoped that the shared ordeal of war would strengthen the bonds holding together the British Empire. No one valued that dream more than Milner. Despite his prodigious administrative talents, he was not close to Asquith, and so the prime minister had given him only minor assignments. Milner chafed impatiently as admirers inside the government and the military told him how wartime bureaucrats were making a mess of things that he could have set right. ("I shall never be quite happy until I see you War Minister," wrote one general.) His one solace was his love for Violet Cecil.

She, however, was still consumed by grief. Like many bereaved women then, she tried to console herself by compiling a collection of letters from her son's final weeks, copying them by hand into an album, along with a list of the villages where he had spent each night during his short time in France and a hand-drawn map of the forest where he died. One by one she watched other families she knew receive the same terrible news about sons, husbands, or brothers.

An advisory committee Milner served on recommended that all possible land be farmed—to make Britain less dependent on imported food that had to cross an ocean patrolled by German U-boats. And so, adding to her own sense of a world turned upside down, Violet dutifully ordered her flower gardens at Great Wigsell converted to grow fruit and vegetables, and sheep were set to graze on the lawns. With farmhands called away to the front, the only laborers available were German POWs. "This place is polluted by German prisoners who are ploughing," she wrote to