Leon Uris (67 page)

I was over the way on O’Connell Street barely able to hear Pearse, trying to calculate the impact on the gathering. They did not seem impressed. A few made hurrahs, others shrugged, some laughed, most thought it was part of Home Army maneuvers.

As the news spread, a hundred more Home Army made their way to the GPO, then a flash ran through the Liberties, whose long and tortured history made it Europe’s most horrible slum. The Liberties erupted!
Thousands of the wretched poured from its confines into O’Connell Street and engaged in a storm of looting and rioting that was an outburst of pent-up outrage and frustration.

In actual fact, it was Home Army lads who finally stopped the rampage of smashed windows and thefts.

It is said for future generations that everything was broken into
except for bookstores
. This was Irish pride saying, “We love the written word so much as to hold it sacred.” In truth, most of the poor devils from the Liberties were illiterate and saw no value in lifting books.

Up to this point the British hadn’t put two and two together. What brought out their first unit, a squadron of Lancers, was the rioting. When the Lancers trotted down O’Connell Street in a state of ignorance, they were hit by a fusillade from the rebel guns in the GPO.

Assembled hastily at Dublin Castle, Lord Nathan and his commanders were finally able to figure out that this was not a maneuver.

Assessing their own forces, the British had some five thousand troops in or within quick range of Dublin. Among these were Irish Fusiliers and Irish Rifles of the British Army. They were sent into battle immediately to demonstrate their loyalty to the Crown and infer that this was all about good British-Irish against bad Irish.

British reinforcements were only an overnight boat ride away and they had something else…CANNONS. There were sufficient artillery, up to sixteen-pounders, to contain every building that was seized.

With our lack of knowledge of basic military tactics, we in the Home Army had closed ourselves into barricaded positions. We had no training or leadership to launch any kind of offensive. For the British it was a case of surrounding each of these buildings to cut off escape and then cannonading it.

*  *  *

By midnight the huge main floor of the GPO bounced eerily in a profusion of candlelight. Padraic Pearse went up to the roof and gazed at a flaming Dublin being battered by point-blank cannon fire.

The British occupied and fortified positions to engulf the rebels with rifle and machine-gun fire….

Was it over before it began? Was our true destiny that of eternal subservience to the British Crown? All of my father’s life and all of Conor Larkin’s life was going up in flames! All of my mother’s life seemed for naught! Dear God! Why have you made us so accursed as a race?

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.”

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 natures to subhuman status. Brodhead was a visceral Irish-hater.

He was also a lifelong crony of Roger Hubble. Brodhead used his military command at Camp Bushy in Ireland to covertly support gunrunning to the Ulster militia; he even sent his officers to train them. In fact, the Earl’s youngest son, Christopher Hubble, had been used in a gunrunning venture from Germany, no less!

Shortly before the war, Protestant Ulster was so cocky it openly flaunted its military prowess and illegal activities.
It came to a point where the English government felt compelled to order the troops up from Camp Bushy to occupy Ulster and declare martial law.

The Bushy commander, Llewelyn Brodhead, organized a document in which all the officers of his command refused to move on Ulster and offered their resignations.

He forced the British government, Churchill included, to back down. With a European war on the horizon, the Army warned that more than a third of its entire officer corps stood to resign in sympathy with Brodhead.

It was a blackmail that Churchill, for one, never forgot.

Brodhead was subsequently promoted and, along with Churchill, joined together as architects of the disaster at Gallipoli. It is to be noted he did not like the expedition from the onset but once given the Anzac Corps to command, carried on like the good soldier he was.

General Sir Llewelyn Brodhead’s judgment in battle proved deplorable. Although the ax fell on many high-ranking officers, Brodhead merely suffered humiliation. He managed to save himself from dismissal by giving some highly questionable testimony at the initial inquiries.

Nevertheless, he was denied a field command in France, which could only be considered a disgrace, a sort of left-handed slap on the wrist.

Brodhead’s sudden assignment to Ireland on the heels of the Rising was looked upon as a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the War Office and the General Staff. With carte blanche to keep the Irish under control at any cost, the General was suddenly in his divine element.

After being shut out of all information, it was a relief for me finally to be summoned to Dublin Castle. Perhaps I could get a fix on what they intended to do with over two thousand Irishmen rounded up and stashed away. Some had been fighters in the Rising. Others were citizens
simply swept up without arrest warrants and held without charges or legal counsel.

“So you are the son of Desmond and Atty Fitzpatrick?”

I owned up to my tainted parentage. I’ve seen those dull blue eyes spelling hatred before from many a bench, from many peacocks wearing Sam Browne belts, from more than one lady at a garden tea. Llewelyn Brodhead’s hatred burned through the centuries, burned through my jacket and flushed my skin. I must not be lured into an argument I could not possibly win. The best I could hope for was to fence around a little bit, hoping he was playing like a cat with a cornered, wounded mouse, to enable me to glean some kind of information.

“Well, you’ve bagged the lot of us,” I said. “Am I to get an inkling of our status?”

Oh, that wicked little slash-mouthed smile! He folded his hands and kept looking, penetrating me until I had to look away rather than get into a staring contest.

“I am administering martial law. All prisoners are barred from access to the British legal system.”

“What are your intentions, sir?”

Oh God, he smiled again. “We have already held secret court-martials. We have sentenced ninety-six perpetrators of this so-called Rising to death. The rest are being held as prisoners of war.”

I nearly passed out, pleasuring Brodhead with my perspiration and dizziness.

“Where? On what charges?” I managed to ask.

“We have endless laws on the books dating back for a century to take care of the Irish and sedition and treason.”

“But they must have a chance to defend themselves.”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me, Fitzpatrick, they have been tried and sentenced to death.”

“Ninety-six people tried and given death sentences in a week? It is a sham, General Brodhead, this prisoner-of-war status. Does that not, in itself, imply you have captured enemy troops? Isn’t that, in itself, an admission by the
Crown that the Irish are different people? Sir, you don’t take German prisoners of war out and shoot them, and they don’t put British prisoners before the firing squad.”

“Save your clever Irish tongue. We can do what we wish to do.”

“Does that not imply that you have always had in mind a separate standard of justice for the Irish?”

Brodhead slammed both hands on the sides of his leather chair. “Let me tell you why you are here, Fitzpatrick. Our fifteen hundred Fenians in custody are
hostages
to assure us that Ireland remains passive. If you go on ranting, you shall be responsible for minimum sentences doled out to these men of twenty years in penal colonies.”

He rose from his seat, leaned over his desk, his face reddening. “As for those death sentences, they shall be carried out at my pleasure. The louder you protest, and the more trouble you stir up, the more people we will execute. I suggest you and your mother keep your big mouths shut or you shall become directly responsible for the executions of those condemned. You may go, Fitzpatrick.”

“Haven’t you learned anything in your entire experience in Ireland? Your loathing of us as inferiors is so inbred you see nothing wrong in what you are doing.”

“Neither does the American press and public. Our ambassador in Washington reports outrage at you in editorials across the entire country.”

I dimly heard him say…“Don’t bother to attempt to contact us again. Dublin Castle is closed to you.”

I got back to my office as quickly as I could, locked myself in, and tried to find reason. There was no doubt now why Llewelyn Brodhead had been sent to bless us.

Why should England have reacted in such a manner? The Rising posed no threat to their rule in Ireland. It was not carried out by trained soldiers. It was done and over
within a week and punishment should have been meted out to fit the crime.

In their stampede to keep us silent, had they entirely lost sight of their own glorious history of democracy and justice? Not when it came to the Irish. The lengths that England would go to in Ireland had already been established in the great famine.

Down through the ages they knew but one way to rule us…by intimidation. When trouble stirred they’d overpower us with their armed forces, impose martial law, suspend justice, spy, murder…BULLY.

Bullying had always put the Irish in their place. Why not bully now? In the sordid British experience here, what did the execution of another ninety-six Irishmen matter?

They lost focus that these were ordinary citizens in their own country protesting for their freedom. The men they intended to kill were dreamers and intellectuals. Dear Lord, when do you line up poets against a firing wall and shoot them down?

I was folded up in three halves so I could fit on my office couch and avoid the springs when a distant crackle made me unglue my eyes. Maybe my hearing was playing tricks on me.

My old partner, Robert Emmet McAloon, likewise bedded down in his office, flung open my door.