Tipperary: A Novel of Ireland

  I sat in that room for three hours; other than the two men, nobody came or went. At a quarter to three, they gave me bread and tea. And at three o'clock I heard the familiar footstep coming down a nearby staircase; after a whisper in the hallway outside, Harney entered, beaming.

  “How did you get here?” he said, obviously delighted.

  “I came to fetch you.”

  “The girls?” He grimaced.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought they might,” he said. “They tried hard to stop me.”

  “So they sent me”—and we both laughed. “What's going on?” I asked.

  “But you must have heard?”

  “Not about this place. There are guns in the city.”

  Harney said, “We know that reinforcements will come in along this road. Our job is to stop them. Or delay them.”

  I said, “Come on. Come out of here.”

  He shook his head. “Can't do that.”

  “Joseph—I promised your sisters I'd get you out of Dublin safely.”

  He laughed. “But you didn't say when you'd do it, did you?”

  “Come on.”

  “No.” He held out his hands. “I can't. This is my command. Here— I'm a soldier.”

  “All right. Where do I sit? What can I do to help?”

  “You don't sit, you lie down, in the next room, under the bed.”

  I said, “This is nonsense. If we leave now—”

  Harney held up a finger. “Charles—I'm not leaving here. And I can't let you leave now. You could get shot.”

  I abandoned my attempts to persuade him. Harney left the room and came back a short time later in uniform—a full military tunic in soft green, a soldier's breeches, and a hat with one side pinned up in a slouch. Diagonally across his body he wore an ammunition belt. Now he had become someone else.

  “Volunteer Malone, secure all. Volunteer Grace, check again all windows and doors.” He beckoned to me, and I followed.

  In the next room—smaller and toward the rear of the house—the shutters had been drawn tight and mattresses dragged against the windows. Other bedding covered the floor.

  “Stay here. There's food and drink. Until I come for you,” he said and shook my hand.

  Strangely, I did get a night's sleep, deep and sound. It is my impression that one or both of the other men slept in the room also, but my sleep was too deep to confirm this. I awoke at six o'clock to a silent house, and I drifted back to sleep in the room that would stay dark, no matter how high the sun. An hour or two later, I had bread, cheese, and milk, and then I sat there, not knowing what to do. The morning drifted on. I could hear men talking but saw nobody; the walls in these new brick houses had been densely built.

  At eleven o'clock, activity in the front room seemed to intensify. I heard heavy boots pounding, objects being dragged across the floor, and dull metal clanging. Then, once again, the same grave silence fell. Somewhere in the far distance a child laughed.

  This silence lasted for a long time; I know that it did—I could scarcely take my eyes from my watch.

  At twenty minutes before noon I heard something new—a faint rhythmic sound that did not come from inside the house. I pressed my ear to the door of the room, trying to divine what I could. The sound increased, steady and firm—the sound of military boots in step. I had never heard troops on the march and was surprised at the even fullness of the sound, a dense, rhythmical tread, faster than I'd expected, and heavier. No sooner had I remarked upon this to myself than it was blotted out by a new and more savage sound: the men in the room at the front of the house had opened fire.

  They fired in a specific routine—one: pause: two: pause: three: longer pause. I calculated that they fired through one window after another, systematically and regularly. One. Two. Three—I began to count: five seconds, I reckoned, between each gun. And when that sound had established itself, I became able to distinguish sounds from outside. First came shouts, barked orders. Intermingled with those, I heard screams, then more shouts.

  And—why had I not been expecting it?—the gunfire increased fourfold as the soldiers on the street began to fire back. A new force hammered into my locked and darkened room—the sound of shattering glass from the windows near Harney and his men. This was followed by repeated thudding sounds, and I knew that these must come from bullets striking the adjoining wall. A hell of noise was born, full of cracking and splintering sounds, full of booming and tinkling, punctuated now and then by brief sharp whines, which I took to come from ricochets. I crawled away from the door, spreading myself as flat on the mattresses as I could, and reached the comparative calm of the wall farthest from the one adjoining Harney and his comrades.

  There I lay, heart pounding, trying to divine the course of this pitched battle from the weight of fire. I cannot tell how long this activity went on; my concentration did not extend to looking at my watch repeatedly. Could it have been an hour? Perhaps—and more. At one point, all matters escalated and the firing from the next room reached an almost unendurable pitch of intensity. Downstairs I could hear a sudden great hammering on the door. Bullets pierced the woodwork, then whistled into the hallway and expired, and I reasoned (if that word may apply in such heat and fear) that the military must have tried to breach the door. But Harney and his comrades had fortified it the previous night with furniture, and now they seemed to change the angle of their fire to address this attack. Their heavy rifle shots (I could easily distinguish them from the army's gunfire) sounded closer to the front walls of the house, and I presumed that they had begun to aim downward, because the hammering on the door soon ceased. Later I discovered that the soldiers—from the Sherwood Foresters regiment—had indeed tried to storm the house.

  Through the wall, I could also hear the bolts of the rifles clanging and clicking as the three men reloaded; they seemed to have plenty of ammunition. Upon the retreat from the front door, comparative calm returned. This was followed by a sudden burst of firing from inside the room, a shout, and a sudden bursting open of my door.

  Harney beckoned, Grace stood close behind him, and I saw Malone lying face down beneath one of the windows. I knew that he was dead— I know not how I knew. We crashed down the stairs and into a rear scullery, and from there by a side-door into the yard of the house next door. The three republicans had so pinned down the Sherwood Foresters that they had been unable to surround the house. And the army had taken dreadful casualties—close to three hundred soldiers died.

  Harney, bent double, led us to the rear of a long garden. Past a small glasshouse, he opened a door onto a deserted lane; he and Grace no longer carried guns. He tapped Grace on the shoulder: “God go with you.”

  Jimmy Grace kicked open a locked gate facing us, and went into a garden leading away from Northumberland Road. When I last saw him, this freckled boy, he was climbing a high brick wall fifty yards away. Harney and I stood there—he in uniform, I in my best suit, both of us covered in plaster dust. He had blood on his cheek from a glass splinter; I had a bloodied hand and shirt-cuff, from some piece of glass—I remembered not where.

  “I need a coat,” he said, “and you have to go.”

  “Yes,” I said, “with you.”

  He looked at me. “No point arguing, I suppose?”

  I shook my head.

  Behind us we could hear the soldiers firing sporadically at the house. We began to run through a series of lanes; I slowed him down—he was more than twenty years younger than me.

  In Percy Place we found a woman carrying a bucket of water to her basement home. We followed her down the stairs. She became immensely alarmed and, screaming, slammed the door in our faces. On Mount Street, we knocked at two doors; when they saw Harney's uniform they swore at him and shut the door. We found refuge in the little church at the end of the street—and there we sat, breathing heavily, trying to determine our next move. Simultaneously, Harney and I took out our watches—almost two o'clock.

  Harney said, “It'll be dark at six
; we'll stay here until then.”

  As I nodded, still short of breath, we heard a fearful noise, followed by another, and another.

  “Artillery!” said Harney.

  Time would tell us that the authorities had sent a gunboat up the river Liffey, and it had begun to shell the center of the city.

  We barred the door of the church from the inside and stayed there until darkness fell. Nobody troubled us. We both slept, taking it in turns; in sleep, Harney's face returned to boyhood. When he woke, he might have been recovering from a country walk.

  “Do you think,” he asked me with a grin, “that God will mind if I wash my face in holy water?” and he went to the baptismal font and scrubbed his face vigorously; I followed suit.

  Harney planned, he had said, to get to Boland's Mill; we could reach it in about ten minutes, and he believed that we had lanes enough to hide us.

  Once again he asked me to go home to Tipperary: “You might get killed.”

  And once again I refused, saying, “So might you.”

  Our journey to Boland's Mill became a haphazard thing of slinking in the shadows of lanes and running in bursts across wide streets. I think that we were fired on once, but we saw no concentration of soldiers anywhere. We could tell from the light in the sky that a great part of the city was aflame.

  Harney led, looking back for me at every stage. Our last move took us from a street, down steps to the canal bank, and we ran by the water, in darkness and mud, not knowing where we were going but seeing the hulk of the mill ahead. As we stopped under a bridge, trying to divine our best way forward, a huge searchlight illuminated the mill building.

  “They've surrounded it,” said Harney.

  “Which means,” I said, “that we can't get in.”

  But we did. Harney knew that along the canal wall, beneath the surface of the water, ran a shelf of stone. I lowered him until his feet found it; the canal water came up to his breastbone. He crouched to show me how we would travel, and we walked along that stone shelf, doubled so low that my face touched the cold, slimy water many times.

  The mill had been built to the canal, for the easy carriage of goods. We could hear soldiers' voices not more than a few yards away, but they were not looking for two men sidling like crabs under cover of the canal wall; they were more likely watching for besieged rebels trying to break out.

  And “besieged” is how we found the place; the canal left us close to a double door for loading boats, at which no sign of life could be detected. Now and again, a shot went over our heads as we squatted, trying to figure out where we could break in while the soldiers fired randomly at the mill. Harney rose to the challenge, crept forward along the canal's shelf, and soon we tumbled onto some kind of high platform, a dock for loading. Judging from the random army gunfire, we had reached the blind side of the mill.

  There we lay for several minutes, recovering. Soon, I crawled along the wooden floor of the dock, followed Harney up some kind of steep stairs to a door, and found myself behind him in a half-lit passageway, outside a small office.

  Far beneath us, in the dim lights of a few candles, spread a remarkable scene. Men sprawled everywhere—all over tables and long benches, by the racks and storerooms. Few wore uniforms; most had guns. At windows and by barred doorways, others crouched, weapons at the ready.

  I felt as though I were alighting from the sky and looking down on some extraordinary occasion; I remember the silence, punctuated by distant gunfire; and I remember the way the men not guarding doors and windows sat in orderly stillness. Some had food; many simply looked ahead; a few dozed. The dimness made it impossible to gauge the number of people—Harney thought a hundred, I thought fewer.

  As we stood there, soaked and now beginning to shiver, the door of the office beside us opened. An immensely tall man with spectacles looked at us; I recognized him immediately—I had met him in Bruree, in the house of my dear consumptive patient.

  Harney saluted; they shook hands. Harney made an introduction: “Commandant Eamon de Valera.”

  I said, “I know.”

  Until Sunday we stayed in the mill, under the command of “Dev,” as everyone called him. Men lent us greatcoats until our clothes dried—and then we got drenched all over again when a shell hit a water tank far above our heads. The capacity to fight back from inside was much more limited than I had seen on Northumberland Road. This building restricted opportunities to fire; ammunition supplies had almost run out; and any gunshot from within had begun to draw massive retaliation.

  All next day, shells pounded us over and over—and then we learned that de Valera had raised a rebel flag on the building in the hope of diverting fire from the civilian streets of the city farther in. (The strategy had limited success; by Friday the British troop reinforcements had begun to shoot on sight—men, women, and children.)

  Those were days of terror—and of no little wonder. Every roof, wall, and foundation shook every minute of every hour, or so it seemed. Men grew old in front of my eyes. I made it my business to speak to many, knowing that I should soon be sifting this astounding time for the purposes of my History. Few admitted to an age of more than twenty-two or so; these boys and young men, from shops and offices and farms, had one thing in common: an imbued and unshakable desire to have their country governed by its own people.

  Given my own knowledge of Ireland, I knew the families of many. One told me that I had cured his whooping-cough when he was a baby. Another recalled how I had comforted his grandfather when the gentleman was simply too old to carry on. When the word went around that I healed people, I grew much in demand—but I had no materials and no facilities. I helped as best I could with cleansing and dressing wounds, and for many there was little that I could do.

  By Saturday we knew the full desperation of our conditions. We were surrounded on all sides—even from the water. The gunboat that had been shelling the city was now turning its full attention upon us; soon the building would be destroyed around our heads. We had no food; we had desperate wounded; we had bodies.

  On Sunday I saw Harney deep in conversation with de Valera, who had not been in the building. Rumor had it that Dev had taken several men and occupied another building nearby, and that thus we were gaining ground. Untrue; and now he and Harney broke away—in agreement, to judge from the nodding of heads.

  Moments later, Boland's Mill surrendered. We walked out into the world, ragged, exhausted, and unknowing of what was to come. Would they mow us down with their guns the moment they saw our faces? Not far from me, a young man began to cry, and he pointed ahead; aimed straight at us, and attended by two soldiers, stood a barbarous-looking gun with a belt of bullets feeding into it. I stepped left until I walked beside the young man.

  “To get you,” I said, “they'll have to get me too.”

  He calmed down. Up ahead strode de Valera and Harney; within moments Harney disappeared, taken into an army vehicle. I tried to break from our ranks as they took him—he and I had earlier been separated. But a soldier knocked me back into line with the butt of his rifle on my shoulder and I had lost my best friend.

  It was the bloodiest of weeks. The heart of Dublin lay in ruins. British artillery pounded it and was answered only by small-arms fire. All the main buildings around the river Liffey were reduced to blackened, smoking hulks.

  Boland's Mill held out until the end. The General Post Office had already surrendered, and the Poets' Rising, as it would soon be called for its many poet-soldiers, died fast. Every republican activist who could be found and identified was rounded up and taken into custody. With no moral support except from one another, the rebels were ordered to lay their arms in piles and were marched along the streets, derided by the civilian population.

  That night, every rebel aged eighteen and younger was told to go home. The remaining men and women were piled into jails and makeshift detention centers within garrisons across Dublin. Under orders, the army and police then arrested over three thousand people believed to be
members of the IRA or Sinn Fein. Most were released within weeks. In the final sifting, just under six hundred men were deported, many of them to a prison camp in Wales called Frongoch.

  However, the worst had yet to happen. The rebellion came to an end on the afternoon of Sunday, 30 April. On Tuesday, 2 May, a series of secret trials began—of those whom the British authorities believed to be leaders. No lawyers represented those on trial, and nobody was allowed to speak for them. In any case, not one of the men or women on trial would have pled not guilty.

  Fifteen death sentences were handed down, and the executions began. My own father, John Joe Nugent, politically aware during that time, told me he knew nothing of what was going on. When news of the executions broke and when the word got out as to how many men were killed and in what way, the mood of the country changed to one of deep and angered sympathy.

  The killings had been grisly. Firing squads of riflemen stood feet away from men who refused to wear blindfolds. Heavy bullets tore them to shreds, and then the officer in charge applied the coup de grâce bullet— to the head. Of them all, the execution of James Connolly drew the most outraged responses. He had been severely wounded in the General Post Office, where he'd commanded the socialist Irish Citizen Army. As he was unable to stand, they executed him in a chair. Thus did the Poets' Rising, observed at first hand by Charles O'Brien, become a success.

  The British officer accepting the Boland's Mill surrender singled me out; somebody must have pointed to me. I was told politely to go back where I'd come from, and my insistence that I wanted to find my friend Mr. Joseph Harney carried no weight. As I stood there, a portrait of dishevelment, my clothes in ruins, exhaustion and grime lining my face, I saw Mr. de Valera. Two officers were confronting him, and a conversation was taking place. I walked over to him, but was not allowed to get close. All was confusion; I could hear him trying to argue for the release of his men, saying that if not released, they should be treated as war prisoners.

  He gained no advantages for his men—nor for himself; he was summarily led away, accompanied by an armed guard. At that moment, I saw a distinctive young woman, in age not more than a girl, step in front of Mr. de Valera. She had curly blond hair, and her clothes and bearing suggested good family background; she hauled with her a camera apparatus. To a bright magnesium flash—which startled some—she took a photograph of Mr. de Valera. Other photographers stood there too, and many of the “de Valera surrender” photographs became famous all over the world.