Six days of the Irish Republic Part 7

Enniscorthy Castle, which commands the town, was taken from Mr. Henry Roche, J.P. All food and arms and vehicles throughout the town were commandeered. But there was no looting, a considerable body of young men having been formed into a species of Republican police--an organization which would have saved the Dublin rising half its horrors.

The ladies of the "c.u.mann na Ban" next turned the top story of the Athenaeum into an improvised hospital, and here were brought the wounded in the attack on the constabulary barracks, which lasted all Thursday and part of Friday.

Friday was spent in preparation and expectation--the news of the collapse of the revolt in Dublin not having yet reached them--and on Sat.u.r.day a motor expedition to Ferns resulted in the capture of the post office and barracks.

As food had now become scarce, shops were only allowed to sell limited quant.i.ties, and as the situation was becoming dangerous, with the expected advent of the military, pickets were placed at street corners, and these insisted on the civilian population keeping within doors.

Another strange, though by no means uncommon, sight was whole rows of Volunteers going up to the Cathedral for confession, and on the Sunday attending Ma.s.s.

The clergy, while not refusing them the consolations of religion, however, in no way encouraged them in their illusion of success, for on the Sunday morning a party of citizens from Arklow brought a priest under cover of the white flag to announce to the rebels the collapse of the rising in Dublin.

A deputation of the town was then sent to Wexford to interview the military there, who confirmed the news; but, as elsewhere, even this did not satisfy them, and they refused to surrender the town of Enniscorthy until their leaders had seen Dublin's disaster with their own eyes.

Even then the "commanders" wanted to hold out, and, as the _Daily Sketch_ correspondent pointed out, it was only when the chief citizens themselves made the pet.i.tion that the Volunteers at last consented.

Indeed, it would have been hard to conceive how they could logically have insisted on defending the town, which refused to acknowledge them; and the rebels, in justice be it said of them, were nothing if not logical--even if only the logic of madmen. If Ireland refused to look upon them as saviours, then they were not going to play the part of tyrants; and it seems to me that if the civil authorities of Dublin had taken up this stand on the Tuesday morning, the whole thing might have fizzled off without a single further military casualty.

On Monday therefore--to continue the story of the Enniscorthy rising--the rebels surrendered unconditionally to Colonel French, who entered the town at the head of two thousand military.

At Wexford the situation was saved, as at Drogheda, by the a.s.sistance of the National Volunteers, who, under Colonel Jameson Davis, turned out to a.s.sist the police, the Lord Mayor and six hundred of the chief citizens enrolling themselves also as special constables.

In Galway rebellion has always been in the blood. It was from Athenry, eleven miles east of Galway, that the "Invincibles," who were responsible for the Phoenix Park murders, came; and an interesting account was given of the rising which now took place at Athenry by one of the special correspondents of the Press, Mr. Hugh Martin.

According to this account the central figure was a "Captain" Mellows, who, deported a month before from Ireland, had managed to make his escape from England, and avoiding detection by the constabulary under the disguise of a priest, suddenly turned up at the psychological moment a few days before the outbreak of the rising in Dublin.

The Town Hall of Athenry, on Sunday and Monday, seemed to have aroused a certain amount of suspicion--it was suspected of being a centre of illegal munition making--but it was not till the Tuesday, thirty-six hours after the seizure of the Dublin Post Office, that it suddenly revealed itself in its true colours, when "Captain" Mellows unexpectedly appeared in the green uniform of an Irish Volunteer and proclaimed the establishment of an Irish Republic to a body of some five hundred Volunteers, two-thirds of whom were armed with rifles and the rest with shot-guns and pikes.

Overcoming the local police, they proceeded to take one of the Irish Board of Agriculture's model farms about three-quarters of a mile from Athenry, and having captured the place and appropriated all money, settled for the night.

The next day, after a vain attempt by the police to dislodge them, they marched, several hundreds strong, with a whole train of wagons and carts filled with food of every description, towards Loughrea, where they captured Lady Ardilaun's seat, Moyode Castle, from the lonely caretaker, John Shackleton, and his pretty eighteen-year-old daughter Maisie.

A curious figure now appeared in the person of Father Feeny, who, according to Hugh Martin, appears to have exercised as much control over the men as the "Captain" himself.

His influence seems to have been on the whole for good, for the account describes him as hearing the men's confessions and insisting that the fifteen to twenty young colleens who were one of the most curious features of the local rising, marching beside the men and doing all their cooking, should be separately accommodated in the castle at night.

Some isolated R.I.C. men who happened to fall into their hands were treated as prisoners, but when on the Thursday afternoon the police from Athenry made an attack, they were chased with motor-cars for a distance of about four miles back to Athenry, where the forces of the Crown only just managed to get into their barracks in the nick of time.

The next day--Friday--saw the positions reversed, and news reached the rebels that troops and artillery were on their way from Loughrea, some six miles' distance, and it was the rebels' turn to turn tail, scattering as they went to right and left, in spite of every effort of "Captain" Mellows to encourage them with stories of the coming invasion by Germany.

Some made for the hills, others tried to get back to their homes, but most were seized by the Belfast police, in cars driven by Ulster Volunteers, and those who did get back had to face not only the taunt of ignominious defeat but the anger of the Redmondites, who now foresaw the possibilities of a retribution quite out of all proportion to the chances they had ever had of success.

Indeed, that seems to have been the general result of the collapse of the rebellion all over Ireland; and though at first it apparently tended to weaken the hands of the Irish Const.i.tutional leader--who, when the news came to him, must have felt as he had on that famous occasion when, as a young man, five minutes before having to make a great speech near Manchester, he was handed the news of the Phoenix Park murders--on the whole it really considerably strengthened his position, much in the same way as the revolt of De Wet brought out the loyalty of General Botha.

Botha, indeed, was one of the very first to see the similarity of the two cases, and wired at once to Redmond, though it can of course only be taken as a very superficial verdict of the South African Premier on the real grievances underlying the movement, since he could hardly be expected to understand Sinn Fein, much less those subtle provocations which eventually counselled the mad appeal to Germany; for there can be little doubt but that, if Castle rule had prevailed in Pretoria as it still does in Dublin, South Africa would long since have been a consenting party to German occupation.

This, however, was only one of the subtler aspects of the rising which hardly found its way across the Channel, and consequently could scarcely be expected to appeal to a colonial who was not an Irishman himself.

As the collapse became more general, however, it became more and more evident to intelligent statesmen that it was more a hatred of Castle rule than a love of German rule that had been at the bottom of it all, and that it had been, in spite of the bl.u.s.ter of foreign alliance, more an armed protest against a domestic state of affairs than a real attempt to sever the Imperial link; nevertheless, the latter idea still survived in the minds of the military authorities, who could see in it nothing else, with the disastrous results that only became evident in the aftermath.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

AFTERMATH

The surrender and collapse of the abortive rising was no sooner over than the whole affair took an entirely new aspect and pa.s.sed through a completely new phase when it came to deciding what should be thought of the incident and what should be done to the prisoners.

It called for the utmost delicacy of handling on all sides, but this is just what it did not get, and at once there was a complete revulsion of feeling for the Sinn Feiners which, had it come before the rising, might have enabled them to sweep everything before them.

The psychological change is curious as a study in Irish politics.

The first announcement of the rising was so sudden that it took all but those immediately concerned entirely by surprise, and after a moment of almost speechless amazement the movement was promptly denounced by every moderate man in Ireland.

To the Nationalists it appeared at first as if it were the tearing asunder of the Home Rule Bill and the ruination of the const.i.tutional cause for ever. Consequently their att.i.tude was, from their own point of view, perfectly correct, viz. unqualified denunciation. But as further details came along and their opponents in England began to make capital out of it, the case became different. The cry went up that it was want of strength on the part of Mr. Birrell, the Chief Secretary, who could do nothing but resign under the circ.u.mstances; and so pained was he that he even went to the length of what was called a confession of guilt: but his weakness had really been great strength--for any weakling can be strong enough to sign an order for wholesale slaughter if he "d.a.m.ns the consequences."

True, there could be no minimizing of the event either in the matter of casualties or damage done.

A fortnight previous and Ireland was still the "one bright spot" and Sackville Street one of the finest thoroughfares in the kingdom, but during those momentous days the capital had been for the greater part of a week almost entirely in the hands of the rebels; a Republican flag had taken the place of the English Jack, which had floated over it for seven continuous centuries, and now Dublin lay a heap of crumbling buildings, whose smoking ruins looked like the track of the Huns--it might now be called Ypres-on-the-Liffey.

The loss of life, too, had been tremendous, but the military casualties were out of all proportion to those of the rebels, in some cases the skirmishes representing a proportion of ten, and even twenty, to one.

The casualties, in fact, were as high as many a Boer War battle, and amounted to three hundred killed and over a thousand wounded, of which nearly two hundred were civilians. They included over sixty officers and about four hundred rank and file. The Royal Irish Constabulary lost two killed and thirty-five wounded; the Dublin Metropolitan Police six; the Royal Navy three; and the Loyal Volunteers sixteen. With regard to the Sinn Feiners no figures are available, but they must have been considerably less than a quarter of these--perhaps even under.

The circ.u.mstances under which the troops and police suffered, however, were such that the severest measures were adopted by General Sir John Maxwell, who issued the following statement with regard to the action of the courts martial:--

"In view of the gravity of the rebellion and its connection with German intrigue propaganda, and in view of the great loss of life and destruction of property resulting therefrom, the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief has found it imperative to inflict the most severe sentences on the known organizers of this detestable rising and on those commanders who took an active part in the actual fighting which occurred. It is hoped that these examples will be sufficient to act as a deterrent to intriguers and to bring home to them that the murder of His Majesty's liege subjects or other acts calculated to imperil the safety of the realm will not be tolerated."

The military authorities have been blamed for the excessive rigour with which these orders were carried out, especially for the use of sh.e.l.ls, but it may be questioned how far this did not arise purely from the nature of the situation.

Certainly the rebels were at a disadvantage, and consequently won a certain amount of sympathy, yet only a day before that sympathy was entirely with the unfortunate military; but eventually a point was reached when, instead of the military retrieving the situation lost by the weakness of the politicians, it became a question whether they were not undoing a good deal that it had taken a great deal of hard work upon the part of the politicians to build up.

Now this is no idle theory, but the only possible explanation of a series of changes that ensued.

When the news of the rising was first announced to John Redmond, he made a dignified if not too diplomatic reply, in which he expressed despair about the situation and utter disgust about the culprits.

The next official utterance was the somewhat ponderous manifesto of the Irish Party--interesting as an historical summary of Ireland's real att.i.tude to the Empire, but lacking a grip of the actual psychological drama of the situation.

The same may be said of the Irish leader's first appeal for clemency in the treatment of the prisoners.

It was in the shape of a question asked of Mr. Asquith as to whether he was aware that the continuance of military executions in Ireland had caused rapidly increasing bitterness and exasperation among large sections of the population who had no sympathy with the rising, and whether it might not be better to follow the precedent set up by General Botha in South Africa, where only one had been executed and the rest exceedingly leniently treated, and stop the executions forthwith.

The Premier's reply was a curt refusal, phrased in the terms of an absolute confidence in the discretion of the military authorities.

Unfortunately that "discretion" was exercised in such a manner as at once to place its victims in the same category as Emmet, Wolf Tone, and the Manchester Martyrs. In a word, to use the words of an English critic, "It gave the Sinn Feiners the real victory, for it was looked upon as the verification of all that they had feared and prophesied, and for which they had, until that point, been looked upon as fools and scaremongers."

Looking back over the situation at this critical juncture, it may well be doubted whether it was altogether wise to carry out any sentences into execution, and the Bishop of Limerick referred very pointedly to the example of a very similar situation in the case of the Jameson raid, when the leniency of the Boer Republicans towards the raiders avoided war with England.