Supply of heroes, p.36
Supply of Heroes, page 36
Curry thought, They haven’t heard me. They don’t know what really happened. He waved his hands and spoke now as if his experience had made him their equal. “You’re not paying attention, Commandant. How do you deny the Aud? The British have the German freighter. I saw the gunboats take it away.”
But Curry was the one who hadn’t heard. Connolly sneered at him. “The Aud sank in a hundred feet of water this afternoon off Cobh. The captain put his crew in lifeboats, then blew his vessel up. The Germans want to deny this thing too, as who wouldn’t?”
MacNeill was still shaking his head. “None of this matters.” He stood. “We can’t send our boys out into the streets to be gunned down. Casement’s right and so is his man here. The Rising’s off.” He started to leave.
“Eoin, wait!” Connolly grabbed his arm. Though the labor leader was a burly man and MacNeill was goose-necked and frail-looking—his collars were always loose—MacNeill shook himself free.
“I’ve opposed this from the beginning. I knew it would come to no good and it has. Now I am ordering the Volunteers to go home.”
“You can’t! I refuse to allow it.”
“You issue an order, Connolly, and see who obeys it. Apart from your Socialist hooligans, no one will. My order will be obeyed by ten thousand men.” MacNeill looked at them all. “You’re the ones with grand strategies and desperate maneuvers and the willingness to shed blood to no purpose. I’m the one with the men.” At that MacNeill left the room. The others listened as the loud clomping of his feet on the stairs faded.
At last Pádraic Pearse stood up. To Curry he seemed strangely detached, a man removed from his own emotions, as he said with eerie calm, “We have set our faces on Jerusalem. It is the will of our Father that we go up.”
Curry waited for the others to protest, but they didn’t. Pearse was like a ghost to Curry, and it shook him to be the one to have to challenge him. “Pádraic, without MacNeill, without the Volunteers . . .”
Pearse looked at Curry as if he were a mulish pupil. “We have Dublin. Our men can take Dublin. And when we do, the Irish nation will rally to us.”
“Pádraic, the British have men in Dublin too. It’s their one stronghold. They’d slaughter us.” Curry stared at Pearse, completely lost. Once this man had seemed possessed by reason itself. This was the man who was going to replace the emotionalism of pub talk with a realistic operation calculated not to purge the ancient feelings, but to succeed. Only the cold logic of his strategies had convinced Curry before. But this was no strategy. This was the blind mysticism of his play. “One man can free a people,” he’d written, “as one Man redeemed the world.”
Curry shuddered as he grasped what they’d come to. These men would free their people by leading them out to die. And then he understood that, despite the elaborate veneer of military planning, of strategic alliance, of practical preparation, the Irish rising was from the beginning fated to be a bloody spasm of mystical hope.
What a fool I’ve been, he thought. Actually to have believed that this date was chosen because of the calendar of the tides. Dies irae, dies illa. He wanted to turn and follow MacNeill from the room. But he was held fast by the burning eyes of Pádraic Pearse.
“Who arrested Casement, Dan?”
And Curry heard the question, as Pearse wanted him to, as, Who is it who has betrayed me? He stepped back as if he’d been hit. He saw it all now, how he’d been used by both sides, how he’d so lacked a will of his own on which to stand that he’d repeatedly embraced the will of whoever he was with. And with what horror did he feel himself now preparing to do it again.
Pearse, before he was a teacher, had been a barrister, and he was staring at Curry not with the schoolmaster’s hauteur, but with the lawyer’s stark accusation.
“Who arrested Casement?” he demanded again.
“It was Tyrrell,” Curry answered miserably. Yes, Tyrrell. The bastard had beaten him and, through him, Ireland.
Pearse nodded. “The woman’s brother.”
“Yes.” Jane, Douglas, and himself, Curry thought. The unholy Trinity.
“And he let you go?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To warn you. To tell you what Casement said.”
“To convince us to call the Rising off.”
“Yes, but—”
“And you, Dan, what are you going to do?” Pearse put the question to him gently. And you, Simon Peter, who do you say that I am?
Thou art the Christ.
There was only one way for Dan Curry to establish his innocence—not of the crime of ambivalence now, but of treason—establish it not only with Pearse and the others, but with himself. Not my will—how easily it came back to him—but Thine.
“I’m with you, Commandant,” he said.
19
In the beginning was the Word . . .” The priest proclaimed these opening lines of Saint John’s Gospel at every mass said in Ireland or anywhere. “. . . and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
And in Ireland it was as if that theology of the Word took root in a unique way, for no other nation had so staked its destiny, finally, on the power of the Word itself. No other nation launched its revolution believing that language might be enough.
But that was precisely the position, however implicit, of the men and women who gathered on that glorious spring day in the shadow of the massive columned portico of the General Post Office on Sackville Street. But then, no other nation had ever launched its revolution under the leadership not of military men or of merchants, but of poets.
Pearse had composed the proclamation himself, although it would be signed by seven men. Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett were professional poets, but the others—Sean Mac-Diarmada, Thomas Clarke, James Connolly, and Eamon Ceannt—were ennobled too by the literary mysticism that held sway in Ireland then. Say it well, they believed, and it will come to pass because God is not merely with the Word, but God is the Word. Yeats knew this about his fellows, and he had enshrined their sensibility at the Abbey. First their Church, then their theater, then their revolution all depended on the theology of tongues. God is a new language, the Church proclaimed at Pentecost. The new language, Yeats and his poets replied, is God. “Speak but the Word,” they prayed, priests and poets alike, “and our unworthy souls shall be healed.”
It was what they always did, speaking but the words, the words, the words.
But what else, finally, did the Irish ever have?
Pearse stood at noon on the highest step of the GPO, his supporters clustered about him, numbering a few more than a hundred. Half of them, like him, wore the heather green uniforms of the Volunteers, while the others wore the dark green of Connolly’s ICA. For every one of them, more than a thousand Irishmen were fighting at that moment in France, wearing the muddy brown of the BEF.
The great boulevard before Pearse was nearly deserted because of the holiday, but what strollers there were passed by indifferently. Far above them, on the classical balustrade of the huge municipal building, the stone statues of mythic Irish warriors stared out over the city mutely.
Pearse unhunched his shoulders to make himself as large as what he was about to say. And with a voice that faltered at first, perhaps because of the language, he began, “Poblacht NA H Eireann!”
Oh no, Curry thought. He was shoulder to shoulder with the Republican soldiers in front of Pearse, and he too was in uniform. Not in Gaelic!
But immediately Pearse went on in English. “The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the people of Ireland!”
Pearse looked out at the foot traffic, but no one had stopped to listen yet. He spoke more loudly. “Irishmen and Irishwomen! In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.”
Still, the bowler-hatted men and the soberly gowned women were going on their ways, unaware that the earnest man with the high forehead and pale skin was speaking to them. A few ill-clothed urchins from the slums of the Liberties or of nearby Henrietta Street watched curiously, but with apparent incomprehension.
Pearse went on, nevertheless, with increasing fervor, for the Word had soothed him and he was sure now it would be heard. “Having organized and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organizations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army; having patiently perfected her discipline; having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.”
At that moment an ill-armed force of less than fifteen hundred men and women were occupying strategic buildings, fourteen in all, elsewhere in the city. As Pearse continued reading the proclamation, which announced the formation of a Provisional Government, sporadic gunfire could be heard. Most of the rebels carried ancient pistols, little ammunition; some were armed only with the mythic Irish weapon, the pike.
Still Pearse read his proclamation as if that were the act that would accomplish their purpose. When he finished, he turned to James Connolly and shook his hand, then led the band of his supporters into the GPO, while behind them one of the few passersby who’d stopped to listen indulged himself in a first act of Irish freedom. He shouted that if they had their own republic now, they could do any damn thing they pleased, and he urinated in the street for all to see.
A group stormed Dublin Castle. Because the British stronghold was defended with a token force—the British guard was down because they’d taken MacNeill’s order canceling the Rising as definitive—the group could have captured it, making something real of their revolution. But when the guns they fired actually killed the lone guard at the gate, they fled in panic. The British had taken the German threat seriously, but never the rebels’, and this, reflected Sir Matthew as he watched from his window while they scattered, was why.
It was heartbreaking, but the men who’d seized the various undefended buildings were too exhilarated to feel that yet. After seven hundred years the dream of Irish heroes had become the dumb show of clowns. The massive confusion resulting from the two sets of orders—MacNeill’s canceling and Pearse’s summoning—kept all but a few revolutionaries home. Those who dared to act were therefore hopelessly outnumbered even by the thin British garrison, and their strategy of locking themselves inside the GPO, the Four Courts, the Imperial Hotel, Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, and other buildings made them volunteer prisoners whom the British could dispose of at will. The theory, of course, was that the Word would be heard and have its effect. The Word may have been with God or may even have been God, but John goes on to say, also, that the “people did not know Him.”
After reading the proclamation and securing their occupation of the GPO, Pearse and his band piled the desks, chairs, couches, shelves, and cabinets from the various offices into the street outside, forming the mythic revolutionary barricade to which the oppressed population of Dublin, and then all of Ireland, were supposed to rally. Hadn’t the words of the proclamation claimed “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland”?
Well, the Word was heard and the people, led by the Liberties urchins, did rally. But not in the way that Pearse expected.
While the rebels watched helplessly, the people of Dublin, once they learned what was happening, came to the barricade in droves, not to man it, but to dismantle it; not out of opposition to the rebel cause, but to get the furniture. They carted away the desks, cabinets, and couches, which thenceforth would be the proud centerpieces of their dingy rooms.
“Jesus Christ!” Dan Curry said from his place by the story-high window in the main hall. Behind him, with a boisterous animated din, the officers of the revolution were establishing in separate clusters the various centers from which operations would be coordinated. Curry watched as the furniture barricade, piece by bloody piece, disappeared. The sight alarmed him, but Pearse and the others seemed indifferent to it.
Curry fingered the trigger of the pistol he’d been holding since they’d entered the GPO, but he didn’t need it. He was posted as a sentry to watch for the first sign of the British reaction. But Sackville Street was crowded now with ordinary citizens—not only looters, but idling spectators. They could be seen muttering to each other that at last the bush-hatted Irish tin soldiers had begun to move. They were waiting for the police to come, and it struck Curry that they were like the crowds who went to steeplechases not out of love of the sport but to see horses fall and watch riders get crushed.
Curry reined his disdain. It behooves not the revolutionary to feel contempt toward those in whose behalf he acts. Still.
He’d watched only moments before when the first man to come into the post office after it was seized marched up to James Connolly not to volunteer but to buy a stamp. When Connolly told the stranger that stamps were not for sale because a new republic had been proclaimed, the man asked, “What the hell kind of republic is it that doesn’t sell penny stamps?”
The first sign that someone was coming from the direction of Dublin Castle was the commotion across the street as the spectators craned, pointed, and began to vie for a better position from which to watch. Curry braced himself, wiped his gun hand free of perspiration, and prepared to sound the alarm. But what came into view was not a Crossley Tender or a phalanx of troops, but a farmer’s wagon pulled by a pair of horses and carrying eight women, one of whom held up a hand-lettered sign that read cumann na mban.
More than ninety women would participate in the Rising by its end, most of them members of the Women’s Auxiliary. They had not been consulted about the Rising and they hadn’t been asked to be part of it, but they were patriots too. They knew what contribution they could make, even if the men didn’t. They presented themselves at the various outposts; at some they were simply turned away, as for example by Eamon de Valera at Boland’s Mill. But mostly their sheer determination carried them past the first objections, and they served effectively as nurses, cooks, and messengers, although a few like Countess Markievicz found themselves pressed by circumstances into service as combatants. Despite the rhetoric of sexual equality found in Pearse’s proclamation, most rebels, including Pearse himself, considered it unthinkable that women would take part in military action as such. The men were the soldiers as they were the visionaries, and if the glory was to be mainly theirs, so was the sacrifice.
Curry watched the women gathering up their skirts to leap off the wagon and begin to unload it. They carried steaming vats, baskets, sacks, and tins up the stairs of the post office. As one by one they disappeared from his view behind the stout Ionic columns, he felt an unexpected shock when he recognized the figure of the last woman in the line. Her face was obscured by the bag of flour she’d hoisted on her shoulder, but he knew her anyway, as surely as he knew the Rising was doomed.
He began to rush toward the entrance to make her go away, to demand that she go away, but then he stopped. He couldn’t leave the window, his post. Curry realized with a further shock that if he failed to take his small responsibility seriously, then he would be just another of the buffoons who’d lost this battle before it began. He retraced the dozen steps until he was in the bright warm light of the afternoon sunshine again, but instead of looking out the window he stared across the vast, bustling hall, watching for Jane.
Of course he feared for her and couldn’t stomach the thought of her being in such danger, but her presence in the GPO would pose another problem too. It would deprive him of the satisfaction he felt as a man who’d finally handed himself over to what was, after all, only the ancient Irish fate. By reminding him, simply in being there, of the other future he’d wanted for himself, she would force him up against the absurdity of the future they’d made inevitable. She would cause the transformation of his multiple misgivings and criticisms into what he had so far staved off—infinite regret.
But then the circle of his concern came around again. If she was in the GPO when the British moved against it, she would die.
Without a further thought to his duty as a sentry, he crossed the hall to the entrance and reached it just as Jane, behind the other women, came through.
“Jane!” He took the sack from her shoulder. Before she even spoke, he said, “You can’t stay here.”
Jane wasn’t going to let him see how hurt she felt, not for anything. She knew they were not enacting a mythic lovers’ drama now, that the Rising was real and its prospects were bleak. But it had never occurred to her that he would snub her at the door.
She turned away from him and followed the other women into the center of the hall, where they proceeded to set up a food line.
Curry had no choice but to follow her, because he was carrying the flour.
“Lieutenant Curry!” It was Connolly who barked at him. “Why aren’t you at the window?”
Jane spared him the humiliation of watching as he put the flour sack down and sheepishly returned to his post. She knew he was looking back at her as he went, and suddenly she had an impulse to call out to him, Dan, I’m sorry! But he’d have misunderstood. He’d have thought she meant she was sorry she’d come to the GPO, sorry she’d joined the Rising, when all she meant was she was sorry her coming had made his situation more difficult than it was.
Someone had to bring him his stew and bread. It might as well be me, she thought. This was nearly an hour later. Everyone had gone through the food line but the sentries.
“Here you are, Lieutenant.”
When he faced her, she couldn’t read him. He took his plate impassively.
