IV
When I told my mother on my return of the plans for Easter, she shook her head.
"There never was an Irish rising that some one didn't betray it," she said. "It was so in '67, and before that in 1798."
But she did not appreciate the spirit I had found in Dublin. I told her that all were united, rich and poor, dock-workers, school-teachers, poets, and bar-tenders. They were working together; I believed they would stand and fight together. And I was right.
It was not easy to go quietly back to teaching mathematics and hear only now and then what was going on in Dublin. Fortunately, Glasgow is two fifths Irish. Indeed, there are as many Irish there as in Dublin itself, and the spirit among the younger generation is perhaps more intense because we are a little to one side and thus afraid of becoming outsiders.
In February, when conscription came to Scotland, there was nothing for members of the Irish Volunteers in Glasgow to do but to disappear. I knew one lad of seventeen whose parents, though Irish, wanted him to volunteer in the service of the empire. He refused, telling them his life belonged to Ireland. He went over to fight at the time of the rising, and served a year in prison afterward.
Whenever an Irish Volunteer was notified to report for service in the Glasgow contingent of the British army, he would slip across the same night to Ireland, and go to Kimmage, where a camp was maintained for these boys. While the British military authorities were hunting for them in Scotland and calling them "slackers," they were drilling and practising at the target, or making ammunition for a cause they believed in and for which they were ready to die.
Presently news came from Dublin that James Connolly had written a play entitled, "Under which Flag?" We heard also that when it was produced, it had a great effect upon the public. In this play the hero, during the last act, chooses the flag of the republic and the final curtain falls. Some one told Mr. Connolly he ought to write another act to show what happened afterward. His reply was that another act would have to be written by "all of us together."