(Signed) P. H. Pearse, Commandant General.
Commanding-in-chief the Army of the Irish Republic and
President of the Provisional Government.
Once a day they allowed me visitors. Every one who came to my room was confident that things were going well. That we were isolated from other "forts" and even from headquarters did not necessarily mean they were losing ground. We were holding out, and our spirits rose high. We believed, too, that by this time the Volunteers outside Dublin had risen. We could not know that, even where they had joined the rising on Easter Monday, the loss of one day had given the British enough time to be on guard, so that in no instance could our men enter the barracks and seize arms as originally planned.
While I lay there, I could hear the booming of big guns. All of us believed it was the Germans attacking the British on the water. There had been a rumor that German submarines would come into the fight if they learned there was a chance of our winning it. I had heard that report the evening before the rising. Edmond Kent, one of the republican leaders, had been most confident of our success, and when a friend asked him, "What if the British bring up their big guns?" he replied:
"The moment they bring up their big guns, we win."
He did not explain what he meant by this, but I took it that he expected outside aid the minute the British, recognizing our revolt as serious, gave us the dignity of combatants by using heavy artillery against us. Whatever he meant, the fact remains that when they took this action, they made us a "belligerent" in the world's eyes and gave us the excuse we could so well use—an appeal to the world court as a "small nation," for a place at the coming peace conference.
Sunday morning one of the despatch-girls, white and scared because she had been escorted to our "fort" by British soldiers, came from headquarters to inform Commandant Mallin that a general surrender had been decided on. The Commandant and Madam were in my room at the time, and Madam instantly grew pale.
"Surrender?" she cried. "We'll never surrender!"
Then she begged the Commandant, who could make the decision for our division, not to think of giving in. It would be better, she said, for all of us to be killed at our posts. I felt as she did about it, but the girl who had brought the despatch became more and more excited, saying that the soldiers outside had threatened to "blow her little head off" if she did not come out soon with the word they wanted. Possibly they suspected any Irish girl would be more likely to urge resistance than surrender.
Commandant Mallin, to quiet us, I suppose, said he would not surrender unless forced to do so. But he must have decided to give in at once, for in less than an hour an ambulance came to take me to St. Vincent's Hospital, just across the Green.