As they carried me down-stairs, our boys came out to shake my hand. I urged them again and again to hold out. As I said good-by to Commandant Mallin, I had a feeling I should never see him again. Not that it entered my head for a moment that he would be executed by the British. Despite all our wrongs and their injustices, I did not dream of their killing prisoners of war.
I felt no such dread concerning the countess, though our last words together were about her will. I had witnessed it, and she had slipped it in the lining of my coat. I was to get it to her family at the earliest possible moment. It was fortunate that I did.
My departure was the first move in the surrender. That afternoon all the revolutionists gave up their arms to the British in St. Patrick's Square.
X
Those first two weeks in St. Vincent's Hospital were the blackest of my life. In that small, white room I was, at first, as much cut off as though in my grave. I had fever, and the doctors and nurses were more worried over my pneumonia than over my wounds, though every time they dressed them I suffered from the original treatment with corrosive sublimate. My greatest anxiety, however, was because I could get no word to my mother in Glasgow. I knew she would think I had been killed.
That was just what happened. The first word she had received since the day I left home was that I was dead; that I had been shot in the spine, and left lying on the Dublin pavement for two days. The next rumor that reached her was that I was not dead, but paralyzed. The third report was that the British had sentenced me to fifteen years' imprisonment. Had I not been wounded, the last would probably have been true.
After two weeks I wrote a letter, and the doctor had it forwarded home for me. It had not been easy work writing it, for my right arm was the one that had been wounded. I knew, though, that unless she had word in my own handwriting, my mother might not believe what she read.
Presently news began to drift in to me of trials and executions. I could not get it through my head. Why were these men not treated as prisoners of war? We had obeyed all rules of war and surrendered as formally as any army ever capitulated. All my reports were of death; nothing but death!