I agree to these conditions for the men only under my own command in the Moore Street District and for the men in the Stephen's Green Command.
James Connolly
April 29/16
On consultation with Commandant Connolly and their officers I have decided to agree to unconditional surrender also.
Thomas MacDonagh.
The British did not shoot any one on Sunday. They let us meditate on all that the past week had done to our leaders. There is no torture so excruciating as suspense. It is the suspense which Ireland has had to endure for generations that has weakened her more than any battles. How we have waited and waited! It has always been hard for us to believe we were not to realize our hopes. Even in these latter years during which Home Rule has loomed large before us, we have not suspected that, in the end, it would become only a parliamentary trick and a delusion. If any one had told me the Sunday before that all these men were to be shot, I should not have believed them. Our bitter belief has been forced upon us.
On Monday the British began it again. This time it was Michael Mallin they stood against a wall and shot. I remembered how, when I was so ill at the College of Surgeons, he had been gentle with me. He always had tried to ease the discomforts of his men. You would never have guessed by looking at him, he was so quiet and restrained, that he had been waiting twenty years for the day which would make him a commandant over Irish soldiers. He told me that, as a boy of fourteen, he had enlisted in the British army to get experience with which to fight Great Britain. When he was stationed in India, he said, he had lain awake night after night, planning how some day he could put his military knowledge at Ireland's service. Six days he served Ireland; eight days he lay in prison; now he was dead!
Later his widow came to see me. She brought me the note-book he used when writing the despatches I carried. She brought me, besides, some small bits of Irish poplin he had woven himself. She did not break down; she seemed exalted. It was the same with all the wives of those shot, and with the mother of Padraic and William Pearse. You would have thought they had been greatly honored, that their dignity was equal to bearing it.
Yet they all had terrible stories of cruelty to tell me. Kilmainham Prison was a grim waiting-room for death. In addition, the court-martial never lasted long enough for any one to feel he had been fairly tried and judged. I heard all the prison sentences, over a hundred that first week! Most of them were for long terms, and five for life. Councilor Partridge was given a fifteen-year sentence that afterward was commuted to ten.
It is not the same thing to read of executions and sentences in the press and to hear of them from the lips of friends,—the wives, mothers, and daughters of the men executed or sentenced for life. To feel we had failed in our purpose was enough to make us brood; but to know that never again would these men sing rebel songs together or tell of their hopes—