At length Norah Connolly and her sister came to see me. They told me of their father's last hours; how, because of his wound that already had brought him close to death, he had to be strapped into a chair to face the firing-squad. I thought of gentle Mrs. Connolly saying good-by to her husband, knowing all the while what was about to take place!
Some of the first-aid girls who had been in prison for fifteen days came to visit me, too. We compared notes. I learned then how Chris Caffrey had been stripped and searched by British soldiers to her shame, for she was a modest girl. But she had eaten her despatch before they dragged her off the street where she had been bicycling. I heard, too, how Chris had been almost prevented from reaching headquarters by a crowd of poor women gathered about the post-office for their usual weekly "separation allowance." Their husbands were all fighting in France or Flanders for the British. They would not get their allowance this week, and were terror-stricken, crowding about the post-office and crying and shouting hysterically. Chris, as we called Christine, had to fire her revolver at the ground before they would make way for her.
Next followed the story of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, one of the few men in Dublin we could go to for advice about the law when we had any plan to carry out. He had been shot without a trial, they said; without even knowing, when called out into the little courtyard, that he was about to be killed. And he had had nothing to do with the rising! He always had been against the use of force. When he was arrested, after a day spent in trying to get a committee of safety together because the police had disappeared, his wife did not even know where he was. She had no word of his death until a day after he was buried in quicklime, the burial of a criminal!
Ah, how the stories of Belgian atrocities which we had heard from the lips of the Archbishop of Michlin when the Great War broke out, paled beside this one fortnight in Dublin! We did not know when it would end or how. There ensued a reign of terror in all Irish homes, whether the men or women had had anything to do with the rising or not. For both soldiers and police were now given power to arrest any one they pleased. Several hundred men were put in prison under no charge, nor were any charges ever preferred in many cases.
The women, too! Helen Maloney and Dr. Katherine Lynn, whose motor Madam had used that night in St. Stephen's Green and whose bicycle I had been riding, were both arrested Easter Monday and taken to Dublin Castle. Miss Maloney was discovered a few hours later with the lock half off her door, her fingers bleeding pitifully from attempts to get out. Next they were taken to Kilmainham jail, where for fifteen days those two women, with eighty others, were kept in a room completely lacking any sanitary arrangements. We used to shudder at stories of such deeds, which we then believed could happen only in Siberia. Dr. Lynn is famous for her surgical skill. She is one of the Irish doctors to whom the British send their worst war cripples for treatment, and is far more successful than they in treating such cases. Many visitors to Dublin have seen Miss Maloney on the stage of the Abbey Theater and recognized her talent. Dr. Lynn was deported to Bath; Miss Maloney was sent to the Aylesbury Prison, and kept there a year. Never once during that time was any charge preferred against her.
Little Tommy Keenan of Camden Row had, so he thought, the good fortune to be put in prison with sixty of the Fianna when our men surrendered the College of Surgeons. But, much to their chagrin, at the end of two weeks the boys were released. Did they scurry away to grow up into better British subjects? Not at all! Tommy lined them up in front of the jail and led them off down the street singing "The Watch on the Rhine" at the top of their lungs.
There was no end to the stories I heard as I lay there in the hospital. Stories of heroism and stories of disaster followed one another, each strengthening my belief that the courage and honor of the heroic days of Ireland were still alive in our hearts. Perhaps it is for this we should love our enemies: when they cleave with their swords the heart of a brave man, they lay bare the truth of life.