There came a day when I could no longer endure lying alone in my room, thinking of all that had happened for this reason or that. The nurses had been very kind to me. Some of them were in sympathy with the Sinn Fein movement, while all of them felt the horror of the executions. There were times when I could rise above this horror and cheer them, too, by singing a rebel song. I had interested them, besides, in suffrage work we had been doing in Glasgow, where for several years eleven hundred militants had done picketing and the like.
Finally, however, I persuaded them to let me move into the public ward, where I could see other women patients and talk a little. There were about twenty women and girls in the ward. Nine of them, who had nothing to do with the rising, had been wounded by British soldiers. The nurses insisted this was accidental. But the women themselves would not agree to that explanation, nor did I, for I recalled the Red Cross girls being shot at,—a thing I had seen with my own eyes. I told the nurses I had seen the British firing at our ambulances in the belief, no doubt, that we were doing what we had caught them at—transporting troops from one part of Dublin to another in ambulances. Sometimes I felt sorry to have to make those nurses see facts as they were, instead of helping them keep what few illusions still remained about their men in khaki. But I was glad when I could tell them what I had just heard of De Vallera's daring. With a handful of men, he had prevented two thousand of the famous Sherwood Foresters coming through lower Mount Street to attack one of our positions. Or, again, it did me good to relate the story of the seventeen-year-old lad who single-handed had captured a British general. The sequel to that tale, however, was not very cheerful, for the same general had sat at the court-martial, and gave the boy who before had had power of life and death over him, a ten year sentence.
There were three women in the ward who had all been struck by the same bullet: a mother, her daughter, and a cousin. They had been friendly to the British soldiers, had fed them because, as the mother told me, her husband and son were in the trenches fighting for Great Britain. These three women had been at their window, looking with curiosity into the street, when the very soldier they had just fed turned suddenly and shot them. One had her jawbone broken, the second her arm pierced, and the third was struck in the breast. They were all serious wounds which kept them in bed. While I was still in the ward, the two men of this family came back from Flanders on leave, only to find no one at home. The neighbors directed them to the hospital. I hate to think how those men looked when they learned why their women wore bandages. They told me that during Easter Week the Germans put up opposite the trenches of the Irish Brigade a placard that read:
"The military are shooting down your wives and children in Dublin."
But the Irish soldiers had not believed it.
I asked them if it was true, as alleged, that in answer to the placard, the Irish Brigade had sung "Rule, Britannia." They were indignant at the idea. They might be wearing khaki, they said, but they never yet had sung "Rule, Britannia." When the day came for them to return to the front, the father wanted to desert, dangerous as that would be, while the son was eager to go back to the trenches.
"This time," he said to me, "we'll not be killing Germans!"
When rumors came later of a mutiny in the Irish regiment, I wondered to myself if these two men were at the bottom of it.
Stories of atrocities poured into our ears when the Germans invaded Belgium. Now we had to hear them from our own people, and now we had to believe them. They were stories as cruel as any heard since the days of the Island Magee massacre.