I was proud that I could tell my mother I had been mentioned three times for bravery in despatches sent to headquarters. The third time was when I was wounded. Commandant Mallin had said then:
"You'll surely be given the republican cross."
But the republic did not last long enough for that. I was given an Irish cross. This was the joint gift of the Cumman-na-mBan girls and the Irish Volunteers of Glasgow. They arranged, as a surprise for me, a meeting with addresses and songs. Since I had no hint of it, I was out of Scotland on the day set. They had to repeat part of the ceremony when I came back. It all was meant to be very solemn, but somehow I felt strange and absurd to be getting a cross for bravery that had led to death or prison so many others.
I had left Scotland very quietly to go to England and see some of our boys being held in Reading Jail without any charge against them. I had had a good talk with them, even though a guard stood near all the time. He was a pleasant-enough person, so we included him in our conversation, explaining the whole rising to him. The boys were in good spirits, too. They laughed when I told them I had always boasted I would never set foot in England. And here, on their account, I was not only in England, but in an English prison.
We had very few Irish revolutionists in the Scotch prisons. Two hundred of them were brought, during August, to Barlinnie Prison, but they were allowed to stay only a short time. Far too much sympathy was expressed for them by the Irish in Glasgow and by Scotch suffragettes, who made a point of going to visit them and taking them comforts. Presently they were removed to the camp at Frongoch, Wales, where several hundred others who had taken part in the rising were interned. As they marched through the streets of Glasgow, we could not help noticing how much larger and finer looking they appeared than the British soldiers guarding them. They were men from Galway,—men who for six long days had put up a memorable fight in that county, and with less than forty rifles had held six hundred square miles! Three thousand of the rifles that went down with the Aud had been promised to Galway. Yet five hundred men had been ready to "go out" when they heard that, despite the countermanding order, Dublin forces were rebelling, no matter what the odds.
XIV
When I went back to Dublin in August, it was to find that almost every one on the streets was wearing republican colors. The feeling was bitter, too—so bitter that the British soldiers had orders to go about in fives and sixes, but never singly. They were not allowed by their officers to leave the main thoroughfares, and had to be in barracks before dark,—that is, all except the patrol. The city was still under martial law, but it seemed to me the military authorities were the really nervous persons. Much of this bitterness came from the fact that people remembered how, after the war in South Africa which lasted three years instead of five days, only one man had been executed. After our rising sixteen men had been put to death.
Everywhere I heard the opinion expressed that if the revolution could have lasted a little longer, we would have been flooded with recruits. As it was, the rising had taken people completely by surprise. Before they could recover from that surprise, it was over, and its leaders were paying the penalty of death or imprisonment. One week is a short time for the general, uninformed mass of a dominated people to decide whether an outbreak of any sort is merely an impotent rebellion, or a real revolution with some promise of success. Besides, there have been so many isolated protests in Ireland, doomed from the first to failure.