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!

At dawn on May 3, the British shot Padraic Pearse, Thomas McDonagh, and old Tom Clarke.

The following day they shot Joseph Plunkett, the brother of Padraic Pearse, and two other leaders, Daly and O'Hanrahan.

The third day John McBride, a man known the world over for his stand in the Boer War, was shot to death. He was the only one killed that day, and we wondered why. What was this British reasoning that determined who should go in company with his fellows and who should go alone?

At length came the turn of the Countess Markievicz. Because she was a woman, they commuted her death-sentence to penal servitude for life. I was very glad; but I knew that, since she had fought as one of them, she would rather have died with them. Penal servitude! Those words rang like a knell for one who was all energy, who needed people around her, who wanted to serve.

THE ORDER THAT MADE THE SURRENDER
OF THE COLLEGE OF SURGEONS INEVITABLE

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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—

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.

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