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.

In the House of Commons shortly after the rising, the cabinet was questioned if it were true that the body of a boy in the uniform of the Irish Volunteers had been unearthed in the grounds of Trinity College, with the marks of twenty bayonet wounds upon him.

"No," was the response, "there were not twenty; there were only nineteen"!

The body in question was that of Gerald Keogh, one of a family passionately devoted to the cause of Irish freedom. He had been sent to Kimmage to bring back fifty men. He went scouting ahead of them, just as I had done when I brought in the men from the Leeson Street bridge. As he was passing Trinity College, held by the British, he was shot down and swiftly captured. It is generally understood he was asked for information, and that, upon his refusing to answer, the soldiers tried to force it from him by prodding him with their bayonets. I might add that the fifty men with him were not attacked as they went by.

This boy's brother was also captured by British soldiers, who decided to hang him then and there. He begged them to shoot him, but they fastened a noose around his neck and led him to a lamp-post. Fortunately an officer came along at that moment and rescued him. Even children were not safe from being terrorized by the soldiers, as Mr. Dillon later brought out in the House of Commons.

There also were murders in North King Street. Fourteen men who had nothing to do with the rising, were killed in their homes by British soldiers who buried them in their cellars, while others looted the houses. The house in Leinster Road was pillaged, and the soldiers had the effrontery to sell the books, fine furniture, and paintings on the street in front of the dwelling.

I had been in the hospital now about five weeks, and had been told I might go in a few days to visit friends in the city if I would promise to return every day to have my wounds dressed. Then one morning I was informed there was a "G-man," as we call government detectives, waiting down-stairs to see me. He had been coming every day to the hospital, it seems, to learn if I was yet strong enough to go to jail. Evidently he had decided that I was, for he told me I must accompany him to Bridewell Prison.

When I went up to the ward to say good-by and get my things, I found the nurses terribly upset. You see, it brought the Irish question right home to that hospital. They went to him in a body and tried to beg me off, but he insisted on his rights, and away I went despite tears and protestations.

This was the first time I had been out, so naturally I felt queer and weak. Nor was I pleased with my companion. He had a fat, self-satisfied face; in fact, was not at all the handsome, keen-looking detective you see on the cover of a dime novel. Besides, he was too polite. He thought, I suppose, that this would be the best way to get me to answer the hundred and one questions he began to ask me. I told him I might answer questions about myself, but I certainly should not answer any concerning the countess or my other friends.

This response kept him quiet for a block or two. Then he turned suddenly and asked me about two girls from Glasgow who had come to Ireland at the same time that I did. I just walked along as though I had not heard a word, and so we proceeded in silence the rest of the way.

When we entered the vestibule of the prison, an old official immediately began to catechize me. I refused to answer a single one of his questions, not even as to my name. Instead I pointed to the "G-man."

"Ask him," I said. "He knows all about me, and can tell you if he wants to."

The detective's face grew red, but he did answer the old man's questions. It was very interesting to me to find that he knew who my parents were; that I had been born twelve miles from Glasgow; that I had gone to different schools which he named, and that I had attended the training college for teachers. He told just where I had been teaching, and how well known I was as a militant suffragette. But what he did not say was even more interesting. He never declared that I had been a combatant in the rising. I wondered inwardly if he thought I had been only a despatch-rider or a first-aid girl. I was exceedingly glad I had let him answer for me as, taking it for granted they knew all about me, I might have given myself away.

The old man finally called the matron and told her to treat me well, as I was not a "drunk or disorderly" person, to which class this prison is given over, but a military prisoner. Indeed she did treat me well. Since there was nothing on which to sit down, she kindly opened a cell and let me sit on the wooden plank they call a bed, and stare at the wooden head-board. I did not look forward much to such accommodations, with my wounds still painful. She talked to me, too, very sympathetically. Sometimes it was hard for us to hear each other, as there were many drunken men singing and cursing. Being drunk, they were able to forget that Ireland was under martial law, and cursed the British loudly or sang disrespectful songs.

The detective had gone out, and those in the jail seemed waiting to hear from him before they picked out my permanent cell. After about two hours, he came back. From where I sat, I could see him bend over the old man and whisper to him. Then he walked over to me.

"Come," he said, "we'll go now."

"Go where?" I asked.

"To the hospital," he replied, "or anywhere else you wish. You are free."

The matron was as pleased as if she were a friend of mine. I was too amazed to know what to think. I told the detective, however, that as I did not know this part of Dublin, I could not find my way back to the hospital without his company. Off we went again, and he paid my carfare, for which I thanked him.

In the sky overhead were aËroplanes that the British kept hovering over Dublin to impress the people.

"Are those the little things with which you fight the Zeppelins?" I asked my detective.

This remark hurt his feelings. He was not British, he informed me, but a good Redmondite. How embarrassed he was when I asked him if he liked arresting Irish who had shown their love of Ireland by being willing to die for her and, what sometimes seemed worse to me, going into an English prison for life. After that we did not talk any more until he said good-by to me at the hospital door.

The nurses were not as surprised to see me back as I had expected them to be. They had known I was returning, for it was the head doctor who had telephoned the authorities at Dublin Castle to tell them, with a good deal of heat, that I was in no condition to begin a prison sentence. That must have been what the "G-man" had whispered to the old official at Bridewell Prison.

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