This was the Citizen Army, headed by a more radical, bolder (some might say more impetuous) leadership. Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett formed at the front of the HQ company, all self-proclaimed Commandant-Generals. Though not all of the soldiers were uniformed, or even armed with rifles, these three wore green uniforms crossed by Sam Browne belts and sheathed ceremonial swords.
Four city battalions had mustered elsewhere and were occupying their positions around the center of Dublin and Dublin Castle itself-administrative headquarters of the British occupation and (a complicating factor) also a Red Cross hospital. These city battalions were charged with impeding troops from the British barracks in the outlying reaches of the city from pinching in on the rebel command post, which would be set up within the General Post Office-once it was taken.
The generals formed up their column of perhaps fifty men, backed up by a couple of trucks and motorcycles and a late addition, Michael O'Rahilly-known as The O'Rahilly, himself being the head of that storied clan. Cofounder of the Irish Volunteers, he had arrived at the last minute in his green Ford touring car, which he helped load with homemade bombs and spare ammunition. Though his organization had attempted to abort this revolution, his addition to the force gave it a huge lift. With a sure touch for the apt word, he had announced, "I helped wind this clock. I've come to hear it ring."
At their leaders' command the column set off for O'Connell Street, a broad boulevard flanked by a few stately Georgian homes and an array of hotels, shops and public buildings. Dominating this scene was Nelson's Pillar, 135 feet tall and capped by a statue of the naval hero. Ambitious view seekers could climb its winding steps for a fine outlook over the city and, near to hand, the GPO.
Bemused and largely puzzled bystanders watched this bizarre and faintly ragtag procession on its progress along Abbey Street, then up O'Connell. A bunch of British officers watched from the Metropole Hotel where they took rooms. They had seen such maneuvers, even mock battles, before, and regarded them as comic opera turns that afforded them much amusement. It came as a surprise to many when Connolly, in a loud, stentorian voice, brandished his unsheathed sword and yelled, "The Post Office-charge!"
His troops, those with rifles waving them and firing them in the air, poured through the main entrance. They met no defending force; for all its neoclassical splendor, it was a post office, after all. Within minutes the building was taken. Only two persons within sight were of even vaguely military status. One was a Dublin policeman, the other a British lieutenant sending a telegram to his wife. Pressing onwards, the occupying force found seven British soldiers in the upstairs telegraph office, the post office guard detail. They had been issued guns but no ammunition. They became the first prisoners of the revolution.
Connolly looked out through a pall of smoke toward the Liffey and his longtime bailiwick, Liberty Hall. A burning glow suffused the air, a false sunset to a long Wednesday not ending well.
"The bastards have shelled Liberty Hall. Well, that I expected, but never that the capitalist swine would shell their own factories and public buildings. Hotels, even!"
"You're thinking too much like a socialist revolutionary, Jim, and not enough like an Irishman. They hate us and what we're doing more than they love their property." Pearse nodded toward the Metropole, late billet of British officers and now a sniper's outpost of the revolution, and also in flames. "They'll destroy their property rather than have us use it."
The building shuddered from the shockwave of a nearby hit.
"A lot of those fires are set by looters," Connolly said, and shook his head. "I had hoped more of my class would have joined us than pillaged and burned."
Pearse wasn't interested in continuing this ideological discussion.
"That's an eighteen-pounder. They've brought a gunboat up the Liffey, too. Well, we've lasted three days, more than Emmett's rising, but we can't last much longer digging in to positions that'll soon be pulverized." He turned to the IRB's strategist. "What do you say, Joe?"
Plunkett looked up from his maps, looking every bit a man who was dying except for his piercing eyes. His neck was bandaged from his recent surgery, and his face was wan as if the bandages had served instead to block the blood from his cheeks.
"I'd hoped for better than this. We're in defensive positions and we don't have the guns or men to mount a sortie, much less take another building. We need the country to rise with us."
Pearse turned to Yeats. "You can write us arann, Willie, but we need a means to promulgate it."
"A newspaper," Yeats said. "I have friends at theIrish Times."
"Reactionary rag," Connolly growled.
"The publishers, indeed," Yeats said. "Not my friends."
Pearse gave him an intense look. Yeats had traded his billowing shirt and silk tie-the city clothes that Pearse had known-for rough country tweeds and hobnailed boots. He looked very much a man ready for hard and dirty work. His eyes had the raging look of a burning king of yore, fiercer than Plunkett's. Pearse could hardly credit his eyes.
"Forget their offices," Yeats continued. "Get me to their print shop and the type setters. If the telephones still work I'll get the night editor there. We'll publish your proclamation and my statement and-yes-a poem. Get some copies out of the city to Cork, Limerick, Tralee. Let that be the spark to fire the land!"
"Yes!" Pearse seized Yeats' hand. "We'll round up a squad."
"Smaller is better, Pat," Plunkett said. "I'll see if Ned Daly can spare some men to reinforce them once they've made it."
Pearse looked out over the abandoned street, raked by sniper fire of tommies and rebels alike at any sign of movement.
"Dusk is best," he said. "The smoke is bringing it sooner."
Yeats looked out at the mass of rubble that was O'Connell Street. Some of it was the wreck of gaping storefronts-shattered glass, occasionally glinting orange in the reflection of flames, tattered awnings, overturned counters and mannequins thrown out into the street. Horsecarts and trams lay on their sides. Two dead horses, killed the first day in a silly and bloody charge of mounted British lancers, lay stiff-legged and putrifying in the lee of Nelson's Pillar. Some of the rubble had been organized by the insurgents into a barricade-huge rolls of newsprint, mattresses, all or parts of drays and trams, furniture, even bicycles, all baled together by pulled-down tram wires and the one roll of barbed wire the rebels had rounded up.
Michael Carroll beckoned his men forward with a swing of his arm, then motioned to Yeats to fall in behind.
"Our men will cover us from the Metropole. There's a bolthole in the barricade by that bakery wagon." He grinned. "I dummy-wired it myself."
The squad streamed out into the twilit haze. The streetlights had been shot out, but a couple of snipers banged away nonetheless, their bullets skipping and whining off the cobblestones in puffs of stone dust. The rebels dodged their way to the barricade, and three of them flopped down in the cover of a tram's steel wheels.
"None of that, Joyce," Carroll yelled, pulling the nearest man erect and pushing an upended shop counter aside. He led his men through the gap. Yeats could hear the ring of his own nailed boots on stone as he ran hard to keep up. They burst through the barricade and veered for the corner of Abbey Street. A machine gun stuttered. Yeats strained forward, toward the head of the zigzagging line of men, reaching Carroll's shoulder. Carroll looked back over his shoulder and took a bullet in the throat. His mouth puckered to an «O» as he fell to his knees. Yeats moved to hold him from toppling over. The rest of the men turned the corner without looking back.