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.
"TheTimes!" Carroll's voice was a mouthed rasp protracted by the whistling of air through the hole in his trachea. He held out his rifle to Yeats. "Go!"
Yeats took it, set Carroll down, then tore for the corner. Four remaining men waited there, winded and indecisive. Yeats passed them on the run. "With me!" he yelled, and fired his gun in the air. He looked back. The men were with him.
Yeats swung around, facing forward again. Turning into Abbey Street, advancing in a line abreast and at a slow trot, was a squad of fusilliers led by a florid-faced sergeant. There was no time for either side to fire. Yeats hit the gap between two tommies, swinging his rifle barrel across the cheekbone of the man nearest him. He could hear it crack as the man went down. Yeats was through with three of his men behind him. They were near the burned-out Liberty Hall now, and friendly fire covered them in their dash to theTimes' print shop. Lights blazed within. No low-country hearth had ever looked so beckoning.
"Good work with that rifle." Harry Joyce grinned at Yeats as Yeats pounded on the door with his rifle stock. Joyce nodded approvingly. "That's all she's good for now, General, until you reload. She's a single shot."
The place didn't feel like a newspaper office, but it was going to do for one. Print shop or no, there were desks there. Yeats had commandeered one and was writing away at white heat.
"What is it to be?" Doheny, the night editor asked, waiting patiently until Yeats had put down his pen.
"Narrative poem," Yeats said. "Not Wandering Aengus, Cuchulain, Cathleen ni Houlihan. A poem of modern times and modern men. Here are the first pages."