He did not explain what he meant by this, but I took it that he expected outside aid the minute the British, recognizing our revolt as serious, gave us the dignity of combatants by using heavy artillery against us. Whatever he meant, the fact remains that when they took this action, they made us a "belligerent" in the world's eyes and gave us the excuse we could so well use--an appeal to the world court as a "small nation," for a place at the coming peace conference. Sunday morning one of the despatch-girls, white and scared because she had been escorted to our "fort" by British soldiers, came from headquarters to inform Commandant Mallin that a general surrender had been decided on. The Commandant and Madam were in my room at the time, and Madam instantly grew pale. "Surrender?" she cried. "We'll never surrender!" Then she begged the Commandant, who could make the decision for our division, not to think of giving in. It would be better, she said, for all of us to be killed at our posts. I felt as she did about it, but the girl who had brought the despatch became more and more excited, saying that the soldiers outside had threatened to "blow her little head off" if she did not come out soon with the word they wanted. Possibly they suspected any Irish girl would be more likely to urge resistance than surrender. Commandant Mallin, to quiet us, I suppose, said he would not surrender unless forced to do so. But he must have decided to give in at once, for in less than an hour an ambulance came to take me to St. Vincent's Hospital, just across the Green. As they carried me down-stairs, our boys came out to shake my hand. I urged them again and again to hold out. As I said good-by to Commandant Mallin, I had a feeling I should never see him again. Not that it entered my head for a moment that he would be executed by the British. Despite all our wrongs and their injustices, I did not dream of their killing prisoners of war. I felt no such dread concerning the countess, though our last words together were about her will. I had witnessed it, and she had slipped it in the lining of my coat. I was to get it to her family at the earliest possible moment. It was fortunate that I did. My departure was the first move in the surrender. That afternoon all the revolutionists gave up their arms to the British in St. Patrick's Square. X 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.