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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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