The loss of life, too, had been tremendous, but the military casualties were out of all proportion to those of the rebels, in some cases the skirmishes representing a proportion of ten, and even twenty, to one. The casualties, in fact, were as high as many a Boer War battle, and amounted to three hundred killed and over a thousand wounded, of which nearly two hundred were civilians. They included over sixty officers and about four hundred rank and file. The Royal Irish Constabulary lost two killed and thirty-five wounded; the Dublin Metropolitan Police six; the Royal Navy three; and the Loyal Volunteers sixteen. With regard to the Sinn Feiners no figures are available, but they must have been considerably less than a quarter of these--perhaps even under. The circumstances under which the troops and police suffered, however, were such that the severest measures were adopted by General Sir John Maxwell, who issued the following statement with regard to the action of the courts martial:-- "In view of the gravity of the rebellion and its connection with German intrigue propaganda, and in view of the great loss of life and destruction of property resulting therefrom, the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief has found it imperative to inflict the most severe sentences on the known organizers of this detestable rising and on those commanders who took an active part in the actual fighting which occurred. It is hoped that these examples will be sufficient to act as a deterrent to intriguers and to bring home to them that the murder of His Majesty's liege subjects or other acts calculated to imperil the safety of the realm will not be tolerated." The military authorities have been blamed for the excessive rigour with which these orders were carried out, especially for the use of shells, but it may be questioned how far this did not arise purely from the nature of the situation. Certainly the rebels were at a disadvantage, and consequently won a certain amount of sympathy, yet only a day before that sympathy was entirely with the unfortunate military; but eventually a point was reached when, instead of the military retrieving the situation lost by the weakness of the politicians, it became a question whether they were not undoing a good deal that it had taken a great deal of hard work upon the part of the politicians to build up. Now this is no idle theory, but the only possible explanation of a series of changes that ensued. When the news of the rising was first announced to John Redmond, he made a dignified if not too diplomatic reply, in which he expressed despair about the situation and utter disgust about the culprits. The next official utterance was the somewhat ponderous manifesto of the Irish Party--interesting as an historical summary of Ireland's real attitude to the Empire, but lacking a grip of the actual psychological drama of the situation.