From the roof there comes the sound of machine guns. Looking towards
Sackville Street one picks out easily Nelson's Pillar, which towers
slenderly over all the buildings of the neighbourhood. It is wreathed in
smoke. Another towering building was the D.B.C. Café. Its Chinese-like
pagoda was a landmark easily to be found, but to-day I could not find
it. It was not there, and I knew that, even if all Sackville Street was
not burned down, as rumour insisted, this great Café had certainly been
curtailed by its roof and might, perhaps, have been completely burned.
On the gravel paths I found pieces of charred and burnt paper. These
scraps must have been blown remarkably high to have crossed all the
roofs that lie between Sackville Street and Merrion Square.
At eleven o'clock there is continuous firing, and snipers firing from
the direction of Mount Street, and in every direction of the City these
sounds are being duplicated.
In Camden Street the sniping and casualties are said to have been very
heavy. One man saw two Volunteers taken from a house by the soldiers.
They were placed kneeling in the centre of the road, and within one
minute of their capture they were dead. Simultaneously there fell
several of the firing party.
An officer in this part had his brains blown into the roadway. A young
girl ran into the road picked up his cap and scraped the brains into it.
She covered this poor debris with a little straw, and carried the hat
piously to the nearest hospital in order that the brains might be buried
with their owner.
The continuation of her story was less gloomy although it affected the
teller equally.
"There is not," said she, "a cat or a dog left alive in Camden Street.
They are lying stiff out in the road and up on the roofs. There's lots
of women will be sorry for this war," said she, "and their pets killed
on them."
In many parts of the City hunger began to be troublesome. A girl told me
that her family, and another that had taken refuge with them, had eaten
nothing for three days. On this day her father managed to get two loaves
of bread somewhere, and he brought these home.
"When," said the girl, "my father came in with the bread the whole
fourteen of us ran at him, and in a minute we were all ashamed for the
loaves were gone to the last crumb, and we were all as hungry as we had
been before he came in. The poor man," said she, "did not even get a bit
for himself." She held that the poor people were against the Volunteers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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