The Guns of Easter (9 page)

TO GET TO ELLA’S, JIMMY
would have to cross the Grand Canal. He set off immediately, before he had time to be frightened. His head hurt and his body felt heavy and strange, but he kept thinking of that kitchen full of food.

He walked quickly down Mount Street. At its far end lay the Grand Canal, and on the other side of the bridge was – finally – Northumberland Road.

There was heavy firing going on down towards the canal and it grew louder as he approached. There was no boom of artillery, but what sounded like hundreds of rifles keeping up a continuous fire. It was an endless, rolling wave, like a distant storm.

A large crowd of civilians had gathered at the top of Mount Street; they blocked his view of the bridge beyond. It was strange, but in a way it was cheering – things couldn’t be so bad if all these people were standing around, could they? The shooting seemed to be coming from directly ahead, beyond the crowd.

One of the things that surprised Jimmy most during the day was the constant presence of onlookers. The people of Dublin were reacting to the rebellion in odd ways. In
places they were calm, and went about their business as best they could. But wherever there was fighting going on people gathered around to watch. They treated it like entertainment, as if they couldn’t really believe that it was serious. Certainly they didn’t seem to believe that they themselves might be in danger.

The onlookers gave the whole rebellion a strange air of fantasy. If this was a serious fight, it seemed, these people wouldn’t be standing around so casually watching it. Again and again Jimmy found himself thinking of the crowd as spectators at a sports match. You nearly expected them to start clapping after some especially clever shot or move made by one side or the other. It was all like some strange and sinister dream.

This crowd was the biggest he’d seen watching any of the fighting. At its rear, even more strangely, a tramp with a big bushy beard was playing a fiddle, hoping to collect some coppers. But the people ignored him, too busy watching the scene that Jimmy still couldn’t see. As Jimmy drew near there was a lull in the gunfire. A stir came from the crowd, but Jimmy couldn’t make out what was happening. Then the crowd parted in several places and people appeared carrying large bundles. It took several people to carry each bundle.

Jimmy stopped, mystified. Then he noticed that the bundles were a khaki colour, that they were in fact dead or wounded soldiers. The people carried the soldiers
down a laneway, towards a first-aid station.

He was beside the fiddle player now. The tramp stopped playing his fiddle and gestured at the hurrying people.

‘A terrible fight,’ he said. ‘A terrible fight to be sure.’

A whistle blew somewhere ahead, and the shooting started again. It sounded for all the world like a referee’s whistle. Was he going mad? But there was nothing imaginary about the renewed storm of fire that answered the whistle.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked the tramp.

The man shrugged and spat on the ground. ‘Somebody is shooting somebody else,’ he said, ‘and the public is enjoying the free entertainment – so they’re neglecting me.’ He smiled at Jimmy. ‘I don’t suppose, young fellow,’ he said, ‘that you’d have a spare copper? You don’t look as if you do, but there’s no harm in asking.’

Jimmy was looking beyond him, at the back of the crowd. He reached absentmindedly into his pocket and pulled out a coin. He handed it to the tramp, who looked at it in surprise.

‘Sixpence!’ he said. ‘Glory be! The poor give to the poor – it’s the way of the world.’

But Jimmy wasn’t really paying any attention to him. He hadn’t even noticed that he was giving the man so much money. Instead he ran past the tramp, worming his way through the motionless crowd towards the bridge.
His head hurt now, and his throat felt sore. He was definitely sick. He stepped on several feet as he passed through the crowd, but nobody paid any attention to him. They were all transfixed by the scene in front of them.

Nothing he’d come across since Monday had prepared Jimmy for what he saw when he finally reached the front of the crowd. It was a sight so terrible that it held him as mesmerised as any of the other watchers. He had only imagined that he’d seen terrible things since Monday: compared to this, everything else had been only a small horror. What was happening on Mount Street Bridge was the worst thing in the world.

WHEN HE SAW THE SOLDIERS ON THE BRIDGE
Jimmy thought that they must be troops from the barracks at Beggar’s Bush. The barracks was just down the road. It seemed natural that they’d march this way if they were going into the city.

In fact the soldiers were not from the barracks. They’d come over from Britain the night before. From the harbour at Kingstown three columns of troops had marched the six miles into Dublin. Two of the columns
had taken other routes, and they’d already entered the city with no resistance. The third column came as far as Mount Street Bridge and didn’t look as though they were going to get any farther.

The Irish Volunteers had taken over two houses in Northumberland Road itself, and a third, Clanwilliam House, on the city side of the canal overlooking Mount Street Bridge. They’d ambushed the third column as it came, and the fighting had been going on all morning.

Later Jimmy learned that there were only about a dozen Volunteers involved; but looking at the shooting, you’d think there were hundreds of Volunteers there. They had no heavy arms, only rifles and pistols. They didn’t have a single bomb or grenade between them. But they were in a perfect ambush position, and the British army had brought its men over in such a hurry that they had no bombs or grenades either. They were regretting that now. And they were dying because of it.

All the soldiers could do was to attack the Volunteer positions, and all the Volunteers had to do was to keep firing. They hardly even needed to aim. The result was like something from a slaughterhouse. The soldiers charged the bridge, the Volunteers shot them down as they charged.

Jimmy heard the facts of the matter later, when the rebellion was over; he even met one of the men who’d been in Clanwilliam House. Now, at four o’clock on that
day, he had no thought of facts or statistics. He’d been thinking a lot about dying during the day; now he was watching death having a party. It seemed as though hundreds of young men were being slaughtered in front of his eyes. It was madness.

To his left Jimmy heard the thunder of the Volunteers’ guns from Clanwilliam House, but his eyes stayed fixed in front of him on Mount Street Bridge. The bridge, and Northumberland Road beyond, seemed to be a solid mass of soldiers. Some of them were upright, running; others were crawling, and many were just lying still, unable to move.

The whistle that Jimmy had heard was the signal for a charge. Soldiers on the footpaths of Northumberland Road, still unsure of just how many houses the Volunteers held, were pouring fire into every house where anything moved. Past them charged a great khaki wave of men heading for the bridge. They were trying to cross it, to reach the Volunteers’ position on the other side of the canal.

But they were failing completely. It was as if someone had drawn an invisible line about halfway across the bridge, a line that meant death for anyone who tried to cross it.

The troops charged up the road. When they reached the bridge they threw themselves on the ground and began to crawl. The roadway and footpaths of the bridge
itself were completely covered with crawling men. They wormed along in column, forming what looked to Jimmy’s feverish eyes like four giant, khaki-coloured snakes. Between these snakes, and all around them, lay the dead and wounded. The snakes, as they tried to advance, added their share to these piles.

No-one got beyond that midway point. Again and again Jimmy saw crawling soldiers drop and lie still, or jump up screaming, only to flop brokenly back down. It was, indeed, a slaughter. And this was all happening only a few yards in front of the watching crowd. Here were the civilians, watching, while a few yards away were these hundreds of men crawling, crying, screaming and dying.

‘The poor boys,’ said a stout woman in a white apron beside Jimmy. ‘The poor young fellas.’

Jimmy’s whole body trembled as he stood. He wanted to run away, to scream himself; but his feet wouldn’t move and his voice stuck in his throat. He was as frozen as any of the dead young men on the bridge. He couldn’t even make his eyes close, though he dearly wanted to close them.

Ahead of him the bridge bristled with khaki figures. They jerked and tossed like the leaves of a tree being blown in a strong wind. But they weren’t leaves, they were men: they were fathers and brothers and sons and uncles. They were good men or bad men, mean or decent men, heroes or cowards.

The wind that tossed them didn’t care what they were. It was the same wind that had hit Charlie Fox, that had sent Billy Moran tumbling to the grass in the Green. It was the wind of death, and it was snuffing these men’s lives out like so many candles.

Finally they stopped coming. The shooting in Northumberland Road went on, but the Volunteers in Clanwilliam House stopped firing. To Jimmy’s astonishment, people from the crowd around him began to run out on to the bridge. There was a priest, and a man in a white coat who must be a doctor. There was a small group of other men and women too. The civilians on the bridge bent to the wounded soldiers. They helped those who could still walk to get to their feet. The other wounded had to be carried.

‘Clear the way,’ people shouted. ‘Clear the way there!’

Three men carrying a soldier with a headwound staggered past Jimmy. The crowd made way for them. More wounded, alone or else supported or carried by onlookers, streamed by. It was another procession such as Jimmy had seen as he arrived. He watched them disappearing into the laneway behind Clanwilliam House.

From Northumberland Road the whistle blew again. The last civilians were sprinting hastily from the bridge. Up along Northumberland Road, another wave of soldiers was rushed towards the canal.

Oh no, Jimmy thought. Please, no. Not again.

With tears in his eyes, unable to make himself move, he was forced to watch the same awful scene repeat itself. The first soldiers fell without even reaching the bridge. Those who did reach it threw themselves down and began to crawl forward, forming once more into the huge, ugly snakes. The Volunteers picked them off like flies. Not one soldier got more than halfway across. The piles of bodies grew higher. It was like watching the previous attack all over again.

‘Mother of mercy,’ said the stout woman beside him. ‘Those poor, poor boys.’

Had this, then, been going on since morning? It made no difference to him that the soldiers would have shot the Volunteers in the same way if the positions had been reversed. The point was that nobody should do this to anybody at all.

Beside him Jimmy heard a sudden gasp and a muffled cry. The stout woman in the apron crumpled and fell to the ground. At first Jimmy thought she’d fainted, but then he saw the spreading red stain on the white apron. Someone called for a doctor. The woman lay on the ground. She looked puzzled. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but nothing came out.

‘The poor young boys,’ she said at last.

Something inside Jimmy snapped. Too weak to run, he staggered away and up along the canal. After a minute he had to stop. He bent over and was violently sick. His body
shook. His face was burning.

If someone had asked Jimmy his name right then, he couldn’t have told them. He felt he was going mad. But it wasn’t madness. Nor was it the effect of Charlie’s punches, although they hadn’t helped. It wasn’t even the growing shock he’d been feeling all day, a shock that had reached its high point watching the insanity on the bridge.

What was wrong with Jimmy now was simpler but much more dangerous than any of those things. It was what he’d feared but hadn’t wanted to believe or even really think about: he’d picked up Sarah’s fever, and now it had come to claim him. His body shook, and the fever burned in his brain.

Behind him, in Northumberland Road, a whistle blew; but Jimmy Conway was no longer interested in the game.

JIMMY WOULD NEVER KNOW FOR SURE
just how he spent the next hour or so. His senses were too mixed up by the fever’s burning. When his mind cleared briefly he found himself in Pembroke Road. Long flights of steps led up to the front doors of the houses here. Jimmy found himself sitting at the bottom of one such flight, leaning against the
railings. His whole body was burning and his clothes were soaked with sweat.

In the distance he heard firing, and now explosions too. Also, the strains of fiddle music seemed to float down on the still air. A fiddle? Jimmy remembered something about a fiddle, but he couldn’t fix the memory in his mind. Then the music stopped suddenly, and it didn’t start again.

Pembroke Road itself seemed to be deserted, at least around here. Jimmy clung desperately to the railings of the house. He had to think, he told himself.

Footsteps came down the road. A man was coming from the direction of the bridge. He wore a ragged overcoat and had long, unkempt hair and a big bushy beard. Jimmy was certain he’d seen him before but he couldn’t think where.

As the man came closer Jimmy heard him muttering to himself. Behind the thick beard his face looked miserable. He reached Jimmy and, seeing the boy’s blank stare, stopped beside him and stared back.

‘Well hello,’ the man said finally. ‘It’s the generous poor young man, ain’t it?’

A memory struggled into Jimmy’s mind – this man had been playing music somewhere.

‘I …’ he began. It was hard to talk. His throat burned. His tongue felt too big for his mouth. He forced the words out. ‘I’m sick.’

The tramp looked at him with some sympathy. ‘You
don’t look well, right enough,’ he said. ‘The whole city is sick if you ask me.’

He reached into the deep pockets of his ragged coat and pulled out two handfuls of little sticks. Mixed in with the sticks were what looked like pieces of wire.

‘Do you know what this is?’ the man demanded.

Jimmy tried to focus his eyes. Some of the sticks were hardly bigger than matches. ‘Is it kindling?’ he asked.

The tramp snorted with scorn. Then, considering, he sighed. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is – now. But do you know what it was?’

Jimmy shook his head. The tramp seemed to waver in front of his eyes.

‘That was my fiddle,’ the tramp said sadly. ‘A fine fiddle that I got in county Kerry nearly twenty years ago now. I’m after using it to earn me bread since, all over this country. And today I was using it for the same thing – if there is any bread left in this cursed city.’ The tramp spat on the ground. ‘Divil a ha’penny I got today, barring yer tanner.’ The tramp seemed angry now. ‘I played them patriotic British marching songs and good Irish rebel songs, but they were all far too busy watching men slaughtering each other to listen. Good loyal citizens all – bad cess to them! – and to the soldiers too.

‘So then this big ugly British sergeant,’ the tramp went on, unstoppable now he had an audience, ‘told me to move on. I’ll remember that cur for as long as I live. I let
me temper get the better of me,’ he said. ‘You’d think I’d know better at my age. I asked the big bosthoon who he thought he was, an English lout, to be telling an Irishman to move on in his own country. And with that he snatched me poor darlin’ little fiddle and trampled it under his big clodhopping army boots. Trampled it into … into kindling, as you so cleverly put it.’

Sighing again, he looked at the pathetic bundles of splinters in his hands. Then he put each bundle carefully back in his pockets.

‘All me own fault, of course,’ he said. ‘I can’t hould me tongue sometimes – I’m the first to admit it. But the gall of the man!’

Jimmy forced himself to ask a question. ‘Why,’ he asked slowly, ‘are you keeping the pieces?’

The tramp thought for a moment. ‘Why, to start a fire with,’ he said. ‘Waste not, want not! You know, boy, with me fiddle, I was an entertainer; without it I’m only a beggar here, and that’s no thing to be in this town. The wars of ould Empire’s glory are after leaving too many crippled soldiers in Dublin. What chance do I have against that kind of competition? The European war will ruin the trade entirely – and this local skirmish won’t help either.’

Jimmy didn’t follow all that the tramp said, but he warmed to the man.

‘W … where do you live?’ he asked him.

‘I have a little tent – a sort of a tent, I should say. But it’s dry at least, or at least it’s sort of dry. A humble thing, but my own. It’s down there be the river Dodder, if the army aren’t after bombing it as a rebel stronghold. They seem to be shooting at anything they don’t understand, and soldiers don’t understand much. I should get back there now, too. It’ll be dark soon, and there’s a curfew. Losing me fiddle to the army is bad enough, but losing me life to them would be worse.’

Jimmy tried to think clearly. He remembered suddenly why he himself must get off the streets. Would the tramp shelter him if he offered him some of the money that he still had? He ought to keep it for his family, but it would be no use to them anyway if the army shot him in the dark.

But if the tramp found out he had the money there was nothing to stop him from just taking it and leaving Jimmy where he was. Nobody would care. Nobody would believe that a poor boy like Jimmy had money anyway, unless he’d robbed it himself.

The boy struggled to decide what he should do, but he just couldn’t think. The fever and the dizziness came in waves and washed his thoughts away, like the waves washing things off a beach. The effort to hold on to them was painful. Jimmy groaned.

Hearing the groan, the tramp leaned forward and peered into the boy’s face. ‘You really are sick, young fella,’ he announced. He reached out and touched
Jimmy’s forehead. ‘Fever,’ he said. ‘You’re burning up with it! What are you doing out at all, at all?’

Jimmy tried to explain, but the effort was too much. The tramp heard the words ‘no food’ and ‘Ma’. They were enough to tell him that the boy was in real trouble, but then you didn’t need much imagination to see that.

‘Can you play the mouth organ?’ asked Jimmy suddenly. The words came out in a rush.

The tramp frowned, puzzled. The boy was raving; the fever had addled his brain. What should he do with him? It was probably some child’s condition that would be harmless to the tramp himself – in his time he had had every fever going. The chances were that this one would be powerless against him. In any case the child couldn’t be left here: he’d get no help from anyone living in this area.

‘The mouth organ,’ Jimmy asked again, with an effort. ‘Can you play it?’

The tramp decided to humour him. ‘Of course I can,’ he said. ‘A man that can play a fiddle can play a thing as simple as a mouth organ. The French fiddle, some calls it – though that’s an awful insult to fiddles, and an awful insult to French people too, for all I know.’

‘Shelter me till the morning,’ Jimmy said, ‘and I’ll give you a brand new mouth organ. Then you won’t be a beggar.’

The tramp could hear the desperation in the boy’s
voice, and his heart went out to the child. He was obviously raving about the mouth organ. But there’s a kind of brotherhood in misery – to abandon him here would be a crime.

‘Come on,’ he said to Jimmy. ‘You have to get in someplace anyhow.’

The boy pushed himself up from the steps and tried to stand up. He swayed from side to side. ‘Is it far?’ he managed to ask.

The tramp looked at him with pity. ‘Here, lean on me,’ he offered. ‘You won’t get far on your own.’

Jimmy did as he was told, glad of the adult support. With the tramp’s arm around him he felt safer. After a day of terrible danger he’d had to face alone, he was sick, lonely, hungry, tired and worried.

Stumbling slowly down Pembroke Road Jimmy felt better. Even though the fever visions racked him, he felt that there might, after all, be some goodness left in the world.