Alternate Generals II

In the Prison of His Days Joel Richards

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916 (a bank holiday), a band of seven revolutionaries and perhaps seven hundred men ignited an uprising in Dublin against British rule. Doomed by nonsupport from the Irish Volunteers and the country at large, the rebellion failed after a week of bloody house-to-house combat that leveled much of Dublin's center and resulted in 130 British soldiers dead.

The rebels had solicited German aid, and a gunrunning ship, attempting a landing, was scuttled by its crew outside Queenstown harbor to avoid capture. The British used this pretext to quickly try the leaders by military courts-martial for treason and abetting the enemy. They were shot, rather than hanged, before Irish or British public opinion could be mustered in their behalf.

The iron chair leg scraped across the pitted floor.

The poet looked up from his notebook to his cellmate. MacBride's eyes were calm, the mustache fierce. Perhaps ill tended was a better word. Prison cells-these kind, without mirrors and with little enough light-did not lend themselves to careful barbering or even routine maintenance of facial hair.

Yeats was clean shaven, or had been two days ago. His hand rubbed over his chin, feeling the rasp of his own stubble. He was unused to this, sleeping in unwashed street clothes, the inability to shape his outward image. He was unused to the larger implications of confinement and imminent death.

"How do you do it, MacBride?" he asked in a low voice, and got back a cocked eyebrow of questioning, no words. Yeats waved an arm about him.

"Does soldiering prepare you for this?"

"It does," MacBride said.

"And death, too?"

"Ever at a soldier's back."

Yeats stood up, took a step or two to stretch out the kinks. A hangman's rope would do that as well. But this was a military barracks, and the others had been shot.

"Sheehy-Skeffington, that harmless, fey man! Can one credit it? The man's a pacifist and still they shot him. So why are we alive?"

MacBride smiled thinly. "Your literary reputation with these barracks types? I doubt it. Maud has been agitating and stirring up her contacts here and in London, I'm thinking."

Yeats nodded and tried to make sense of this. Maud Gonne had been and was the love of his life. She had offered Yeats spiritual love and friendship. She had married Major John (Sean) MacBride, choosing the organizer and leader of the Irish Brigade of the Boer army over Yeats. Yeats had asked Maud to marry him many times. MacBride had asked once-had it been with more decisiveness, less diffidence? — and she had accepted. Though long separated, in the Church's eyes the two were still wed.

What the Church would not put asunder the Crown might, and probably would. Little good that would do Yeats. He and MacBride would continue their link in death.

What had it been? The crowds, duty, or a lonely impulse? All these and the madness of what was Ireland.

What had led him to this tumult?

Sunday was not a day for selling pipes and cigarettes in Dublin. Most fellows might think a fine March afternoon the occasion for a walk on Stephens Green with a favorite girl, or a rougher time at it with the lads on the soccer pitch. Tom Clarke was rather too old for either. Too frail, some might say-but not many. Certainly not the military and constabulary powers at Dublin Castle who knew him well.

Tom Clarke was a naturalized American citizen who played a harder game than soccer. In his youth he had been convicted and imprisoned in London for bomb making. Now he was back in Dublin again, doing business in a modestly sized but highly aromatic tobacco shop on Great Britain Street that announced itself in Gaelic as belonging to T. S. O'Clerigh.

Another type of business altogether was being conducted this day. Present were seven rebels comprising the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood who would later elect one of their number, Patrick Pearse, as President and Commandant-General of the Irish Republic. Pearse was a poet, playwright and headmaster of St. Enda's Irish-Speaking School, himself possessed of a mystical but highly compelling vision of restoring Ireland to its days of splendor and heroism. In stark contrast was the trade unionist, James Connolly-hard-nosed and almost equally a socialist and an Irish revolutionary. He had organized and commanded his own Citizen Army, apart from the Irish Volunteers who made up the far larger body of Irishmen covertly under arms. Also in the conclave was Thomas MacDonagh, university lecturer and critic, and a dynamo of talk and action. Others included Joseph Plunkett, the movement's battle tactician and a man about to undergo an operation for glandular tuberculosis, and Sean McDermott, an upbeat but tough motivator of men.

There had been some good talk. Questions of military planning and logistics had been worked over in good Irish fashion. No amount of words, however, had been able to talk away the inadequacies in manpower and armament of the insurgent forces. Unsaid till now but hanging over the meeting was the palpable fear that this rising would likely be another bloody Irish failure.

Pearse addressed the matter.

"The Volunteers as a body will not be with us. At most we'll get those who are already IRB men, perhaps a few more. We need to rouse a citizenry of irregulars and turn them into a force of nature."

He paused and looked about him. Some of his compatriots stared back, puzzled and uncomprehending. Joe Plunkett opened his mouth in a roundfaced grin and spoke.

"You and MacDonagh are our academics, Padraig. I sense something in your line."

"Indeed," Pearse said. "I think we can get Yeats."

"The poet?" Clarke asked. "Are not the days gone when poets fought beside kings, devisingranns whose powers could shatter battlements and break spears? Would that such days maintained! Ireland is acrawl with poets-more of them than serpents before St. Paddy's time."

"And none better than Yeats," MacDonagh said. "He is not a great orator, but his words and reputation are power in their own right. He was one of our Brotherhood and a revolutionary in the days of the Centenary riots-he exhorted the crowd-and could be one again."

"A bit old, wouldn't you say?" Clarke said with a mischievous grin.

"Fifty-one to your fifty-seven," Pearse laughed. "As well you know."

"But are his fires as hot as Tom's?" McDermott asked. "Banked, rather, I'd heard. What makes you think we can get him?"

"I spoke to him in the street yesterday. He's restless and anxious, asking himself the kind of questions a man does in his middle years, without a cause-as yet-as ours to answer them. You know of his love for the actress Maud Gonne. It's shaped many of his poems these last twenty years."

"She married Sean MacBride," Plunkett said.

"MacBride's back in town," Pearse went on. "And Yeats knows it. Maud has left MacBride these several years, and Yeats still burns to win her. He fears that he must act rather than versify or play consort to her nationalistic schemes. He told me so. We can marry the appeal of his love for his country and his lady."

Clarke smiled. "You're a poet, too, Padraig. Very noble of you to bring aboard Ireland's best. He's bound to upstage you in that department." His eyes turned deep. "But by all means let us have with us a man whose words and presence will raise the nation. And chronicle our fight. But can we get him?"

"I've asked him to join us." Pearse looked at the shop's walnut-and-brass sea captain's clock. "He'll be here in ten minutes-2:30."

"Risky, Padraig," Clarke said. "How much does he know?"

"Nothing concrete. But he's far from a fool. I think he has drawn the true conclusions."

"Can he keep his mouth shut if he doesn't buy in?" Plunkett asked.

"Yes," Pearse said. "But it's our job to sell him. Let me tell you how we'll do it."

William Butler Yeats stood at the mirror in his rooms at the Hotel Nassau on this fine spring afternoon and considered his appearance.

Augustus John had sketched him in 1908, giving him a wild «gypsy» cast, or so Yeats had thought, but rendering him alive and vigorous. Charles Shannon had painted him quite charmingly, resembling Keats. Best of all had been the charcoal drawing of John Singer Sargent, sharp-featured yet with a sensitive mouth, looking passive but verging on a decisiveness Yeats seldom could rouse. His hair was parted to a high and uncombed forelock that fell over one eye, lending a Byronic note overall. His body then had been lean.

And now, eight years later? The hair was still there, but it framed a face of more fleshiness and care. The eyes were more puffy than dark and deep set. What had George Moore said of him on his return from his American lecture tour? "… with a paunch, a huge stick and an immense fur overcoat."

"You left out the intestinal troubles, George," Yeats muttered, and turned toward the door.

Bright sunlight dappled the Dublin streets through shade trees and overhead wires. Open trams trundled boater-topped men and their ladies to the parks. Single men on cycles whipped in and around them and the occasional plodding horsecart. Yeats stood at the curb looking for a chance to step off.

William Butler Yeats did indeed have a good apprehension of what awaited him in a closed-for-business tobacco shop on a Sunday afternoon. Particularly when it was the shop of Tom Clarke and his invitation had come from Patrick Pearse. Pearse had ostensibly talked of literary matters, referring pointedly to Yeats' own poem, "September 1913," bemoaning the trading of Irish romanticism and nationalism for moneygrubbing. Pearse had let Yeats know that not all Irishmen had made that bargain.

Yeats had no illusions of the men he'd meet or of himself, not this day. He had written a more recent poem, "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing." In a dark moment he felt he'd written it of himself.

But the prospect of redemption was at hand.

With resolve and vigor Yeats stepped off the curb. Today he had no need of a fur coat against the March breeze nor a huge stick to support him.

"Gentlemen," Yeats said mildly.

"Mr. Yeats," murmured some of the assembly. "Willie," said MacDonagh and Pearse.

Yeats settled into the vacant chair, the only one in the room with arms, and clearly for him.

"I more than suspect that the IRB is planning a rising," he said, and held up a forestalling hand. "What do you want of me?"

"We have the shock troops to mount a rising," MacDonagh said. "We need the country behind us to make it stick. Otherwise the British will wear us down."

"Ah," Yeats said. "You want me to write your pamphlets, your addresses and exhortations. Odes to the rising. Maud was always after me for that in the 90s, and I wouldn't. I was more idealistic about the uses of my art then. But I suspect you want more."

"We want your pen, Willie, and your voice and your name," Pearse said, and smiled. "All three have increased in value since then."

"You have several jobs, it seems. Tell me in what specific capacity you want me, and convince me that this rising has a chance for success."

"We don't have a cabinet yet, Willie," MacDonagh said. "We shall once we declare a republic, and we can make you a cabinet minister. Minister of Information, perhaps. But for the moment we are a military organization. This is the Military Council of the IRB, and Pearse is Commandant-General. I propose a staff rank of general for you, reflecting the eminence that poets of ancientEireann had to their kings."

"A general," Yeats repeated softly. "I've taken on roles, worn masks, but never one such as that."

He sat back in reflection. The others sensed his inward casting and held silence.

What am I? Yeats considered. What have I truly done in this life? What is my legacy? I am a minor poet of narrative lyric work and plays. Verses and essays of a parochial Irish nature, written in the style and tradition of Rossetti, Pater, Herrick and others of an earlier day. I have no wife, nor am I likely to have one. Maud won't have me in that role. I leave no children. And in the modern, real world emerging, I have no credentials. Perhaps if I live through-and shape-this rising I can find a more forward-looking and expansive arena for my poetry. For we will be dealing with life and death in our time, and not Cuchulain's.

And-an inward chuckle bubbled up-perhapsthiswould win me Maud.

If this is self delusion, well… perhaps I'm allowed an indulgence now and again.

He looked up. Pearse met his eyes, and spoke:

Yeats sat upright in his chair. "I take the point, Padraig, even when you make it with my words. There's work to be done, and we're not dead and gone. Not yet. So let me hear your plans for making this grand thing work."

While much of Dublin was enjoying the quiet of a bank holiday following Easter, a body of irregular soldiers poured forth from Liberty Hall, a large structure devoted to trade unionism on the banks of the Liffey. This was not the Irish Volunteers, a broader based group which commanded the largest number of armed and organized men in the country. Its leader, Professor Eoin MacNeill, had ordered his 10,000 men to withdraw from Easter Day maneuvers once he knew that leaders of the IRB had planned to escalate them into what he considered to be a disastrous and quixotic insurrection. Some of his men joined the rebels nonetheless.

This was the Citizen Army, headed by a more radical, bolder (some might say more impetuous) leadership. Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett formed at the front of the HQ company, all self-proclaimed Commandant-Generals. Though not all of the soldiers were uniformed, or even armed with rifles, these three wore green uniforms crossed by Sam Browne belts and sheathed ceremonial swords.

Four city battalions had mustered elsewhere and were occupying their positions around the center of Dublin and Dublin Castle itself-administrative headquarters of the British occupation and (a complicating factor) also a Red Cross hospital. These city battalions were charged with impeding troops from the British barracks in the outlying reaches of the city from pinching in on the rebel command post, which would be set up within the General Post Office-once it was taken.

The generals formed up their column of perhaps fifty men, backed up by a couple of trucks and motorcycles and a late addition, Michael O'Rahilly-known as The O'Rahilly, himself being the head of that storied clan. Cofounder of the Irish Volunteers, he had arrived at the last minute in his green Ford touring car, which he helped load with homemade bombs and spare ammunition. Though his organization had attempted to abort this revolution, his addition to the force gave it a huge lift. With a sure touch for the apt word, he had announced, "I helped wind this clock. I've come to hear it ring."

At their leaders' command the column set off for O'Connell Street, a broad boulevard flanked by a few stately Georgian homes and an array of hotels, shops and public buildings. Dominating this scene was Nelson's Pillar, 135 feet tall and capped by a statue of the naval hero. Ambitious view seekers could climb its winding steps for a fine outlook over the city and, near to hand, the GPO.

Bemused and largely puzzled bystanders watched this bizarre and faintly ragtag procession on its progress along Abbey Street, then up O'Connell. A bunch of British officers watched from the Metropole Hotel where they took rooms. They had seen such maneuvers, even mock battles, before, and regarded them as comic opera turns that afforded them much amusement. It came as a surprise to many when Connolly, in a loud, stentorian voice, brandished his unsheathed sword and yelled, "The Post Office-charge!"

His troops, those with rifles waving them and firing them in the air, poured through the main entrance. They met no defending force; for all its neoclassical splendor, it was a post office, after all. Within minutes the building was taken. Only two persons within sight were of even vaguely military status. One was a Dublin policeman, the other a British lieutenant sending a telegram to his wife. Pressing onwards, the occupying force found seven British soldiers in the upstairs telegraph office, the post office guard detail. They had been issued guns but no ammunition. They became the first prisoners of the revolution.

Connolly looked out through a pall of smoke toward the Liffey and his longtime bailiwick, Liberty Hall. A burning glow suffused the air, a false sunset to a long Wednesday not ending well.

"The bastards have shelled Liberty Hall. Well, that I expected, but never that the capitalist swine would shell their own factories and public buildings. Hotels, even!"

"You're thinking too much like a socialist revolutionary, Jim, and not enough like an Irishman. They hate us and what we're doing more than they love their property." Pearse nodded toward the Metropole, late billet of British officers and now a sniper's outpost of the revolution, and also in flames. "They'll destroy their property rather than have us use it."

The building shuddered from the shockwave of a nearby hit.

"A lot of those fires are set by looters," Connolly said, and shook his head. "I had hoped more of my class would have joined us than pillaged and burned."

Pearse wasn't interested in continuing this ideological discussion.

"That's an eighteen-pounder. They've brought a gunboat up the Liffey, too. Well, we've lasted three days, more than Emmett's rising, but we can't last much longer digging in to positions that'll soon be pulverized." He turned to the IRB's strategist. "What do you say, Joe?"

Plunkett looked up from his maps, looking every bit a man who was dying except for his piercing eyes. His neck was bandaged from his recent surgery, and his face was wan as if the bandages had served instead to block the blood from his cheeks.

"I'd hoped for better than this. We're in defensive positions and we don't have the guns or men to mount a sortie, much less take another building. We need the country to rise with us."

Pearse turned to Yeats. "You can write us arann, Willie, but we need a means to promulgate it."

"A newspaper," Yeats said. "I have friends at theIrish Times."

"Reactionary rag," Connolly growled.

"The publishers, indeed," Yeats said. "Not my friends."

Pearse gave him an intense look. Yeats had traded his billowing shirt and silk tie-the city clothes that Pearse had known-for rough country tweeds and hobnailed boots. He looked very much a man ready for hard and dirty work. His eyes had the raging look of a burning king of yore, fiercer than Plunkett's. Pearse could hardly credit his eyes.

"Forget their offices," Yeats continued. "Get me to their print shop and the type setters. If the telephones still work I'll get the night editor there. We'll publish your proclamation and my statement and-yes-a poem. Get some copies out of the city to Cork, Limerick, Tralee. Let that be the spark to fire the land!"

"Yes!" Pearse seized Yeats' hand. "We'll round up a squad."

"Smaller is better, Pat," Plunkett said. "I'll see if Ned Daly can spare some men to reinforce them once they've made it."

Pearse looked out over the abandoned street, raked by sniper fire of tommies and rebels alike at any sign of movement.

"Dusk is best," he said. "The smoke is bringing it sooner."

Yeats looked out at the mass of rubble that was O'Connell Street. Some of it was the wreck of gaping storefronts-shattered glass, occasionally glinting orange in the reflection of flames, tattered awnings, overturned counters and mannequins thrown out into the street. Horsecarts and trams lay on their sides. Two dead horses, killed the first day in a silly and bloody charge of mounted British lancers, lay stiff-legged and putrifying in the lee of Nelson's Pillar. Some of the rubble had been organized by the insurgents into a barricade-huge rolls of newsprint, mattresses, all or parts of drays and trams, furniture, even bicycles, all baled together by pulled-down tram wires and the one roll of barbed wire the rebels had rounded up.

Michael Carroll beckoned his men forward with a swing of his arm, then motioned to Yeats to fall in behind.

"Our men will cover us from the Metropole. There's a bolthole in the barricade by that bakery wagon." He grinned. "I dummy-wired it myself."

The squad streamed out into the twilit haze. The streetlights had been shot out, but a couple of snipers banged away nonetheless, their bullets skipping and whining off the cobblestones in puffs of stone dust. The rebels dodged their way to the barricade, and three of them flopped down in the cover of a tram's steel wheels.

"None of that, Joyce," Carroll yelled, pulling the nearest man erect and pushing an upended shop counter aside. He led his men through the gap. Yeats could hear the ring of his own nailed boots on stone as he ran hard to keep up. They burst through the barricade and veered for the corner of Abbey Street. A machine gun stuttered. Yeats strained forward, toward the head of the zigzagging line of men, reaching Carroll's shoulder. Carroll looked back over his shoulder and took a bullet in the throat. His mouth puckered to an «O» as he fell to his knees. Yeats moved to hold him from toppling over. The rest of the men turned the corner without looking back.

"TheTimes!" Carroll's voice was a mouthed rasp protracted by the whistling of air through the hole in his trachea. He held out his rifle to Yeats. "Go!"

Yeats took it, set Carroll down, then tore for the corner. Four remaining men waited there, winded and indecisive. Yeats passed them on the run. "With me!" he yelled, and fired his gun in the air. He looked back. The men were with him.

Yeats swung around, facing forward again. Turning into Abbey Street, advancing in a line abreast and at a slow trot, was a squad of fusilliers led by a florid-faced sergeant. There was no time for either side to fire. Yeats hit the gap between two tommies, swinging his rifle barrel across the cheekbone of the man nearest him. He could hear it crack as the man went down. Yeats was through with three of his men behind him. They were near the burned-out Liberty Hall now, and friendly fire covered them in their dash to theTimes' print shop. Lights blazed within. No low-country hearth had ever looked so beckoning.

"Good work with that rifle." Harry Joyce grinned at Yeats as Yeats pounded on the door with his rifle stock. Joyce nodded approvingly. "That's all she's good for now, General, until you reload. She's a single shot."

The place didn't feel like a newspaper office, but it was going to do for one. Print shop or no, there were desks there. Yeats had commandeered one and was writing away at white heat.

"What is it to be?" Doheny, the night editor asked, waiting patiently until Yeats had put down his pen.

"Narrative poem," Yeats said. "Not Wandering Aengus, Cuchulain, Cathleen ni Houlihan. A poem of modern times and modern men. Here are the first pages."

Doheny scanned them, then looked up.

" 'A terrible beauty is born. Aye, but that's a good line, and true." He nodded. "Many fine lines."

The sky was lightening, the ruddiness of the sun playing over the glass shards by their feet.

"More light for their gunners," Doheny said gloomily.

The door below shook with heavy pounding. Joyce edged to the window, unslinging his rifle and edging it out before him.

"It's Ned Daly's men!" bellowed a voice below. "Let us in."

"Reinforcements," Joyce said. Yeats bent back to his writing. The sound of heavy boots broke his concentration and a draft of cold dawn air caused him to look up for his coat. His eyes met the black stare of a hard-featured, lean figure, erect in bearing and not the vainglorious lout Yeats wanted him to be.

"MacBride," he said, and felt sick.

"Yeats."

This was too much. Yeats knew quite well that though it was Ireland that he was fighting for, it was also the shade of the professional soldier-personified in his life by Sean MacBride-that he was fighting against. Or at least trying to outdo in his own head and perhaps in the affections of Maud Gonne.

But MacBride was no shade. He was here, very much alive and very much-so it seemed-a comrade in arms.

Yeats turned away to face the night editor.

"When can you go to press, Mr. Doheny?"

Doheny's answer was drowned in the explosion of an artillery shell's immediate impact. Yeats' eardrums felt like bursting as the explosion rocked the room. The shock knocked him to the floor, plaster and lath caving down on him from the ceiling above. A wave of heat followed behind. Men screamed.

"The paper rolls! The bastards have hit the newsprint!"

"Everybody out!" MacBride ordered, his body outlined by the inferno behind him. The smoke was roiling before the flames, turning the air black. Yeats crawled, then stumbled to the front door, MacBride behind him.

Yeats looked up at a squad of soldiers, khaki clad not green, rifles ready and bayonets deployed not six feet from him.

"Put up your hands," MacBride said softly behind him. "Or we'll be dead before your next breath."

"A visitor, Major," Banks said. His voice held a softer and even awed tone, one that Yeats had not heard before from the jailer. He looked toward the door.

A figure in black, taller than Banks, stood in the shadows by the jamb. A priest, perhaps?

"Maud!" MacBride whispered hoarsely.

"Sean, Willie," Maud Gonne said, and strode into the room. A backwards glance from those glittering eyes sent the jailer scuttling back, closing the cell door and locking it before tramping away.

"They let you in," MacBride said. A silly remark, Yeats thought, saved from fatuity only by the heaviness of the situation.

"They've let me little else," Maud said, throwing her cape aside in a careless but graceful gesture. Stage manners without thought. "For once the Church is good for something. I'm your wife."

She moved between the two men and took the hand of each.

"Still your friend, Sean. And yours always, Willie." She paused. "You bold, foolish men."

Yeats nodded. "That we are."

"They're going to shoot you." Yeats felt Maud's grip tighten. She let drop her hands and turned away.

"I expected no less, Maud," MacBride said. "This is my second go at them. They've not forgotten the first."

"That I know, Sean, and little could I do for you. And I tried for you, Willie. So did our friends in England-Wilde, Pound, Shaw. They've tried to get the Prime Minister's ear."

"I've lunched with Asquith," Yeats said. "Little good that will do me."

"They fear the power of your pen, Willie. They'll take the heat of public indignation to your ongoing threat to rally Eireann."

"Bad news but expected. I'd rather hear it from your lips than any other's."

Maud took a step back to better survey them. Dark hair a helmet to that fairest of faces. Beautiful still and always.

"I come to deliver more than news. Ireland's love and mine. It's yours and always will be." She looked at Yeats. "And some words to water it down the years? Have you that for us?"

Yeats reached to the table behind him.

"Two poems."

Maud took the papers, turned away to read.

"They're grand, Willie. 'Easter 1916. That will hold the day green. But this second one. And what do you know of Irish airmen?"

"Little enough. But I know something of foreseeing my death. I learn more each minute."

Maud looked at him. "Ah, Willie-the poems you might have written! What a bargain you have made!"

Yeats focused on the pin at Maud's breast, Ireland's green and gold. He moved his eyes up to see in hers a respect and regard he'd not seen before.

"A good bargain, Maud." He paused. "The best."