When I went back to Dublin in August, it was to find that almost every one on the streets was wearing republican colors. The feeling was bitter, too--so bitter that the British soldiers had orders to go about in fives and sixes, but never singly. They were not allowed by their officers to leave the main thoroughfares, and had to be in barracks before dark,--that is, all except the patrol. The city was still under martial law, but it seemed to me the military authorities were the really nervous persons. Much of this bitterness came from the fact that people remembered how, after the war in South Africa which lasted three years instead of five days, only one man had been executed. After _our_ rising sixteen men had been put to death.
Everywhere I heard the opinion expressed that if the revolution could have lasted a little longer, we would have been flooded with recruits. As it was, the rising had taken people completely by surprise. Before they could recover from that surprise, it was over, and its leaders were paying the penalty of death or imprisonment. One week is a short time for the general, uninformed mass of a dominated people to decide whether an outbreak of any sort is merely an impotent rebellion, or a real revolution with some promise of success. Besides, there have been so many isolated protests in Ireland, doomed from the first to failure.
There was evidence everywhere that the feeling of bitterness was not vague, but the direct result of fully understanding what had happened. At a moving-picture performance of "The Great Betrayal," I was surprised at the spirit of daring in the audience. The story was about one of those abortive nationalist revolts in Italy which preceded the revolution that made Italy free. The plot was parallel in so many respects to the Easter Week rising in Ireland that crowds flocked every day to see it. In the final picture, when the heroic leaders were shot in cold blood, men in the audience called out bitterly:
Colthurst was the man who shot Sheehy Skeffington without trial on the second day of the rising. He had been promoted for his deeds of wanton cruelty, and only the fact that a royal commission was demanded by Skeffington's widow and her friends, made it necessary to adjudge him insane as excuse for his behavior, when that behavior was finally brought to light.