Little Tommy Keenan of Camden Row had, so he thought, the good fortune to be put in prison with sixty of the Fianna when our men surrendered the College of Surgeons. But, much to their chagrin, at the end of two weeks the boys were released. Did they scurry away to grow up into better British subjects? Not at all! Tommy lined them up in front of the jail and led them off down the street singing "The Watch on the Rhine" at the top of their lungs.
There was no end to the stories I heard as I lay there in the hospital. Stories of heroism and stories of disaster followed one another, each strengthening my belief that the courage and honor of the heroic days of Ireland were still alive in our hearts. Perhaps it is for this we should love our enemies: when they cleave with their swords the heart of a brave man, they lay bare the truth of life.
There came a day when I could no longer endure lying alone in my room, thinking of all that had happened for this reason or that. The nurses had been very kind to me. Some of them were in sympathy with the Sinn Fein movement, while all of them felt the horror of the executions. There were times when I could rise above this horror and cheer them, too, by singing a rebel song. I had interested them, besides, in suffrage work we had been doing in Glasgow, where for several years eleven hundred militants had done picketing and the like.
Finally, however, I persuaded them to let me move into the public ward, where I could see other women patients and talk a little. There were about twenty women and girls in the ward. Nine of them, who had nothing to do with the rising, had been wounded by British soldiers. The nurses insisted this was accidental. But the women themselves would not agree to that explanation, nor did I, for I recalled the Red Cross girls being shot at,--a thing I had seen with my own eyes. I told the nurses I had seen the British firing at our ambulances in the belief, no doubt, that we were doing what we had caught them at--transporting troops from one part of Dublin to another in ambulances. Sometimes I felt sorry to have to make those nurses see facts as they were, instead of helping them keep what few illusions still remained about their men in khaki. But I was glad when I could tell them what I had just heard of De Vallera's daring. With a handful of men, he had prevented two thousand of the famous Sherwood Foresters coming through lower Mount Street to attack one of our positions. Or, again, it did me good to relate the story of the seventeen-year-old lad who single-handed had captured a British general. The sequel to that tale, however, was not very cheerful, for the same general had sat at the court-martial, and gave the boy who before had had power of life and death over him, a ten year sentence.