There were three women in the ward who had all been struck by the same bullet: a mother, her daughter, and a cousin. They had been friendly to the British soldiers, had fed them because, as the mother told me, her husband and son were in the trenches fighting for Great Britain. These three women had been at their window, looking with curiosity into the street, when the very soldier they had just fed turned suddenly and shot them. One had her jawbone broken, the second her arm pierced, and the third was struck in the breast. They were all serious wounds which kept them in bed. While I was still in the ward, the two men of this family came back from Flanders on leave, only to find no one at home. The neighbors directed them to the hospital. I hate to think how those men looked when they learned why their women wore bandages. They told me that during Easter Week the Germans put up opposite the trenches of the Irish Brigade a placard that read:
_"The military are shooting down your wives and children in Dublin._"
But the Irish soldiers had not believed it.
I asked them if it was true, as alleged, that in answer to the placard, the Irish Brigade had sung "Rule, Britannia." They were indignant at the idea. They might be wearing khaki, they said, but they never yet had sung "Rule, Britannia." When the day came for them to return to the front, the father wanted to desert, dangerous as that would be, while the son was eager to go back to the trenches.
"This time," he said to me, "we'll not be killing Germans!"
When rumors came later of a mutiny in the Irish regiment, I wondered to myself if these two men were at the bottom of it.
Stories of atrocities poured into our ears when the Germans invaded Belgium. Now we had to hear them from our own people, and now we had to believe them. They were stories as cruel as any heard since the days of the Island Magee massacre.
In the House of Commons shortly after the rising, the cabinet was questioned if it were true that the body of a boy in the uniform of the Irish Volunteers had been unearthed in the grounds of Trinity College, with the marks of twenty bayonet wounds upon him.
"No," was the response, "there were not twenty; there were only nineteen"!