A week is enough time for ribs to stop screaming every time you breathe and start merely complaining, which is the difference between a man who stays indoors and a man who goes back out. My ribs had reached the complaining stage by the following Tuesday, and my forearm had decided the bone question had been settled in the affirmative after all, and the cuts on my face had closed into the specific tight, itching state of healing that is more annoying than pain.
I went back out.
The thing I carried this time was different from the Tuesday before. Not just my body and my opinions about the Commonwealth's presence on Dublin's streets, but something in a glass bottle with a rag stuffed into the neck and enough petrol inside to make a very specific kind of argument that batons could not answer in kind.
The petrol bomb was not my invention and I will not pretend otherwise. The men in the Thomas Street hall had been developing the idea for several weeks — taking what was available, which was glass and petrol and rags and the specific ingenuity of people who have no access to manufactured weapons and have decided this is not going to remain a permanent condition — and had arrived at something simple enough to be made in quantity and effective enough to change the character of an encounter with police who expected the crowds to have nothing more dangerous than their own bodies.
I carried three of them in a bag that I held with the specific careful attention of a man carrying three things that will ruin his day if they decide to express themselves prematurely. The weight of them was slight. What they represented was considerably heavier.
---
O'Connell Street again, which had become the default venue for this particular ongoing disagreement between Dublin and the Commonwealth, the way that certain venues become associated with certain kinds of events through repetition until the venue itself becomes a symbol of the event rather than simply its location.
The police line was across the street in the configuration I had come to know over the previous months — the specific geometry of men with batons forming a wall that said this far and no further in the physical language that police lines speak. Behind them the street was empty and beyond that the buildings were doing whatever buildings do when they are waiting for something to resolve itself one way or another in front of them.
The crowd behind me was larger than previous weeks, which had been growing incrementally with each week's events, word travelling through the city in the way that word travels when the story it is carrying has the quality of something that is developing rather than something that has happened. People who had not been on the street the previous weeks were on the street this week, which meant the crowd had the mixed energy of veterans of the previous encounters and people experiencing this particular negotiation for the first time.
The police line held. The crowd pushed. The batons came out in the way they always came out, with the specific inevitability of a script that both sides had memorised by this point.
I lit the rag on the first bottle from a match I'd been carrying in my coat pocket since morning, which I had checked approximately forty times during the walk to O'Connell Street to confirm it was still there and had not been damaged by my body's various complaints about the previous week's events.
The bottle left my hand in a long arc, trailing a thin line of flame that lasted the full flight and arrived at the police line with a sound I had not heard before and which I will describe as the sound of an argument being made in a language that does not allow for the other side's response. The glass broke against the pavement and the petrol went in every direction the petrol could find, and the fire followed it, and the police line did something it had not done in previous weeks, which was to move backward without being pushed.
I threw the second one at the edge of the line where it was thickest and the third at a position that had been giving trouble, and by the time the third one landed the line had broken entirely and the crowd was moving forward into the space the line had been occupying, and O'Connell Street had become something different from what it had been on previous weeks, which was a place where one side could simply decide the encounter was finished and form a line across the road to say so.
I moved with the crowd, which was the correct thing to do, because a man standing still in a Dublin street after throwing three petrol bombs at the police is a man with a very specific and immediate future that is not preferable to the alternatives.
---
The following morning I was at the window of the room I rented on the top floor of a building on Parnell Street when the army came.
I had known they were coming in the abstract way that everyone who had been paying attention had known — the Commonwealth's escalation having followed a logic that pointed in this direction clearly enough that only the timing had been uncertain. But knowing something in the abstract and seeing it arrive in the specific are different experiences, and I stood at the window and watched the Commonwealth army moving through Dublin's streets in the particular grey morning light that November produces in Ireland and felt the difference between the abstract and the specific settle into my chest in a way that changed the quality of what I was feeling from apprehension to something with more weight to it.
They were not the constabulary. They were not the reinforced police who had been doing the constabulary's work with a soldier's bearing. These were soldiers, fully equipped, moving through Dublin streets with the specific economy of motion that soldiers who have been in a war recently carry in their bodies like a permanent adjustment.
I watched them move down the street below my window and I watched what happened when they reached the men they had apparently been directed toward, which was a group of known nationalists — men whose names and faces had been on lists that the Commonwealth's intelligence had been compiling for months, which everyone in the movement had understood was happening and which had not been preventable.
They took them out of their houses.
The first man I watched come out of a doorway was someone I knew by name if not well — a man from the north Liberties who had been at the Thomas Street meetings and who had the quality of someone whose commitment to the cause had been total and public and entirely undisguised, which was the quality that put him on the list. He came out of the doorway with his hands up, blinking in the grey morning light, and the soldiers around him had a brief exchange with him that I could not hear from the window and then one of them shot him.
Not in the context of a struggle. Not in response to resistance. Simply shot him, in the street, in the grey morning light, and moved on to the next door on whatever list they were working from.
I stood at the window. My hands were on the glass. The street below continued to do what the soldiers were doing in it and I watched it do that in the specific frozen way of someone whose body has received information that it is still processing while the situation continues to develop independently of the processing.
Three more men came out of doors in the street below while I was at the window. Two of them were shot in the same manner as the first — the brief exchange, the specific finality. One of them was taken rather than shot, for reasons I could not determine from the window, walked away between two soldiers toward wherever the soldiers were taking the ones they took.
I stepped back from the window.
My hands were not steady, which was information about my current state that I noted without judgment. I had been on the western front for two years and I had seen men die in various ways and I had done things to men that resulted in them dying, and none of that had prepared me for the specific quality of watching a man shot in his own street on a grey morning in his own city while the city continued around it.
It was the continuity that did it. The fact that the street kept being a street. The fact that the grey light kept being grey light. The fact that the world did not pause to mark the specific moment when a man who had been alive a second before was not alive anymore.
I had learned this from the western front and I had apparently not finished learning it.
---
The newspapers had it by afternoon.
Dublin had, among its qualities, a newspaper culture of particular vitality — the city's papers had been covering the conflict with the specific energy of journalists who understood that the story they were covering was the largest story their publication would ever handle and who were determined to handle it accordingly. The evening editions carried the morning's executions across the front pages in the terms that front pages use when the thing being reported is both a fact and a statement — the headline as argument, the reporting as evidence for the argument, the entire edition as a declaration of position that the paper's readership would understand immediately and without requiring the position to be stated explicitly.
The effect of the newspapers on the city was the effect that a particular kind of news has on a particular kind of city at a particular kind of moment — not gradual, not building over days, but immediate, the reading of it producing a response in the reading population that had the quality of something that had already been decided at a level below conscious decision-making and was now simply being confirmed and released.
By evening the shooting from buildings had started.
Not organised, not coordinated — men with rifles and men with whatever they had that could be pointed at a soldier or a constable from a window or a rooftop, the city's anger having found a form of expression that the petrol bombs of the previous week had pointed toward and that the morning's executions had converted from a possibility into a necessity in the minds of the men doing the shooting.
I was one of them. I want to record that without softening it, because I have been honest about everything else in this account and the honesty is the point of the account. I took a position in a building on Henry Street with three other men I knew from the Thomas Street meetings, and I shot at Commonwealth soldiers moving through the street below, and I did not miss every shot, and I have no more unresolved feelings about this than I had about the men on the western front.
The difference between the western front and Henry Street was that on the western front I had been shooting at men who were shooting at me in a context where both of us had agreed, by the fact of our presence, to be part of something that involved shooting. On Henry Street I was shooting at men who had come to my city and shot men on their own doorsteps in the grey morning light, and the agreement I was operating under was different from the western front's agreement in ways that I find, examining them, to be sufficient justification for the Henry Street side of the ledger.
---
The battle — and by evening of the second day it had become the kind of thing that deserves the word — consolidated around a section of streets in the north inner city where approximately five hundred men had gathered in a combination of buildings and improvised street positions, which was large enough to constitute something that needed to be addressed by force and small enough that the force required to address it was available to the Commonwealth without difficulty.
They gave me a rifle. A proper one this time, not the information-carrying and corner-watching that had been my primary occupation since April, but an actual rifle with ammunition, handed to me by a man I had never met before who had the expression of someone distributing resources according to a plan that was already in motion and did not require discussion.
I found a position in the upper floor of a building on Moore Street, which had windows facing the approach the soldiers were likely to use and walls thick enough to provide something resembling cover against the return fire that the approach would generate once the shooting started. Two other men shared the floor with me — one I knew, one I did not — and we arranged ourselves in the available windows with the professional economy of men who had done this before in other contexts and were applying what they knew to the current one.
The soldiers came from the north.
They came with grenades first, which was the correct approach and which I had been expecting and which did not make the experience of the grenades more pleasant for being expected. The first one came through the window of the building to our left and the sound it made inside the confined space of the building was different from the sound grenades made in the open — contained, amplified, the concussive force having nowhere adequate to go except into the building and everything the building contained. The building to our left stopped being a position in the same moment the grenade resolved itself.
They came through the street below while the grenades were still going, which was the correct tactical sequencing — the grenades suppressing the fire from the upper windows long enough for the infantry to close the distance. I put rounds into the street through my window and I hit some of what I aimed at, which I know because what I aimed at was men advancing through the street and some of them stopped advancing, and I kept firing because stopping was not something the situation had a place for.
The return fire found my window in the specific way that return fire always finds a window from which someone has been shooting — directed, accurate, the rounds coming through the glass and the frame and the wall beside it in a sequence that told me the soldier or soldiers doing the directing were doing it well and had located me specifically rather than simply suppressing the building generally.
One of them found me.
The round caught my left leg below the knee and sat me down against the wall in the way that being shot sits you down — without drama, without the dramatic backward fall that stories describe, just the leg stopping working and the floor arriving and the specific white-hot clarity of a wound that the body has not yet begun to protect with shock. I understood what had happened with complete clarity and without panic, which was the western front's contribution to the moment, and I assessed what I still had available, which was one leg, both arms, the rifle, and the wall I was against.
I kept firing from the wall. The return fire kept coming through the window above me, which was now firing at a position I was no longer in, the repositioning having been an accident of being shot rather than a tactic, but useful regardless.
The soldiers came into the building.
I heard them on the stairs — the specific sound of soldiers clearing a building floor by floor, which I knew from the western front and which told me how long I had before the stairs delivered them to my floor. I put the last of my ammunition through the window at whatever was in the street below and I found, checking the rifle, that the last of it was gone, and the men on the stairs were getting closer, and my leg was producing a volume of blood that the part of my brain that was still doing arithmetic noted with concern.
The door came in and they came through it and there were enough of them that the arithmetic was immediately settled.
---
The constabulary came behind the soldiers, which is the order things happen when a military operation transitions to a policing operation — the soldiers take the position and the constabulary takes what the position contains. What the position on Moore Street's upper floor contained was me, one dead man I had not known, and the man I had known who had apparently gotten out through a back route at some point during the engagement, the specific point being something I had not had attention available to notice.
I was not in a condition to be taken anywhere without assistance, which the constabulary provided in the form of two men who got me upright between them in the manner of men moving something that is not cooperating fully with the moving.
I want to be honest about what happened next in the same way I have been honest about everything else, which means recording that I was not cooperative, which was not a strategic decision but simply the thing my body did when the constabulary attempted to move it in a direction it had decided not to go. I had a functional arm and I used it in the way that a man uses a functional arm when he has decided that the men holding him are men he objects to being held by, and the response to this from the constabulary was the response that constabulary always give to resistance from a man in their custody who has just been shot in the leg and has no weapon remaining and is operating on the specific stubborn diminishing fuel of a man who has run out of everything except the refusal to stop.
They beat me with their batons, which was the available response and the one they used, and I want to describe it as precisely as I can because precision is the honesty I owe this account.
The first impacts I absorbed from a position of still standing, which did not last. The pavement received me as Dublin pavement always had — without cushioning or ceremony — and the beating continued from the floor, which is a different experience from being beaten while standing in the specific sense that the floor removes the variables that standing provided and the batons find everything with less interference. My ribs, which had made peace with the previous week's damage, reopened negotiations immediately. My forearm, which had decided the structural question in its own favour, revisited that decision under the new evidence. My head, which I had been covering with one arm on the grounds that this had worked before, was covered less well than the previous week because the arm covering it was doing more of the work alone and had begun to have its own concerns.
They were thorough. I will say that for them. Men who beat a prisoner to death are not generally men who do it carelessly, and these men were not careless. They had a method and they applied it with the specific patience of men who have decided that the job needs to be done properly and have enough time to do it properly.
I want to record the last things I was aware of, because the last things have always seemed to me worth recording in the accounts I have read of men at their endings.
The pavement of Moore Street was cold against my face. Dublin November pavement, with the specific quality of stone that has been cold for long enough to have forgotten what warmth feels like. The sound of the city around me was still there — I could hear it at the edges of what was happening to me, the ordinary visible life of the city going about its business above and around the specific thing that was happening in this section of Moore Street. A tram somewhere. A voice. The specific sound of Dublin being Dublin while Dublin was simultaneously being this.
I thought about my mother at the port. The way she had unfolded her arms.
I thought about the man who had been shot on his doorstep in the grey morning light. The way the street had kept being a street.
I thought about the fact that I had come home from the western front specifically to vote for independence, which I had done, which meant that whatever I had been heading toward since I came off the boat at Dublin Port I had been heading toward for the right reasons and in the right direction, which seemed to me, lying on Moore Street in the particular condition I was lying in it, to be the most important accounting available at this specific moment.
The Great Irish Island was going to be free.
Not today. Not because of this specific morning or this specific street or this specific ending. But it was going to be free in the way that things become free when the people who live in them have decided with sufficient collective weight that they are going to be, and nothing the Commonwealth could deploy on Dublin's streets was going to resolve the underlying arithmetic in a different direction regardless of what it did to the individual men who were part of it.
I had been part of it.
The pavement was cold.
The city kept going.