An Cosantóir

www.military.ie the defence forces magazine | 23 more like that of a pedestrian crossing a busy road, rather than those who are about to die. Number 25 Northumberland Road, at the corner of Haddington Road, is a beautiful house that stands square, private, noble and commanding. It is unlikely that the advancing troops noticed that the windows had been barricaded. Nor did they probably expect that such a handsome house would be occupied by rebels. The adjutant, who not long before had basked in the joy of the chance meeting with his fam- ily, was the first to be hit by the volley of shots that erupted from number 25. Ten Sherwood Forest- ers fell in the leafy avenue and, suddenly, the ordinary, pretty, so-very-British Northumberland Road was wet with English blood. The adjutant died quickly. His family would not have heard the shots or known that he would not be home for Sunday tea. The soldiers scattered into the gardens and doorways of the grand houses, looking for where the shots had come from, shouting orders, returning fire, pulling the wounded and the dead into cover. The remaining officers prepared to rush number 25. Swords drawn, they led their men on a frontal assault. They may not have been very well trained but they lacked nothing in their foolish bravery. If a fight was wanted then they were up for it; never mind the fear, the officer has his sword up...charge! Shots poured down on them from the house, and now other rebels, 500 yards away across Mount Street Bridge in Clanwilliam House, opened up with their Howth-smuggled Mausers, catching the inexperi- enced, brave troops in a deadly crossfire. The soldiers fell and fell. Even when they reached number 25 they lacked bombs to blow open the door, or grenades to toss into the windows. How inexperienced where they? A British artillery officer from Athlone, Captain E Gerrard, recorded finding himself in the company of some Sherwood Foresters in Beggar's Bush Barracks under fire from rebels holding the railway line. "They had never fired a service rifle before," he said. "They did not even know how to load them; we had to show them how. They were the untrained, undersized products of the English slums." In the end the brave rebels in number 25 and Clanwilliam House were defeated by overwhelming numbers and the bombs and machine guns that eventually arrived. The young sergeant major had died in an advance on Mount Street Bridge and altogether the regiment suffered some 240 casualties. Some of the soldiers would go on to form the execution parties that shot the rebel leaders in Kilmainham Jail. If they had been unfamiliar with their rifles when they first marched into Dub- lin, by then they knew their weapons with that rare intimacy of soldiers blooded by battle. They would be intimately familiar with the Lee Enfield, the smell of rifle oil and cordite, the feel of the wood, the oiled click of the steel bolt, the heavy kick of the brass- plated butt and the sharp crack of its shots. Still, as they lifted their barrels to aim at the small, white cloth pinned above a rebel's heart, you could forgive some trembling barrels or some who faltered in their duty. These were fighting soldiers, not executioners. Would they have trembled more had they known that the shots they were about to fire would echo not just round the breaker's yard of Kilmainham but across the world; that they would signal the end of British rule in most of Ireland; and, per- haps, even signal the end of the British Empire itself. Afterwards they marched away from the smoke and rubble of Dublin to barracks in Naas, where they would finish their train- ing through the summer, marching, digging trenches across the Curragh, learning gas drills; all in preparation for the Front, which would prove far more deadly for the Sherwood Foresters, and where over 10,000 of them would fall. So should we, in this centenary year, remember these English soldiers? While many an armchair republican would be horrified at the idea, those who actually fought them, the Volunteers of de Valera's 3rd Battalion, had no reservation. In 1966, de Valera, then the aged president of a free Ireland, invited the English officer who had taken the battalion's surrender in 1916 back to Ireland. They took tea together in Áras an Uachtaráin and then travelled to Mount Street Bridge, where they stood together with the surviving volunteers of the 3rd Battalion to remember those who had fought and those who had fallen, Irish and English. We do not need to celebrate or honour them; just remember them. And perhaps it will be left to those of us who have been soldiers, or who are soldiers still, to acknowledge that in the end they were just soldiers too, and we will remember them as such. about the author: John McGuiggan is a barrister practising out of the Law Library at Dublin's Four Courts Law Library. He was educated at Ruskin College, Oxford, and University Col- lege Cork, and is a former british Trade Union Official (NUPE) and an Englishman practising in Ireland. Brigadier Lowe's signed instructions as to where and how surrenders of the 1916 participants will be accepted. Photo: National Library of Ireland/ South Dublin Libraries British soldiers search through the rubble of Kavanagh's Public House in Bridge Street [sic] in the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916. Photo: National Archives/Spaarnestad Photo/ Collection Het Leven

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