People say:  “Of course, they will be beaten.”  The statement is almost a query, and they continue, “but they are putting up a decent fight.”  For being beaten does not greatly matter in Ireland, but not fighting does matter.  “They went forth always to the battle; and they always fell,” Indeed, the history of the Irish race is in that phrase.

The firing from the roofs of Trinity College became violent.  I crossed Dame Street some distance up, struck down the Quays, and went along these until I reached the Ballast Office.  Further than this it was not possible to go, for a step beyond the Ballast Office would have brought one into the unending stream of lead that was pouring from Trinity and other places.  I was looking on O’Connell Bridge and Sackville Street, and the house facing me was Kelly’s—­a red-brick fishing tackle shop, one half of which was on the Quay and the other half in Sackville Street.  This house was being bombarded.

I counted the report of six different machine guns which played on it.  Rifles innumerable and from every sort of place were potting its windows, and at intervals of about half a minute the shells from a heavy gun lobbed in through its windows or thumped mightily against its walls.

For three hours that bombardment continued, and the walls stood in a cloud of red dust and smoke.  Rifle and machine gun bullets pattered over every inch of it, and, unfailingly the heavy gun pounded its shells through the windows.

One’s heart melted at the idea that human beings were crouching inside that volcano of death, and I said to myself, “Not even a fly can be alive in that house.”

No head showed at any window, no rifle cracked from window or roof in reply.  The house was dumb, lifeless, and I thought every one of those men are dead.

It was then, and quite suddenly, that the possibilities of street fighting flashed on me, and I knew there was no person in the house, and said to myself, “They have smashed through the walls with a hatchet and are sitting in the next house, or they have long ago climbed out by the skylight and are on a roof half a block away.”  Then the thought came to me—­they have and hold the entire of Sackville Street down to the Post Office.  Later on this proved to be the case, and I knew at this moment that Sackville Street was doomed.

I continued to watch the bombardment, but no longer with the anguish which had before torn me.  Near by there were four men, and a few yards away, clustered in a laneway, there were a dozen others.  An agitated girl was striding from the farther group to the one in which I was, and she addressed the men in the most obscene language which I have ever heard.  She addressed them man by man, and she continued to speak and cry and scream at them with all that obstinate, angry patience of which only a woman is capable.

She cursed us all.  She called down diseases on every human being in the world excepting only the men who were being bombarded.  She demanded of the folk in the laneway that they should march at least into the roadway and prove that they were proud men and were not afraid of bullets.  She had been herself into the danger zone.  Had stood herself in the track of the guns, and had there cursed her fill for half an hour, and she desired that the men should do at least what she had done.