hundred, marching into captivity.

"It is a sight I shall never forget," said one eye-witness who beheld
the surrender from a window in the Gresham Hotel. "That thin, short line
of no more than a hundred men at most, some in the green uniform of the
Volunteers, some in the plainer equipment of Larkin's Citizen Army, some
looking like ordinary civilians, some again mere lads of fifteen, not a
few wounded and bandaged, the whole melancholy procession threading its
way through long lines of khaki soldiers--but downhearted? No; and as
they passed, I heard just for a couple of seconds the subdued strains of
that scaffold-song of many an Irishman before them--'God save
Ireland'--waft up to me.

"Roughs, dockers, labourers, shop-assistants--all kinds and conditions
of men, even the lowest class in the city--yet all exactly the same in
the look of defiance which will haunt me to my dying day.

"Whatever they were, these men were no cowards--and even the soldiers
admitted this readily; they had shown courage of the finest type, worthy
of a nobler cause; and had they been man for man at the front and
accomplished what they had accomplished in the face of such odds, the
whole Empire would have been proud of them--the whole world ringing with
their praise; for, as a soldier prisoner afterwards said, 'Not even the
hell of Loos or Neuve Chapelle was like the hell of those last hours in
the General Post Office.'

"Instead of that, they were doomed to the double stigma of failure in
accomplishment and futility in aim--but every Irish heart went out to
them, for all that, for were they not our own flesh and blood after all?

"At either end a lad carried an improvised white flag of truce--at their
head, Pearse in full uniform, with sword across one arm in regular
surrender fashion. For a moment the young British officer in command
seemed perplexed at the solemnity of the procession and at the
correctness and courtesy of the rebel leader; and he hesitatingly
accepted the sword from his hands.

"The next moment the spell was broken: the man was a captive criminal,
and with two officers, each with a loaded revolver pointing at his head,
the chief and his gallant band disappeared from my view."

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

SURRENDER--COLLAPSE

Late on that fateful Saturday evening upon which the Post Office fell,
the Royal Irish Constabulary were posting in all parts of the country
the following note signed by Commander P. H. Pears