SINN FEIN WARFARE.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.1 SIR,—In view of the persistent attempts made to enlist American sympathy on behalf of the Sinn Fein rebels as clean fighters, and to represent the action of the military as brutal and oppressive, you may care to print the accompanying narrative, which appeared in the Melbourne Argus of Thursday, June 15th. I have retained all that the writer says to the credit of the Sinn Feiners, but have excised one shocking instance of the ferocity of one of their leaders, as he relates it
" Dr. Cecil G. McAdam, son of Dr. R. L. McAdam, of St. Kilda, who was an officer of the Royal Army Medical Corps, returned to Melbourne yesterday, having been invalided from Salonika. On his way home he spent a few weeks in Ireland. He was in Kerry when Sir Roger Casement was arrested, and he saw Casement pass through Killarney on his way to Dublin, in the custody of two members of the Irish con- stabulary. That was on Easter Saturday, April 22nd. Early on the following day Dr. McAdam arrived in Dublin. Fortunately, on the Sunday he changed his uniform for mufti, otherwise he might not now be alive to tell the story of his adventures.
' There was no sign of a rising when I arrived in Dublin on Easter Sunday,' said Dr. -McAdam yesterday, ' but next morning when I was on my way from the Shelbourne Hotel, St. Stephen's Green, where I was staying, to Phcenix Park, I saw a number of men walking in twos and threes, and in small groups, some in plain clothes, others in the uniforms of the Irish Volunteers, all armed with rifles and some with revolvers. On their backs they carried bags, which were afterwards found to contain food. I came out of the park at about midday, and heard the sound of firing coming from the direction of the river. For half an hour I waited outside the park for a tramcar to take me back to Dublin, but not a car appeared. Meanwhile, the firing seemed to be coming nearer. I asked a member of the Irish constabulary what it was all about, and he said, " There is a row on in Dublin." He told me I had no chance of returning to the city. However, I decided to walk back, and, turning a corner, came in sight of three Sinn Feiners, who tried to shoot me. I got back round that corner very quickly, I can assure you. At another corner I met two more Sinn Feiners. They asked me where I was going, and I said, " To Dublin." They told me it was impossible, as they held all the bridges. I said, " Who are you ? " and they replied, " We are Sinn Feiners ; we are Irishmen. The military fired on us this morning, and we are going to make them pay for it this time." They directed me to a back street, and there two more Sinn Feiners fired at me from a distance of about fifty yards,. but luckily for me they missed. Then I came to a gate through which I was pulled by two men. The gate led to a church just behind Four Courts. There was a monastery as well as a church, and in the monastery, a number of people were taking refuge.
I noticed some blood on the pavement, and I asked a monk if they had any wounded in the monastery, as I was a doctor. and would attend
the patients. The monks seemed very pleased. They took me to a room at the back of the church where there was an old civilian, who had been shot through the hand. When fired at he had his hand over his heart, and the bullet struck the hand and remained there. It was a large bullet, fired, evidently, from a very old weapon, I dressed the wound, and the monks asked me to lunch with them. In the church were the dead body of a baby shot through the head, and the body of a soldier of the 17th Lancers, with twenty bullet wounds. The monks had hidden another Lancer who had sought refuge in the church in a confessional box. They told me that the rising was planned for Easter Sunday morning, but at the last moment the orders were counter- manded, owing, apparently, to the arrest of Sir Roger Casement. At 3 o'clock, despite theprotests of the monks, I left the church. On my way towards the bridge leading to the castle I saw the Sinn Feiners pulling down houses and erecting barricades with the timber and stones. An unarmed Sinn Feiner asked me where I was going, and when I told him he advised me not to go, as the rebels intended to " make it very hot " that night at St. Stephen's Green. He asked me where I came from, and when I replied, From the front," he said, " Don't let any of our fellows know it. Tell them that you are Irish." I said Australian was good enough for me, and we parted. . . .
When I reached the Shelbonrne Hotel the rebels were seizing every motor-car and other vehicle that came along, and converting them into a barricade, which stretched across the road from the Shelbourne Hotel to the railings of St. Stephen's Green. As I was entering the hotel a civilian was shot at the corner. This was at half-past 4 o'clock. It had taken me four and a half hours to come from Phoenix Park, about two miles away. Three people had been shot as they were entering the hotel. Two were guests and the third was a servant. About an hour after my arrival at the hotel I saw a cold-blooded murder. The rebels had taken a van from an old man, and he had gone away and come back in a very drunken condition. He attempted to remove his van, and two Sinn Feiners shot him dead right in front of the hotel. Im- mediately afterwards they fired on some ladies who were looking out of a window. The window was shattered, but the ladies escaped. There were eighty guests at the hotel, and that night several of us went for a stroll. A man was standing at a corner of the post-office with a box of ammunition at his feet. He was calling out, " Small arms ! Small arms ! " and was handing out revolvers and ammunition to any one who approached him, even youngsters in " knickers." . . . I slept that night on the floor of my room, as there was intermittent firing on my side, and bullets were coming through the windows. At 3 &clock I heard the tramping of feet below my window, and going to the ground floor I found that about sixty soldiers, with two machine guns, had arrived. The machine guns were posted in the front-room windows on the fourth floor. The main entrance was barricaded with mattresses and furniture of every description. At dawn the rebels attempted to cross the road from St. Stephen's Green to the hotel, but the machine guns opened fire and killed and wounded six or eight, and the rest retired precipitately. Nobody was now allowed to leave the hotel, to which we were confined till the following Sunday. At night the rebels attacked us again, but a machine gun stopped them. From the hotel we could see the Countess Markiewicz walking about amongst her followers dressed in the green uniform of the Irish Volunteers. . . . We did not see a vehicle pass along the street until the following Saturday, when we heard that the rebels had surrendered unconditionally, and what a cheer we gave the driver ! By this time the windows of the hotel had been shattered, and we were very short of food.' "
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