turn down Dame Street and get from thence near enough to Sackville
Street to see if the rumours about its destruction were true, but here
also we were halted by the military, and had to retrace our steps.

There was no news of any kind to be gathered from the people we talked
to, nor had they even any rumours.

This was the first day I had been able to get even a short distance
outside of my own quarter, and it seemed that the people of my quarter
were more able in the manufacture of news or more imaginative than were
the people who live in other parts of the city. We had no sooner struck
into home parts than we found news. We were told that two of the
Volunteer leaders had been shot. These were Pearse and Connolly. The
latter was reported as lying in the Castle Hospital with a fractured
thigh. Pearse was cited as dead with two hundred of his men, following
their sally from the Post Office. The machine guns had caught them as
they left, and none of them remained alive. The news seemed afterwards
to be true except that instead of Pearse it was The O'Rahilly who had
been killed. Pearse died later and with less excitement.

A man who had seen an English newspaper said that the Kut force had
surrendered to the Turk, but that Verdun had not fallen to the Germans.
The rumour was current also that a great naval battle had been fought
whereat the German fleet had been totally destroyed with loss to the
English of eighteen warships. It was said that among the captured
Volunteers there had been a large body of Germans, but nobody believed
it; and this rumour was inevitably followed by the tale that there were
one hundred German submarines lying in the Stephen's Green pond.

At half-past two I met Mr. Commissioner Bailey, who told me that it was