stated that during Easter Week, before going to bed, the family gathered as usual to say the Rosary and to ‘pray for the Volunteers’.31 At the same time it is clear that despite their nationalist proclivities, the Daltons would have remained steadfastly loyal to Charlie’s brother Emmet who was now with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.
A few days after the start of the rebellion, Charlie was talking to his mother when the windows of the house shook with the sound of a deafening explosion – they later discovered that the British gunboat Helga had sailed up the River Liffey to shell buildings which were believed to be occupied by rebels. Towards the end of a week of fighting, Charlie was upstairs with his family saying the Rosary, when he saw a red glow in the sky in the direction of the city centre.32 A man passing by the house the following day said the GPO had caught fire and that the Volunteers had surrendered – he had seen them lined up on the street. Charlie was greatly disappointed at the news. Among the many captured insurgents was an extroverted young man from County Cork, named Michael Collins. All prisoners were released by June 1917.
After the fighting ended, Charlie went into Dublin city centre and walked amid the ruins. He later explained that in his patriotic fervor he wanted to make contact with others who felt the same as he did. He went to one of the Requiem Masses for the dead at the Church of St Mary of the Angels on Church Street, run by the Capuchin Franciscans. He found there what he was looking for. Outside the church he saw an older schoolmate from O’Connell’s, Ernie O’Malley, singing rebel songs.33 Like the Daltons, the O’Malleys had a foot in both camps – Ernie O’Malley had fought with the rebels in the Rising and would later become a prominent IRA leader, while, as previously indicated, his brother Frank was in the British Army. Charlie Dalton recalled that ‘we were horrified’ at the news of the execution of the Rising leaders.34 The shooting by firing squad of men such as Pádraig Pearse, his brother Willie and James Connolly, engendered great sympathy for the rebel cause. This accelerated the rise of the separatist Sinn Fein movement and helped to sound the death knell for John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party.
Emmet Dalton said in his RTÉ interview with Cathal O’Shannon that when he heard of the Rising his reaction was the same as most of the recruits who were with him in Kilworth Camp, he was surprised, annoyed, and thought it was madness. He felt the rebels represented only a ‘tiny minority’ at that time, ‘and we were the overwhelming majority represented by our people in Parliament…’ However, he made it clear that if he had been asked to oppose the rebels in arms, that would be a ‘different situation’, implying that he would not fight against his fellow-countrymen. In Dublin, Irish troops were among the British soldiers deployed against the rebels, and a number of Dublin Fusiliers were killed. There is no record of any mutiny among them when they were were sent in to suppress the rebellion.
It has been suggested that Emmet Dalton was one of the army cadets who formed part of the British forces that were mobilized for security duties in County Wexford at the time of the rebellion. Because of a shortage of garrison troops, trainee officers, part of the Young Officers Corps at Fermoy, were given rifles and full service kit. They were then sent to County Wexford to guard a munitions factory and other strategic points, and to round up suspects.35 Fortunately none of them was required to open fire on the insurgents. The Wexford Rising was, in fact, a rather ‘gentle’ rebellion; although a large number of Volunteers turned out, there was no fighting and nobody was killed. Colonel French, the local commander of the British forces, took a ‘softly softly’ approach and this helped to resolve the situation without bloodshed. A young man, Francis Carty (a future editor of the Sunday Press), lived in Wexford town at the time of the Rising. He later fought with the IRA in the War of Independence and Civil War. He remembered the arrival of a force of cadets in Wexford with a larger number of British troops. He added in his statement to the BMH: ‘I think that Emmet Dalton was one of these cadets.’36
Richard Mulcahy, IRA Chief of Staff during the War of Independence, claimed that Dalton took the rebel surrender at Enniscorthy in 1916. Mulcahy made the claim in 1927 at an election rally, as a way of praising Dalton for his transformation from a British Army officer who once confronted Irish rebels to a rebel hero of the War of Independence.37 However, Mulcahy’s account raises the question – would a cadet or trainee junior officer be the person deployed to take the surrender of a rebel leader? The leader of the Wexford insurgents, Robert Brennan, told the Bureau of Military History that he surrendered to the British commander, Colonel French.38
While brave and idealistic, the insurgents of 1916 did not have an electoral mandate. The party that Irish nationalists voted for in overwhelming numbers was John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party. As a result, Dalton and others who followed Redmond’s call to join the British Army in the First World War believed that in doing so they were expressing the will of the Irish people. The execution of the leaders of the rebellion helped to swing public sympathy towards the Volunteers’ separatist cause, and to divert support away from the Redmondites. In a 1977 interview, Dalton reflected that the general attitude of the Irish people at that time was changed by ‘the execution of the leaders perpetrated by the British for no valid reason’.39
Referring to the Rising itself, he considered the insurrection a hopeless gamble because it had no hope of success. He could not envision the leaders had ever believed in achieving military victory. He told how his contemporaries at the time looked askance at the Rising. ‘They did not see it the way one sees it now…’ Nevertheless, Dalton appeared to harbour a suspicion that the measure of independence Ireland ultimately achieved with the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty could have been secured peacefully had the 1916 Rising not occurred. In a telling quote, he remarked: ‘I think it [the Rising] should never have happened. I think if it had not happened the Home Rule Bill … could have been achieved, and I don’t see that there was a whale of a difference between the Home Rule Bill at that time and the Treaty as it was subsequently accepted.’40
Dalton also recognized the galvanizing effect of the British government’s attempt to introduce conscription in Ireland in 1918. That move was widely opposed by all elements of nationalist Ireland, including the Irish Parliamentary Party, and was later abandoned. Dalton told RTÉ interviewer Pádraig Ó Raghallaigh that he believed the move to impose conscription had an ‘extraordinary effect’. He said the Irish people stood solid against conscription, and he recalled the petition signatures and protests outside the churches on Sundays.41
Despite Dalton’s doubts and misgivings about the 1916 rebellion, he was destined to serve with the IRA in the War of Independence and, after the Truce, to be a member of Michael Collins’s entourage during the talks in late 1921 that resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but in the meantime he would undergo the horror of the trenches as a young British Army officer in the Great War.
CHAPTER TWO
The Great War
In the high summer of 1916, the Battle of the Somme was raging in France. This great Allied offensive against the German lines was set to become the bloodiest encounter ever experienced by the British Army in its long history. The fighting at the Somme had been in progress for a couple of weeks when, back in Ireland, on 15 July, 18-year-old Emmet Dalton passed his military examinations. He was judged to be an officer who was qualified for active service with the 7th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers (RDF). The following month 2nd Lieutenant Dalton was sent to France. The scale of the carnage meant that the British war machine required a constant supply of young men like Dalton to be hurled into the maelstrom. Soon, the teenaged officer would find himself in the firing line in a major offensive. Having lied about his age on joining up, it appears he continued with the subterfuge. In the official booklet given to each officer, the Officer’s Record of Services, his date of birth is given as 4 March 1896, instead of 1898 – adding two years to his real age.1
In early September Dalton was transferred to the 9th Battalion, RDF, attached to the 48th Irish Brigade. The 48th brigade was part of the 16th (Irish) Division, commanded by Major General W.B. Hickie. Many of the officers and men in the Division were Redmondites, supporters of Home Rule. Like Dalton, there were those who had been shocked and horrified at the news of the Easter Rising in Dublin. The men of the