Watching waves of British soldiers run into gunfire on Northumberland Road, it might have occurred to some of the rebels that there was no reason to expect better treatment from the British than they gave their own citizens. At that time, the top 1 percent of British society controlled almost 70 percent of the wealth, and working-class men were being fed into an industrial war machine across the channel at rates that were unprecedented in history. At the Battle of the Somme three months after the Easter Rising, Britain suffered almost sixty thousand men killed and wounded on the first
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