The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (51 page)

Joseph Plunkett spent almost two months in Germany, living with a frugality comparable with that of Roger himself, until June 20, when he left for the Swiss border, on his way back to Ireland via Italy and Spain. The young poet paid no particular attention to the small number of adherents the Irish Brigade had attracted and did not show the least sympathy for it. The reason?

“To serve in the Brigade, the prisoners have to break their oath of loyalty to the British army,” he told Roger. “I was always opposed to our people enlisting in the ranks of the occupier. But once they did, a vow made before God cannot be broken without sinning and losing one’s honor.”

Father Crotty heard this conversation and kept silent. He was like that, a sphinx, for the entire afternoon the three spent together, listening to the poet, who monopolized the conversation. Afterward, the Dominican remarked to Roger:

“This boy is out of the ordinary, no doubt about it. Because of his intelligence and devotion to a cause. His Christianity is that of the Christians who died in Roman circuses, devoured by wild beasts. But also of the Crusaders who reconquered Jerusalem by killing all the ungodly Jews and Muslims they encountered, including women and children. The same burning zeal, the same glorification of blood and war. I confess, Roger, that people like him, even though they may be the ones who make history, fill me with more fear than admiration.”

A recurrent subject in the conversations between Roger and Joseph at this time was the possibility the insurrection might occur without a German invasion or, at least, a bombardment of the ports on Irish territory protected by the Royal Navy. Even in that case Plunkett advocated going ahead with the insurrectionist plans: the European war had created an opportunity that should not be squandered. Roger thought it would be suicide. No matter how heroic and intrepid they were, the revolutionaries would be crushed by the machinery of the Empire. It would use the opportunity to carry out an implacable purge. The liberation of Ireland would be delayed another fifty years.

“Am I to understand that if the revolution breaks out with no intervention by Germany, you will not be with us, Sir Roger?”

“Of course I’ll be with you. But knowing it will be a useless sacrifice.”

Young Plunkett looked him in the eye for a long time, and Roger seemed to detect a feeling of pity in his gaze.

“Permit me to speak to you frankly, Sir Roger,” he murmured at last, with the gravity of someone who knows he possesses an irrefutable truth. “There is something you haven’t understood, it seems to me. This isn’t a question of winning. Of course we’re going to lose this battle. It’s a question of enduring. Of resisting. For days, weeks. And dying in such a way that our death and our blood will increase the patriotism of the Irish until it becomes an irresistible force. It’s a question of a hundred revolutionaries being born for each one of us who dies. Isn’t that what happened with Christianity?”

He didn’t know how to answer. The weeks that followed Plunkett’s departure were very intense for Roger. He continued asking that Germany free those Irish prisoners who deserved it for reasons of health, age, intellectual and professional status, and good behavior. This gesture would make a good impression in Ireland. The German authorities had been reluctant but now began to give in. They drew up lists and discussed names. Finally, the military high command agreed to free a hundred professionals, teachers, students, and businessmen with respectable credentials. There were many hours and days of discussions, a tug of war that left Roger exhausted. On the other hand, he agonized over the idea that the Volunteers, following the ideas of Pearse and Plunkett, would unleash an insurrection before Germany had decided to attack Britain, and pressed the chancellery and admiralty to give him an answer regarding the fifty thousand rifles. Their responses were vague, until one day, at a meeting in the Ministry of Foreign Relations, Count Blücher said something that disheartened him:

“Sir Roger, you don’t have an accurate idea of proportions. Examine a map objectively and you will see how little Ireland represents in geopolitical terms. No matter how much sympathy the Reich may have for your cause, other countries and regions are more important to German interests.”

“Does this mean we won’t receive the weapons, Count? Germany flatly rejects an invasion?”

“Both matters are still under study. If it were up to me, I’d reject the invasion, of course, in the near future. But the specialists will decide. You’ll have a definitive answer anytime now.”

Roger wrote a long letter to John Devoy and Joseph McGarrity, giving them his reasons for opposing an uprising that did not count on a German action. He urged them to use their influence with the Volunteers and the IRB to dissuade them from rash action. At the same time, he assured them he was still making every effort to obtain the weapons. But his conclusion was dramatic: “I have failed. I’m useless here. Let me return to the United States.”

During this time his ailments flared up. Nothing had any effect on his arthritis pains. Constant colds with high fevers frequently obliged him to stay in bed. He had lost weight and suffered from insomnia. To make matters worse, in this condition he learned that
The New York World
had published an article, surely filtered through British counterespionage, according to which Sir Roger Casement was in Berlin receiving large sums of money from the Reich to foment a rebellion in Ireland. He sent a letter of protest—“I work for Ireland, not Germany”—that wasn’t published. His friends in New York dissuaded him from the idea of a lawsuit: he would lose, and
Clan na Gael
was not prepared to waste money on judicial litigation.

In May 1915, the German authorities acceded to an insistent demand of Roger’s: that the volunteers in the Irish Brigade be separated from the other prisoners in Limburg. On May 20, the fifty Brigade members, harassed by their companions, were transferred to the small camp in Zossen, near Berlin. They celebrated the occasion with a Mass officiated by Father Crotty, and there were toasts and Irish songs in an atmosphere of camaraderie that helped to raise Roger’s spirits. He announced to Brigade members that within a few days they would receive the uniforms he had designed himself, and a handful of Irish officers would arrive soon to direct their training. They, who constituted the first company of the Irish Brigade, would pass into history as the pioneers of a great exploit.

Immediately after this meeting, he wrote another letter to Joseph McGarrity, telling him about the opening of the Zossen camp and apologizing for the catastrophic tone of his previous letter. He had written it in a moment of discouragement but now felt less pessimistic. The arrival of Joseph Plunkett and the camp at Zossen were a stimulus. He would continue working for the Irish Brigade. Though small, it was an important symbol in the big picture of the European war.

Early in the summer of 1915, he left for Munich. He stayed in the Basler Hof, a modest but pleasant hotel. The Bavarian capital depressed him less than Berlin, though here he led an even more solitary life than in the capital. His health continued to deteriorate, and pains and chills obliged him to stay in his room. His monkish life consisted of intense intellectual work. He drank many cups of coffee and constantly drew on black tobacco cigarettes that filled his room with smoke. He wrote endless letters to his contacts in the chancellery and the admiralty and maintained a daily spiritual and religious correspondence with Father Crotty. He reread the priest’s letters and guarded them like a treasure. One day he attempted to pray. He hadn’t for a long time, at least not in this way, concentrating, trying to open to God his heart, his doubts, his anguish, his fear of having been wrong, asking for mercy and guidance in his future conduct. At the same time he wrote short essays about the errors an independent Ireland ought to avoid, using the experience of other nations, in order not to fall into corruption, exploitation, the astronomical distances that everywhere separated the poor and the rich, the powerful and the weak. But at times he became discouraged: what was he going to do with these texts? It made no sense to distract his friends in Ireland with essays about the future when they found themselves submerged in an overwhelming present.

When the summer was over, feeling somewhat better, he traveled to the camp at Zossen. The men in the Brigade had received the uniforms he had designed, and all of them looked good with the Irish insignia on their visors. The camp seemed well ordered and functioning. But inactivity and confinement were undermining the morale of the fifty Brigade members in spite of Father Crotty’s efforts to raise their spirits. He organized athletic competitions, meetings, classes and debates on a variety of subjects. Roger thought it a good time to flash before them the incentive of action.

He gathered them in a circle and explained a possible strategy that would get them out of Zossen and give them back their freedom. If at this moment it was impossible for them to fight in Ireland, why not do it under other skies where the same battle for which the Brigade was created was being fought? The world war had spread to the Middle East. Germany and Turkey were fighting to expel the British from their Egyptian colony. Why couldn’t they participate in the struggle against colonization and for the independence of Egypt? Since the Brigade was still small, it would have to join another unit of the army, but they would do it preserving their Irish identity.

The proposal had been discussed by Roger with the German authorities and accepted. Devoy and McGarrity agreed. Turkey would take the Brigade into its army, under the conditions Roger described. There was a long discussion. In the end, thirty-seven members declared they were prepared to fight in Egypt. The rest needed to think about it. But what concerned all the Brigade members now was something more urgent: the prisoners at Limburg had threatened to denounce them to the British authorities so their families in Ireland would stop receiving combatant pensions from the British Army. If this happened, their parents, wives, and children would starve to death. What was Roger going to do about that?

It was obvious the British government would impose this kind of reprisal and it hadn’t even occurred to him. Seeing the anxious faces of the Brigade members, he managed only to assure them that their families would never be unprotected. If they stopped receiving the pensions, patriotic organizations would help them. That same day he wrote to
Clan na Gael
asking that a fund be established to compensate the families of Brigade members who were victims of this reprisal. But Roger had no illusions: the way things were going, the money that came into the coffers of the Volunteers, the IRB, and
Clan na Gael
was for buying weapons, the first priority. In anguish he told himself that because of him, fifty humble Irish families would go hungry and perhaps be ravaged by tuberculosis next winter. Father Crotty tried to calm him, but this time his words brought him no tranquility. A new subject for concern had been added to those tormenting him, and his health suffered another relapse. Not only his physical but his mental health as well, as had happened during his most difficult times in the Congo and Amazonia. He felt himself losing his mental equilibrium. At times his head seemed like an erupting volcano. Would he lose his mind?

He returned to Munich and from there continued sending messages to the United States and Ireland regarding financial support for the families of the Brigade members. Since his letters, in order to mislead British Intelligence, passed through several countries where envelopes and addresses were changed, replies took one or two months to arrive. His anxiety was at its height when Robert Monteith finally appeared to take military command of the Brigade. The officer brought not only his impetuous optimism, decency, and adventurous spirit, but also a formal promise that the families of Brigade members, if they were the object of reprisals, would receive immediate assistance from the Irish revolutionaries.

Captain Monteith, who traveled to see Roger as soon as he arrived in Germany, was disconcerted to find him so ill. He admired him, treated him with enormous respect, and told him no one in the Irish movement suspected he was in so precarious a state. Roger forbade him to tell anyone about his health and traveled with him back to Berlin. He introduced Monteith at the chancellery and the admiralty. The young officer was burning with impatience to begin work and displayed an unshakeable optimism regarding the future of the Brigade that Roger, deep inside, had lost. During the six months he remained in Germany, Robert Monteith was, like Father Crotty, a blessing for Roger. Both kept him from sinking into a discouragement that perhaps might have pushed him to madness. The cleric and the soldier were very different and yet, Roger told himself many times, they were incarnations of two prototypes of Irishmen: the saint and the warrior. Alternating with them, he recalled some conversations with Patrick Pearse, when he combined the altar with arms and stated that the result of the fusion of these two traditions, martyrs and mystics and heroes and warriors, would be the spiritual and physical strength to break the chains that bound Ireland.

They were different but both had a natural integrity, generosity, and devotion to the ideal, which, seeing that Father Crotty and Captain Monteith did not waste time in changes of mood and periods of demoralization, as he did, often made Roger ashamed of his doubts and fluctuations. Both men had laid out a path and followed it without deviation, without being intimidated by obstacles, convinced that in the end victory awaited them: of God over evil and of Ireland over her oppressors.
Learn from them, Roger, be like them
, he repeated to himself, like a short, fervent prayer.

Robert Monteith was a man very close to Tom Clarke, for whom he also professed a religious devotion. He spoke of his tobacco shop—his clandestine general headquarters—at the corner of Great Britain Street and Sackville Street as a “sacred place.” According to the captain, the old fox, survivor of many British prisons, was the one who directed from the shadows all the revolutionary strategy. Wasn’t he deserving of admiration? From his small shop on a poor street in the center of Dublin, this veteran whose body was small, thin, spare, worn by suffering and the years, who had devoted his life to fighting for Ireland, spending fifteen years in prison because of it, had managed to lead the IRB, a secret military and political organization that reached every corner of the country, and not be captured by the British police. Roger asked if the organization was really as successful as he said. The captain’s enthusiasm was overflowing: