Casement on Banna Strand

A man may spend his life as the conscience of empire and still find, at the turning, that empire has no use for conscience once it has read his private papers. The hinge of such a life is rarely the scaffold. It is an earlier moment, on a wet shore in the dark, when the man who has made his name by telling the truth about distant atrocities arrives home to discover that the rescue he has arranged has already failed, and that the only useful act left to him is to call the rising off.

THE CONSUL

He was born at Lawson Terrace, Sandycove, on the first of September 1864, and raised among the basalt and beech of Magherintemple in north Antrim. The consular service took him out, in his twenties, to the river stations of the Congo Free State, and there he learned the trick of seeing: the severed hands at Baringa, the chicotte-scarred backs at Bolobo, the ledgers in which a Belgian company recorded the weight of rubber against the weight of human life. His 1904 report on Leopold's Congo, and the 1911 report on the Peruvian Amazon Company at Putumayo, made him, by the King's writ, Sir Roger David Casement. The knighthood sat oddly on a man who had begun, somewhere over those years, to think of himself as Irish first and consular second. He retired in 1913, took the boat to America, then to Berlin, and proposed to the German General Staff that Ireland would rise if Germany would arm her. The Staff, polite and unhurried, agreed to send twenty thousand Mausers in a freighter dressed as a Norwegian tramp. The freighter was the Aud. It sailed from Lübeck in early April 1916.

THE U-BOAT

U-19, Lieutenant Raimund Weisbach commanding, took him aboard at Wilhelmshaven on the twelfth of April with Robert Monteith of the Volunteers and Daniel Bailey of the so-called Irish Brigade, a recruitment failure of fifty-six men drawn from the prison camp at Limburg. The submarine ran on the surface at night and submerged by day. He was sick the whole passage. The malaria he had carried out of the Congo since 1903 was on him again, and the diesel reek of the boat made eating impossible. On the evening of the twentieth he stood in the conning tower as the Kerry coast came up grey on the horizon, and asked the lieutenant, in his careful German, whether any signal had been received from the Aud. None had. The rendezvous at Fenit was to have been made the previous night. Spindler, the Aud's captain, ought by now to have been running her arms ashore at the pier. Nothing had been heard since Wednesday morning. Sie ist verschwunden, said Weisbach. She has vanished.

THE DINGHY

At twenty past two in the morning of Good Friday, the twenty-first of April, in heavy darkness and a fine cold rain off the Atlantic, the dinghy was put over the side. Two German seamen rowed. Monteith sat forward with the revolvers. Bailey crouched amidships. Casement, fevered, half a century old, lay against the stern thwart and watched the dark line of Banna Strand rise out of the swell. He had no firearm of his own. He had a leather wallet at his belt containing three pre-printed German telegrams and a return cipher he was never to use. The dinghy struck the soft wet sand at twenty past three. The seamen put him out and pulled back into the dark without a word. The boat made the dunes by half past three, the three men crouched in the lee of an Iron-Age ring-fort half a mile inland called by the country people McKenna's Fort.

THE HINGE

In the wet bracken inside the bank of the rath, the rain on his face, the fever climbing again, he had the seconds in which a man's whole arrangement of himself comes apart and reassembles. The arms were not coming. The Aud was taken or scuttled, it scarcely mattered which. Without the twenty thousand Mausers the Volunteers in Dublin had something near eight hundred working rifles and a city, no country behind them. The country had been promised a country rising on the back of German steel; the city alone would be a gesture, six days of street fighting and a roll-call of executions. He had known, in the U-boat, what the German General Staff had been about. Theirs was a wartime nuisance, not a cause; he had written as much to his sister Nina from Berlin, that the German government's heart was not in it. There remained one thing he was still in a position to do. He could send Monteith on a bicycle to Tralee with the cancellation, get word to Pearse and to Connolly that the rifles would not land, that the rising must be put off. He was no longer the consul with the King's commission; he was no longer the diplomat in Berlin; he was a sick man in a wet ring-fort with a revolver he would not use and a few hours, at most, before the constabulary came up the lane. He gave Monteith the order. Monteith went. Bailey was sent off separately to find a sympathiser. The hinge was a single sentence spoken inside an earthwork two thousand years older than the empire he had served. After Monteith had gone he lay down against the inner face of the bank and slept, with the fever on him, until one in the afternoon.

THE GIRL AND THE SERGEANT

Mary Gorman, a farmer's daughter of the townland, came up to the rath at one o'clock looking for a missing cow and found instead a tall stranger asleep against the bank in a wet overcoat. She ran home. Her father walked to the village. The parish priest sent word to the Royal Irish Constabulary at Ardfert. Sergeant Hearn came up to the fort at half past three in the afternoon with two constables. The man inside the rath gave the name of Richard Morten, a writer on holiday. The deception lasted twenty minutes. In his coat pocket the sergeant found a German rail ticket and the cipher in the wallet. He was walked down to Ardfert barracks and held overnight; on the morning of the twenty-second he was taken to Tralee gaol, on the twenty-third to Dublin Castle, on the evening of the twenty-third aboard a steamer to London under naval escort. The Rising began on Easter Monday at noon without him and without the Aud's arms. The Proclamation was read at the General Post Office. The garrison held for six days. Connolly was shot strapped to a chair at Kilmainham on the twelfth of May.

THE COURT

He was charged at the King's Bench Division of the Royal Courts of Justice on the seventeenth of May 1916. The defence, led by Serjeant Sullivan, rested on the medieval Treason Act of 1351, and on the proposition that the statute applied only to treason within the realm of England, and that whatever Casement had done in Berlin he had not done it within the realm. The Crown, by a much-disputed reading of the comma-work of an Anglo-Norman clause, argued that the realm followed the King's writ wherever it went. The court agreed. Verdict, guilty; sentence, death. The Privy Council struck him from the roll of knights on the twenty-ninth of June. While the trial ran, the Director of Public Prosecutions had been showing, in private rooms, photographic copies of the diaries the police had taken from his lodgings in Ebury Street, the diaries that recorded, in his own hand, the small entries of his nights in Africa and Brazil. The pages were carried to the American press, to the Catholic hierarchy, to the King himself. They did the work the indictment could not. Petitions for clemency, signed by Conan Doyle and by Yeats, were declined. I die for my country, he told Father Carey in the condemned cell on the night of the second of August, words the chaplain set down in his record.

THE ROPE AND THE LIME

He was received into the Roman Catholic Church on the morning of the twenty-eighth of July by Father Carey at Pentonville. He was hanged on the morning of the third of August 1916 by John Ellis. He was forty-five seconds on the scaffold. He was buried, the same hour, in quicklime in unconsecrated ground inside the prison wall, between the graves of Crippen and another murderer. The Harold Wilson government returned the bones, in February 1965, in a plain coffin under a tricolour. They lay two days in state at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin. A hundred and sixty-five thousand people filed past. On the first of March 1965 he was reinterred at Glasnevin with full state honours; the President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, eighty-two years old and the last surviving commandant of Easter Week, stood bareheaded at the graveside in the rain.

THE STRAND

The conscience of empire is a useful instrument until it is turned upon the empire itself, at which point the empire reaches for the private papers. What he had arranged from Berlin failed; what he did in the wet ring-fort, in the second between the dinghy and the sergeant, was the one act of his last year that bore fruit, for it was Monteith's bicycle ride to Tralee, and the messages it set in train, that brought Eoin MacNeill's countermanding order in The Sunday Independent and reduced the rising to the city action whose dead became, by the arithmetic of executions, the founders of a state. On the headland above McKenna's Fort there is a granite obelisk put up in 1971. The fort itself, in the care of the Office of Public Works, is a grassy ring still mostly hidden in the dunes, and at low tide on a wet morning in April the long flat sand of Banna Strand runs out to the Atlantic exactly as it did when the German dinghy grounded on it at twenty past three.