Rebels Read online

  His hell only ended after a couple of hours when someone came in and woke the snorer up. He turned out to be an officer of the watch who was wanted on deck.

  At about 7 in the morning, hearing further searches being carried out, he switched cabins. Children had returned to the ship to play. Their ball dropped through the skylight and rolled right up against his body. Kids started yelling for someone to go and get it back.

  He flicked the ball away and pulled a floor covering over himself just as the door opened and an adult voice said, ‘Got it.’

  It was another five days before the boat was allowed to continue. Christensen, when he finally found him, told Monteith, ‘The British have taken into custody four or five men. German citizens, spies, so they say.’

  The band played tangos again. Back to abnormality.

  Two days after that, on 19 November, they were sailing up the breathtaking fjord to Christiania.

  Monteith had barely recovered his peace of mind when Christensen jolted him again. He claimed to have heard another sea-search was planned before Copenhagen.

  ‘Better get off here, I reckon, and go on to Copenhagen by train?’

  Adler’s one motive for coming on the trip was to visit his parents in Christiania.

  Over the loudspeaker, a voice said: ‘Passengers disembarking have passports and landing papers ready, please.’

  Monteith gripped Adler by the shoulder. ‘I thought you said – What the hell are we going to do?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Christensen retorted, brandishing his passport.

  ‘I don’t know a word of your lingo,’ Monteith grinded out, their faces almost touching. ‘You’ll have to interpret for me.’

  ‘What is there to say?’ Christensen spat through the gap in his teeth as he freed himself. ‘You knew the risks.’ Seeing Monteith getting very angry, he added, ‘Don’t worry. There’s always friends, family, luggage-handlers coming on board. Just grab some bags, carry them down the gangway and mix with the third-class passengers.’

  Monteith went warily on deck to find both gangways were manned by police: at the top, in the middle and on the quay.

  He picked up a stray suitcase and joined a line of passengers. With a sinking feeling, he had started down the gangway, when he stumbled.

  That gave him an idea.

  He lurched, bumping against passengers. He cannonaded against a policeman at the top of the gangway who stretched out a hand.

  ‘Steady there, sir.’

  He got to the middle, humming crazily to himself, belching and moving sideways like a crab. His spell on board ship in a confined space really had made him unsteady on his pins. The embarrassed gendarme in the middle of the gangway let him pass without a glance.

  One last hurdle: the gendarmes on the quay. He tripped and fell a dead weight into the arms of one of them who tossed him aside, with a disgusted look at his companion. In spite of Adler, Monteith had made it safely ashore.

  They booked into the Grand Hotel in the centre of town. Monteith signed ‘Jack Murray’ in the book.

  ‘Identification papers?’ the clerk said.

  He fumbled in his pocket, pointed to his bag.

  ‘Later,’ the clerk said.

  But no sooner was Monteith in his room than the manager, who had lately been booked for not reporting an illegal immigrant, went to the police.

  ‘A foreigner’s just checked into the Grand,’ he said.

  ‘Suspicious?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Keep an eye on him,’ the duty officer said, ‘and we’ll drop in and see him by and by.’

  Monteith had eaten and was asleep for a bare thirty minutes when Christensen, who had taken a walk and heard rumours, shook him.

  ‘Wake up, man. The cops are on to us.’

  It was still only 6 a.m. when the two of them squeezed through a back window and went to Adler’s home. There they managed to get some sleep.

  Adler’s father helped out by booking two tickets on the night train to Copenhagen plus two for a local journey.

  When the fugitives approached the station, they saw armed police at the entrance to the main platform, checking on passengers. Adler’s father with a friend went through the check-point while they went on to the unguarded platform for the local train. They then crossed over to where Adler’s father handed them punched tickets for Copenhagen.

  The train left at 8.30 a.m. On board, they posed as brothers, with Monteith pretending to be blotto. They sprinkled whiskey over the sleeping compartment and Adler pressed a few kroner on the Swedish customs official to ensure privacy.

  Officials at the Danish border made Adler fill in forms for the two of them. Having placed them in a crammed folder, they left for the dining-room. Adler removed the forms, tore them up and tossed them out of the window.

  ‘There,’ he grinned. ‘We no longer exist.’

  Arriving at Copenhagen at 7.30 in the morning, they went to the German Legation. There was no passport for Monteith but a spectacled frosty-looking secretary assured them, ‘The German frontier guards know you are coming.’

  They left Copenhagen at 10 a.m. No sooner were they at sea than passengers at the rails shrieked, ‘Unterseeboot.’ A British submarine, nosing around between Denmark and the German port, surfaced 300 yards away.

  ‘Jesus,’ Monteith muttered, ‘now I’m for it.’

  To his relief, it soon submerged again. Three German destroyers were heading towards it at a rate of 30 knots.

  It was 5 in the evening when they arrived at the port of Warnemunde. The Customs let them in with a nod and they took the 6 o’clock train for Berlin where they arrived, without incident, just before midnight.

  Monteith tried two hotels given him by Christensen but Casement had gone to Munich. He was non-plussed. Munich was a long way from Berlin and even further from Lübeck.

  Next day, 23 November, after getting his ID, he caught the night train for Munich, arriving at Casement’s hotel at 9 a.m. Entering his room, he felt this was the proudest moment of his life. He knew Casement by repute as a crusader for the dispossessed in the Congo and the Putamayo and Ireland.

  ‘Everyone here accepts,’ Casement explained, ‘that it’s only a matter of time before America allies itself with Britain.’

  A German naval victory was out of the question and without that they had no hope of victory.

  While he was talking, Monteith was noting his height – about 6 feet 2 inches – his arrow-straight back, the way he moved like a panther, the black hair and beard tinged with silver, the expressive eyes. In Berlin, Haughwitz of the German General Staff had told him Casement was not well. It was not immediately obvious except that his hands quivered a lot.

  ‘All of which, my dear Monteith, has rather put a damper on my efforts to raise an Irish Brigade.’

  ‘My orders, sir,’ Monteith said, ‘were to press on and that’s what I intend to do.’

  The presence of an ally seemed to revive Casement. They caught the train to Berlin at 7 that night and went on on the 26th to Zossen, seventeen miles south of the capital where the Brigade was now stationed. Fifty Irishmen were in a camp with a quarter of a million Germans. Monteith was impressed by Casement’s concern for each of his men. The men themselves he found shifty-eyed and undisciplined.

  Casement introduced him.

  ‘The Lieutenant has come from the home country. He is in command here until a more senior officer can be sent from the United States.’

  Monteith’s first job was to recruit more men so, after a few days’ rest in Berlin, he met with his two chief aides, Sergeants O’Toole and Beverley, caught the train to Limburg and booked into the Alte Post Hotel.

  Next morning – it was a Monday – still in civvies, he began at 9 prompt. He planned to interview fifty men a day individually. He applied no pressure and offered no bribes. He admitted his own mistake in fighting for the British long ago.

  They listened with, at best, indifference, as if to say, Who the he
ll is he?

  Within the first hour, he knew he was in for a hard slog.

  A fortnight later, a rejuvenated Casement wrote to Joe McGarrity, asking him to try and get some Irish-Americans into Berlin. ‘If we can get twenty privates and two officers, we have a chance.’

  The message was forwarded to Devoy. It was his best news from Casement in many a long day. Christensen had proved it was possible to get men into Germany.

  As soon as Christensen was back from Berlin, Devoy contacted him, told him what he had in mind and started handing him bundles of dollar bills.

  Birrell was becoming increasingly worried about Ireland. First, there was his Government’s indifference. When Carson had resigned from the Cabinet, Asquith had simply replaced him with another Unionist, the notable barrister F. E. Smith.

  Next, the Commons, backed by generals like Sir John French, now in charge of Home Forces, wanted to conscript even Irishmen. For that, Birrell felt, the army would have to enter villages and cart off Micks and Pats at bayonet-point. It would utterly destroy John Redmond and his Party, which, presumably, was what Unionists wanted.

  Only loyalty to the Prime Minister, to John Redmond and to Ireland stopped him resigning. With the war dragging on beyond all expectations, the cry ‘Home Rule is on the statute book’ had faded to the point of inaudibility.

  Across the stormy sea, the Sinn Feiners were growing stronger all the time.

  At St Enda’s School, Pearse never stopped. In addition to his many burdens – giving lessons, organizing the Volunteers throughout the country, trying to pay his bills – he went on writing.

  As darkness fell, he was at his desk, reading over his new one-act play, The Singer. Largely autobiographical, it expressed his mystical ideas about the need for a rising to throw the British out of Ireland. He set it in the west, in wild hill country.

  Its hero is Macdara, a young man who is very silent, until he stands up to talk to the people. Then he has the voice of a silver trumpet and words so beautiful they make people cry. And there is a terrible anger in him, for all that he is shrinking and shy.

  Macdara admits that when he came home and his mother stretched out her arms to him, it was as though she were the Virgin meeting her Son on the way to the cross. Human love was not for him, only a cold, chaste hardening of the heart before he meets inevitable death in front of a jeering crowd.

  He is not content to be a poet. He is a teacher and a fosterer.

  ‘The true teacher must break bread to the people: he must go into Gethsemane and toil up the steep of Golgotha.’ For he knows God’s Name is suffering and loneliness and rejection.

  His young brother dies for his people and Macdara decides to follow him, wishing that he and he alone could sacrifice himself for all like Christ.

  Macdara, his mother says, is ‘the Singer that has quickened the dead years and all the quiet dust.’

  Accused by the elderly of embarking on a foolish thing, he replies, ‘And so it is. Do you want us to do the wise?’

  He goes to meet the Gall (the foreigner), pulling off his clothes to be naked like Christ, saying, ‘One man can free a people as one Man redeemed the world. I will take no pike, I will go into battle with bare hands. I will stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men on the tree!’

  Pearse knew he could not stage this play, not with the rising so near. But he was happy to have written it. It was an expression of his faith.

  An unwise thing had to be done because the wisest things had not won Ireland an inch of freedom. The way of the cross was the paradigm of all unwise deeds that can make the dead dust dance at the sound of the voice of a Singer who loves enough. If only he, Patrick Pearse, could die alone as Christ did, and by dying save his peers.

  That, he knew, was impossible. Many would have to die for the foolish yet necessary thing that he and his colleagues in the Brotherhood at home and abroad had set their hearts on.

  He went on his knees beside his desk and prayed for all of them in Ireland, and America, and Germany.

  That same evening, Devoy wrote to the German Foreign Office, saying of Casement, ‘He has full authority to speak for me and represent the Irish Revolutionary Party in Ireland and America.’

  Devoy had discovered that Christensen was claiming maintenance for his wife, who turned out to be a kept girl-friend whom he had brought with him from Berlin.

  A bachelor-prude, Devoy did not like the idea of him living with a slut in New Jersey at his expense.

  ‘That bastard, that whoreson,’ he muttered over and over, now convinced that he was in the pay of the British.

  Unable to replace Casement, he had no choice but to back him.

  He wondered how the request for submarines to transport arms and ammunition to the Kerry coast was being received in Berlin. They were certainly taking their time about it.

  On 5 November, the German Admiral Staff finally replied to the General Staff that their High Sea command thought Tralee Bay was not deep enough for submarines. If attacked, they would be detected and sunk.

  That same day, a solitary Irish-American, McGooey, arrived in Berlin. Casement was hoping for a couple of hundred. He prayed things were going better in Ireland.

  *

  From the point of view of the Administration, Ireland was moving towards crisis.

  From the Castle, Nathan told Birrell that, in his view, the Nationalist Party had lost control of the country. Redmond confirmed that the Sinn Fein Volunteers were growing in strength. But Birrell was in a dilemma. If he did not repress the Sinn Feiners, they would grow; if he did, they would grow even faster.

  Even Wimborne knew what would happen if conscription were enforced in Ireland. If he failed to enlist soon, say, 10,000 Irishmen, the Cabinet might impose conscription. In which case, support for the Sinn Feiners would be overwhelming.

  The German War Office finally made Monteith a lieutenant. He arrived back in Zossen in uniform at 2.30 in the morning of 28 November to find it under two feet of snow. In his absence, the men had been chafing under Teutonic discipline. They were without overcoats, had been granted no leave and were deprived of weapons because they could not hold their drink. He moved into the officers’ quarters. His job was virtually impossible but he would give it all he had.

  He called Casement in his hospiz, suggesting that a break in Zossen would do him good. He himself had never felt lonelier in his life.

  On the last day of November, at midday New York time, he was remembering Mollie. He had made a compact with her that they would think of each other at this time every day.

  ‘Mollie Darling,’ he wrote, ‘I forgot to take one of your curls with me when leaving America. Send me one at once, then I shall feel that I have you with me, and will feel safe no matter what or how great the danger may be.’

  Three days later, to his surprise, Casement turned up. Monteith booked him into a fine old inn, the Golden Lion, half a mile from the camp. He looked well and joined the men on route marches north to Mittenwalde and bought everyone beer.

  In his African days, Casement had thought nothing of walking fifty miles a day on mud roads and in intense heat. He could still manage five miles an hour. The two of them were so deep in conversation they were soon a mile ahead of the column. They turned round to wait for the short stout Sergeant-Major. He eventually puffed up, complaining, ‘Sir Roger, you’re killing us all, sir.’

  Those long walks imprinted themselves indelibly on Monteith’s brain: the long white roads without any turnings, the smell of fallen leaves decaying in the crisp air, the wind sighing through the gaunt naked branches of the trees.

  Mile after mile they walked, part of a platoon yet strangely solitary, alone under the moon and stars, walking through shadows. And Casement talked of his terrible experiences in the jungles and swamps of Africa and by the banks of the Amazon and into Putamayo.

  But most of all, as they crunched snow under their boots, they remembered the greenness of Ireland, the softness of its rain; and won
dered what were the chances of a rising against the British.

  In mid-December, Casement was bucked by a flattering letter from Christensen in Jersey City. A couple of days later, came a note from Devoy exposing him for what he was.

  So nothing Adler had said, nothing in their relationship had been genuine. The wretched Germans, who thought him a double-agent, had been right all along.

  For a sensitive man like Casement, this was the final humiliation. His one consolation was that he had done his best for someone he had thought of as a friend.

  What had he left now, except his love for Ireland?

  Would Ireland, too, reject him?

  At this time, an unsigned article, ‘Peace and the Gael’, appeared in the Dublin magazine, the Spark. The author was Patrick Pearse. He wrote of the heroism of the war.

  ‘It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.’

  When Connolly read it, he nearly had a fit. He said to Bill O’Brien: ‘Listen to this. For love of country? Whose country? Lives given gladly. What utter bilge! Our poor sods enlisted out of need and died because of incompetence. Irishmen should only fight for Ireland, Bill. Their place to die is here and now, not far off on someone else’s battlefield that will leave this country as enslaved as ever.’

  He wrote a counterblast in his own Workers Republic.

  ‘No, we do not think that the old heart of the earth needs to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives. We think anyone who does is a blithering idiot.’

  John MacNeill sensed a growing restlessness among his men. He tried to calm things down in his own publication, the Irish Volunteer, calling for patience and discipline.

  Connolly read that with equal contempt.