The Making of Modern Britain
Page 20
This was important for Casement as he believed the Germans would inevitably win, and would therefore be able to dictate Ireland’s future. In Dublin, the leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood had decided within days of the war starting that their best chance would be a rising at some point helped by Germany. They had infiltrated the Irish Volunteers and other bodies and were planning for a bloody revolt. At the very least this would force the British to draw troops away from France and hasten their defeat. They too were soon in touch with Berlin, via Switzerland. Meanwhile, in Germany, Casement tried to recruit captured men from Irish regiments – all of whom had volunteered to fight for Britain – into an ‘Irish Brigade’, modelled on the 300-strong force that fought with the Boers against Britain a dozen years earlier. His overtures were largely met with scorn, however. In Limberg prison camp, he was struck, pushed and asked how much the Germans were paying him. Out of many thousands, only a few hundred ever signed up to wear the iron-grey tunic with a harp and shamrock badge. Nor were the Germans much impressed with his strong anti-colonialist views as he pressed on, insisting on meeting the German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, and on getting promises for around 100,000 rifles, German officers and men, plus ammunition, for the planned uprising. The question was, when? In Berlin, Casement had little knowledge of the tiny conspiracy being hatched by the IRB, who had agreed to proclaim their republic at Easter 1916.
The IRB, lately allied to the socialist leader James Connolly, had begun to bring round large sections of the more moderate Irish Volunteers to join the uprising – a plan Casement learned about quite late. Though Germany had eagerly watched the pre-war Irish crisis, its military leadership did not believe the chances of success were high. In a series of increasingly desperate letters from the Hotel Saxonia in Berlin, Casement wrote to his handler, Count Georg von Wedel, insisting that without troops and serious amounts of firepower, any uprising was doomed. He soon realized he was trapped. Germany would offer 20,000 rifles and enough ammunition for only a day or two of heavy fighting. If Casement agreed, he would be returning to Ireland to take part in a disaster. If he pulled back, he would seem a coward. He wrote to the count, ‘I do not think anyone was ever put in a more atrocious position. Whatever I do must of necessity be wrong . . . My instinct as an Irish nationalist is to be with my countrymen in any project of theirs, however foolhardy, to stand or fall with them.’ So he was put into a U-boat with a couple of companions, while 20,000 rifles and a few machine guns were sent separately on a German freighter, disguised as a Norwegian ship. Thanks to the Admiralty’s code-breakers, this was intercepted and scuttled. Later, through messages from Germany sent via the Vatican, and the testament of a priest who sheltered him, it became pretty clear that Casement had gone to try to stop the rising, not to lead it. Having landed by rubber dinghy in Tralee Bay, delighting in the ‘primroses and wild violets and the singing of the skylarks in the air’, he was promptly captured. He still had the ticket stub from his German train journey to the U-boat base in his pocket, and was charged with treason and sabotage before being taken to London.
The priest who had briefly sheltered him, Father Ryan of Tralee, duly warned the leaders of the planned rising that the Germans were not sending troops. They were determined to go ahead. Some, at least, saw things differently from Casement. These were brave men, but also visionaries and fanatics. It is a curious thing that so many of them had English or Scottish connections. James Connolly, the great mustachioed socialist, was born to Irish parents in Edinburgh, where he began work for the city’s evening newspaper before joining the British army. He had returned to Scotland before settling in Dublin in his late twenties. Tom Clarke, one of the guiding figures in the IRB, was the son of a British army sergeant. He had been imprisoned for trying to blow up London Bridge, and later earned his living as a Dublin tobacconist. Eamon de Valera, the later president, was born in the United States to an Irish mother and a Cuban father. He was brought to Ireland and educated there from the age of two, becoming a teacher and a passionate supporter of the Celtic revival. Joseph Plunkett, who travelled to Germany seeking arms and who devised the military plan for the rising, was Irish born and educated, but he got his first military training at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, in the OTC. Padraig Pearse, who read out the declaration, had an English father, a Birmingham stonemason in his case, and had also come to nationalism through the Irish language and culture, founding a bilingual school. His nationalism was unhealthily martyr-fixated: after the war began, he hailed the patriotic bloodletting: ‘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 battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this.’
This was the language of blood-sacrifice, not so different from some of the more gruesome poetry being written by young English patriots destined for France. The IRB men knew even as they gathered their bullet-fodder that they had little chance of success. A real uprising would have required artillery, plenty of machine guns and German soldiers – 25,000 of them, in Casement’s reckoning. Worse, since the rebels would need plenty of men of their own, the official leaders of the Irish Volunteers, unaware of the IRB’s infiltration of their organization, disapproved of the revolt. In a confusion of contradictory orders, only some 1,600 men actually took part and most of the fighting would be confined to central Dublin. The mixture of IRB intellectuals, well-drilled but under-equipped Volunteers and the couple of hundred working-class Dubliners of Connolly’s Citizens’ Army, formed in 1913 to defend trade unionists after the great lock-out, had little prospect of holding their target buildings, the General Post Office, the law courts, a biscuit factory and others, once the British army arrived in force. A serious uprising, meant to strike at the heart of the Empire, was hurriedly redefined as a glorious gesture. Perhaps, by proclaiming the Republic and by giving their lives, the rebels would so transform the politics of Ireland that after the war, independence from Britain would become inevitable.
This, in turn, was implausible if the British behaved logically. Forewarned by the broken German codes of what was intended to happen over Easter, one might have thought that the authorities would have been waiting to strangle the rebellion before it started. Not a bit of it. Astonishingly, despite the evidence of the Volunteers training, and the intercepted codes, and the arrest of Casement, the rebels were able to seize their targets, which were undefended. There were only about 1,200 British soldiers in the area, none of them in central Dublin. Again, one might have thought the British army, with its bitter experience from France, would be able to counter-attack effectively. Again, they did not. Soldiers ran at well-protected sandbag emplacements and, as if it were Flanders, were promptly mown down: in one engagement, just twelve Irish Volunteers killed or wounded scores of soldiers. The British artillery was so inaccurate that British forces returned fire on their own guns, assuming they must be rebel ones. Connolly, wounded but commanding from his bed, which was carried from place to place, provided inspirational leadership once Pearse had proclaimed the Republic. But as soon as major reinforcements arrived, and the British artillery had the range of the rebels’ headquarters at the GPO, the end could not be long delayed. On 29 April 1916, five days after the rising had begun, Pearse gave the order to surrender. On the British side, 132 soldiers and policemen had been killed. On the Irish Republican side, 64 fighters had died, as well as nearly 250 civilians.
Even at this stage it had been a small-scale rebellion, relatively quickly contained. It did not look like the lit fuse for Irish independence its leaders had hoped it would be. By comparison with the 1,600 rebels, around 150,000 Irishmen had volunteered to fight for the Empire in Flanders by 1916, and Irish opinion, certainly as reflected in the newspapers and in the booing of crowds, was hostile to the Republicans. Having looked at some of the leading Republicans, it is worth remembering others who took the opposite course. Take the case of William Orpen, one of the most talented painters in Britain. W
ith a long lower lip and a tendency to strike poses he looks in his self-portraits rather like the later comic actor Kenneth Williams. By 1914 he was already a hugely fashionable portraitist, who would go on to paint Churchill, Field Marshal Haig, the French commander Foch and a swathe of rich aristocratic society. But he was also an Irishman, who had started at Dublin Art School aged twelve. He painted and supported the Irish home-rule leaders, and had seen nationalists running guns into Howth in 1913. He supported the strike of Dublin transport workers under Larkin too, and among those who had sat for him was a beautiful Irish painter he had met at the Slade called Grace Gifford, whom he painted as ‘young Ireland’. She would later marry one of the leaders of the rising on the night before he was executed, and serve time in prison herself. So Orpen, like many more, faced a personal conflict when war came. Sean Keating, another Irish painter who later became well known in the Republic, begged Orpen to leave London and return to Ireland. Keating told him: ‘“Leave all this. You don’t believe in it.” But he said: “Please. Everything I have I owe to England . . . It was the English who gave me appreciation and money. This is their war and I have enlisted. I won’t fight but I’ll do what I can.” ’ And so it all followed, said Keating sadly, ‘the horrors of trench war, block headed generals, political crooks and rich Americans and finally [for Orpen] two bottles of whisky a day, amnesia and death at 52’.77
What this leaves out is that Orpen became the finest war artist on the Allied side, whose superbly painted images of trench warfare, done rather traditionally, are much more unsettling than the more famous paintings by the modernists and cubists of shells going off. In Orpen’s pictures you see the yellowed corpses of dead German soldiers, a raped woman going mad, a soldier standing stark naked having had his uniform blown off by a shell-blast. You see injuries and horror in the sunlight. By the time the war ended, Orpen was bitter about the politicians, whom he derisively called ‘the frocks’. Yet he was commissioned to paint the huge official recording of the victorious leaders signing the Versailles treaty afterwards. It is a monumental picture, but the war leaders look strangely small in the great Hall of Mirrors, and this is no mistake of perspective by the artist. As he said, there was no dignity there: ‘People talked and cracked jokes to each other . . . the “frocks” had won the war. The “frocks” had signed the peace! The army was forgotten. Some dead and forgotten, others maimed and forgotten, others alive and well – but already forgotten.’78 Orpen was only one of the great artists who told the truth about the war. (His friend William Nicholson made an almost equally savage official portrait of the Canadian general staff posing in front of a huge blown-up photograph of a shattered townscape. Sargent himself painted Gassed, showing a column of blind men tottering through the devastation. Stanley Spencer’s images of army hospitals are among his finest work.) But had Orpen not decided his duty lay with Britain and the war, then our understanding of it would have been less. We owe him much. And in making his choice, he was far from alone. The ‘Irish airman’ whose death was memorialized in a famous poem by Yeats, was another Slade art student, like Orpen. Where the fighting was actually happening, old Irish enmities simply seem to have collapsed. Ulster Volunteers and Catholic nationalists, not to mention the Curragh ‘mutineers’, would end up fighting and dying alongside each other.
All this would be squandered by British stupidity. Having ignored their own original intelligence, then failed to stop the rising quickly, the authorities now went on to make their worst mistake of all. Sinn Fein had not been involved in the rising. Yet all ‘dangerous Sinn Feiners’ were rounded up by the army and police – more than 3,500 men and women were arrested – and many of those who had taken part in the rising were court-martialled for treason. Ninety were sentenced to death, of whom fifteen were actually shot, all but one in Dublin’s brooding old Kilmainham gaol. Connolly was so badly injured that he had to be tied to a chair to be executed. Plunkett was married in jail to Orpen’s muse. These and the others were shot privately in the gaol’s stonebreakers’ yard, adding to the air of fear and horror which was felt by English bishops and MPs as well as by Fenians in America and the Vatican. The blood, in the words of one bishop, seemed to be seeping out from below the prison door. Another 1,500 men were interned in camps that became hot-houses for Irish revolution. The killings turned Irish opinion round and made martyrs of men who had been in danger of being regarded as marginal and failures. Sinn Fein, having not been involved in the rising, would transform itself into the core party for full-on independence and win a huge harvest of votes by the end of the war.
And Casement? His trial did not go as smoothly as the authorities had hoped. As a British subject he had certainly been a traitor, and admitted it. His faith in the Germans had gone, indeed he regarded them now as ‘cads’ who were bound to be defeated. The Treason Act would not normally apply to crimes committed in Germany but it was closely reinterpreted to catch Casement – people said later he had been ‘hanged by a comma’. There was a major campaign for clemency, led by famous writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton and John Galsworthy. Bernard Shaw wrote privately. Yeats wrote to Asquith. The Archbishop of Canterbury, remembering the Congo campaign, saw the home secretary. What of Conrad? He was patriotically disgusted by Casement. The last time he’d seen the man, he told an American lawyer, was on the Strand, where ‘he was more gaunt than ever and his eyes still more sunk in his head . . . He was a good companion; but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion.’ Given the letters he had written to Casement this was unkind, and perhaps cowardly too. Meanwhile any hope of Casement escaping the noose was being snuffed out by photographed pages of handwriting and shocked whispers circulating through London clubs, Parliament and newspaper offices. In his Ebury Street rooms, rented before the war, the police had found Casement’s diaries.
Casement had always been homosexual and haunted by the fate of others who had been discovered and disgraced, or who had killed themselves. He seems to have kept, alongside his public diaries, the ‘black diaries’ which listed and described his sexual exploits. These fell into the hands of the British secret service. The Home Office set to work. Asquith was sent them. The Archbishop was told about them. So was the American ambassador. Newspaper editors were briefed. Casement’s supporters were quietly tipped the wink. There has been a long argument about whether these diaries were, in fact, forgeries, but recent research tends to suggest they were genuine. Casement probably never knew quite what was happening outside his prison cell, but it is grimly ironic that this man whose life was a torrent of explanation and advocacy was being finished off by his own handwriting. His appeal to the Lords would have had to have been approved by the attorney general – the same F. E. Smith who had done so much to support the illegal Orange revolt of earlier times. But it would not have saved him and he would duly go to the gallows, with the hangman commenting that he was ‘the bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute’.
Before he died, however, Casement had given a passionate speech from the dock, denying the right of an English court to try him and hoping for reconciliation between Ulstermen and the rest of Ireland. He then made a declaration about every people’s right to self-rule, one that would echo:
If we are to be indicted as criminals, to be shot as murderers, to be imprisoned as convicts because our offence is that we love Ireland more than we value our lives, then I know not what virtue resides in any offer of self-government held out to brave men on such terms. Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself – than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers or to love our kind . . . If there be no right of rebellion against a state of things that no savage tribe would endure without resistance, then I am sure that it is better for man to fight and die without right than to live in such a state of righ
t as this.
Overwrought it may be, but the speech echoed and resonated for years afterwards, affecting other opponents of British imperialism. Wilfred Scawen Blunt found it ‘finer than anything in Plutarch’. A young, sensitive trainee lawyer in London thought it ‘extraordinarily eloquent and moving’: he was Jawaharlal Nehru and he would, one day, lead an even larger part of the British Empire to independence.79 Casement’s body was buried in quicklime at Pentonville Prison and finally returned to Ireland in 1965, for a huge state funeral attended by the elderly de Valera. His cause, however, thanks to the British executions, was smoking and fizzing all the way to civil war.
The Wizard Circles towards Power
The rise of Lloyd George to become prime minister is one of the most unlikely tales in modern political history. He had been a radical, natural democrat, scourge of the rich, the foe of military imperialists during the Boer War and the man Ulster Unionists and their English Tory allies liked to hate the most. He would become a war leader whose speeches brimmed with fire and patriotic defiance, holding near-dictatorial powers and supported by the very people who had been among his sharpest enemies – Bonar Law, Unionist leader Carson, and Milner. By doing this, he would destroy the Liberal Party, which divided into Lloyd George-ites and Asquith-ites, and ensure that there was no effective left-of-centre party throughout the inter-war years – since Labour was still a feeble infant. Having been the individual most responsible for progressive politics in Britain before the war, he would become the man most responsible for the conservative politics of Britain after it. He is mercury and smoke, glitter and varnish. There are clues to the mystery. He was always an outsider, not part of the networks of power in Liberal England and as uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of Liberal thought as Tony Blair was later bored by socialist ideology. He believed in himself, and in doing. He was increasingly drawn to self-made and ‘go-ahead’ business people, rather than party loyalists or other MPs. His power came from his actorly self-projection, his ability to connect with millions of voters in a mimicry of intimacy and above all in his formidable, astonishing zest for action. In Asquith the country had a philosophical parliamentarian as its leader, who famously believed in ‘wait and see’ – in peacetime a perfectly sensible tactic of allowing situations to disentangle themselves where possible. By 1916 what Britain needed was a leader far more on the front foot – someone with the energy of a dozen devils and the tongue of as many angry angels. Such men have faults. Lloyd George was, for instance, corrupt, libidinous and unscrupulous. But these men don’t grow on trees.