Rebels

by Peter De Rosa

  Grey’s brief reference to the situation in Ireland set the stage for Redmond. Taking a deep breath, he rose from his corner seat below the gangway. This was the Mother of Parliaments and he was proud to be a House of Commons man. A fine orator, he looked the part with his neat greying hair, grey brows over slightly bulbous eyes and grey moustache. His rich, Celtic voice rang through the Chamber.

  The Germans, he said, could not rely on civil disturbance anywhere in the United Kingdom. The Home Rule issue had changed the Empire’s view of Ireland and her view of Empire. There were in Ireland two large bodies of Volunteers.

  ‘I say to the Government that they may tomorrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland.’ To loud murmurs of approval, he went on: ‘I say that the coast of Ireland will be defended from foreign invasion by her armed sons, and for this purpose armed Nationalist Catholics in the South will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulstermen in the North.’

  The unthinkable happened: Unionists stood to cheer Redmond. Apart from Carson. He remained seated and silent.

  Redmond, his watery eyes glistening, was delighted at his triumph and not a little puzzled. He had not pledged a single Irishman for the front. He had simply said Irishmen would defend Ireland – provided, that is, they were given the arms. But his contribution was interpreted as a war speech and, on reflection, he was content with that. Especially if the Ulster Unionists now dropped their objections to Home Rule.

  When the chimes of Big Ben struck 11 p.m. on 4 August 1914, King George V, Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales went with heavy hearts on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace, to wave to a country at war.

  Hearing the cheers, Prime Minister Asquith remembered the remark of a predecessor, Sir Robert Walpole: ‘Now they are ringing bells; in a few weeks they’ll be wringing their hands.’

  Churchill, having sent an Admiralty signal to all ships: ‘Commence hostilities at once with Germans,’ scurried across to Number 10. It was a warm evening. His broad white forehead was beaded with sweat as he entered the Cabinet room, a big cigar in his mouth and a puckish smile on his face.

  ‘The Fleet is under war orders.’ Try as he would, he could not hide his indecent elation.

  Sir Edward Grey, more circumspect, returned to his office on the second floor of the Foreign Office and peered through the tall window into the deepening gloom of London.

  ‘The lamps,’ he said, ‘are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

  In the Irish Office, Augustine Birrell took out his bicarbonate of soda. He would need a lot more of the stuff before the war was over. The Ulster Volunteers had nearly 40,000 rifles and the Irish Volunteers after Howth had at least a couple of thousand. As he swallowed his bitter medicine, he knew that, across Ireland, glasses were being raised with far more palatable brews.

  In his run-down house at Glenalina Terrace, at the head of the Catholic Falls Road, Belfast, sat round-faced, bow-legged James Connolly. Aged forty-six, he was exceptionally well-read for someone who had left school at eleven. A devout Marxist, his present job was organizer for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union.

  While he was musing at an open window, his nineteen-year-old daughter came in. He felt in his bones that now, now was the time to throw out the British.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Daddy?’

  ‘Ah, Nora. I was thinking of what that madman Redmond said recently in Parliament. He’s not like an Irishman at all. He said we should protect our Irish shores against the foreign enemy.’

  ‘When England is the chief foreign enemy.’

  Connolly grinned. His eldest daughter was an apt pupil.

  ‘But you always said Germany is as capitalist as England.’

  ‘True, but at least it hasn’t ruined Ireland as the Brigand Empire has for centuries. Anyway, if Irishmen have to die, it’s better they die in their own land, fighting for their own freedom and not being slaughtered abroad for the sake of English capitalists. Now, if you’d leave me for a minute.’

  No sooner had Nora gone from the room than Connolly picked up the phone and got in touch with the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Belfast.

  In Dublin, Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, Clarke’s wife Kattie and her brother, Ned Daly, were hugging each other. England was involved in a European war for the first time since 1815.

  They were all teetotal, otherwise they would have toasted ‘England’s war, Ireland’s opportunity.’

  Casement in his New York hotel was also celebrating in convivial company.

  On his first night in the States, to cheer himself up in a strange city, he had waited until it was dark before slipping into more casual gear. He left the hotel by a rear exit and wandered the streets, past picture houses with movies starring Charlie Chaplin and William S. Hart.

  A profoundly lonely man, he was missing the opportunities for making friends with adult males and mature boys whom he had encountered on his consular travels. In his voluminous diaries, he had recorded, in addition to his great work for the downtrodden natives in places like the Belgian Congo and the Putamayo region of Brazil, his mostly one-night stands. He had devised a schoolboy’s code to describe their superb black limbs and flowering genitalia, and how much they had cost him.

  Homosexuality he considered to be a serious malady, like diabetes or heart-trouble. The victim had to live with it as best he could; and he knew how exhausting it could be. It meant a double life. He was sad to have to deceive his nearest and dearest. Like his County Antrim cousin, Gertrude Bannister. Like his London confidante, Mrs Alice Green.

  He had sometimes been aware of fathers warning their sons about him. But no one close to him had ever had the slightest suspicion. He knew that if once he made a false move he would lose not only his honour but his credibility as a reformer. Since he was preparing to do what all Englishmen and many Irishmen considered treachery, he resolved to be doubly wary.

  On that first night, to make sure he was not being followed, he suddenly jumped on a trolley and got off a couple of stops down the line. He then doubled back to Broadway where he ran into a plump six-footer in his mid-twenties with blond hair and a gap in his front teeth. The stranger identified himself in thick broken English.

  ‘Adler Christensen, sir. Norwegian.’

  He was down on his luck, he said. Having run away from home to go to sea, he was stranded and starving in New York. They had struck up an instant friendship and, after dining, Casement had invited him back to his hotel. He did not realize the profound effect that this young man was going to have upon his life and work.

  Now, in the first flush of war, Casement raised his glass. ‘Adler, to a swift German victory.’

  In his office of the Gaelic American in William Street, Lower Manhattan, surrounded by typewriters and scattered copy, sat John Devoy.

  He was in a collarless shirt, with sleeve garters; in spite of the heat, the windows were shut. Short, silver-haired, grizzled, growing deaf, Devoy laughed about once a year. His one consuming passion was Ireland.

  Born there in 1842, he had joined the Foreign Legion at nineteen for the military experience and deserted after two years. Back in Ireland, he joined the Fenians, a violent separatist movement. He was captured and sentenced to fifteen years. He served five until an amnesty in 1871 allowed him to leave for the States.

  In America he brought unity to the Irish-American scene. Now he was without a peer.

  A bachelor wed only to his work, snappy as a New York cab-driver, tough as a cop, wily as a Philadelphia lawyer, he lived in a seedy hotel on 14th Street. He had no friends, only allies. As the years passed, he became ever more autocratic and scurrilous. His stock reply to the query, ‘Why?’ was a papal, ‘Goddammit, cos I say so,’ his favourite expletive was, ‘Whoreson!’ and when he got annoyed he threw down his hat and stamped on it till he felt better.

  His entire working day from sunrise to beyond sunset was spent in the dusty offices of the Gaelic American, ne
xt to a noisy railroad, writing letters, articles, checking copy, stoking in every conceivable way his hatred for England. Everything that reminded him of England stuck in his craw.

  Thirty years before he had prophesied in a speech in Holyoke, Massachusetts: ‘Ireland’s opportunity will come when England is engaged in a desperate struggle with some great European power or European combination.’ He had prayed night and day for this blessed event to happen before he died.

  His gnarled hand, never more than a few inches from the telephone, grabbed it. A normally taciturn man, Devoy was as excited as a rooster. He started calling his allies in the Clan, Judge Dan Cohalan of New York, Joe McGarrity in Philadelphia. Each said, ‘Early days yet, John,’ but he knew in his old bones that it was Ireland’s time for a burst of glory.

  He got through to Casement in his hotel room. ‘You were right, sir. Germany and Britain are at war. Congratulations!’

  Casement, gagging the phone and gesturing to Adler to stop giggling, felt as if he had been canonized.

  Afterwards old Devoy, the most unsentimental of men, went back over his boyhood days, remembered the ravishing green of old Ireland which he had not seen in over forty years.

  One day, yes-sir, he would return like the salmon – when Ireland was free, of course.

  In the Old World, German troops, as planned seven years before, were massing on the Belgian border. Their Chancellor, the tall, stooped, crew-cut, chain-smoking Bethmann-Hollweg, was appalled that things had gone so far.

  He had been convinced of two things. Firstly, that Britain, fearing a civil war in Ireland, was not willing to go to war. Carson’s posturings in Belfast had significantly influenced his judgement. Secondly, that Britain’s 1839 treaty with Belgium was a mere scrap of paper.

  But the British, too, were prepared.

  Before dawn on 5 August, a British cable ship, the Teleconia, moved through the North Sea. A few miles off Emden, where the Dutch coast joins the German, Royal Navy engineers used giant grapnels to cut Germany’s slime- and seaweed-covered cables connecting it to France, Spain, Tenerife and the two cables to New York via the Azores.

  The Secret Service was no less active. The Head of counterespionage, MI5, was Vernon Kell. Known as ‘K’, he was a gaunt-faced man who invariably wore dark glasses. He got on the phone to Basil Thomson, Head of the Special Branch. Thomson was in Scotland Yard off Whitehall awaiting Kell’s call.

  Their conversation was brief, the matter had been discussed fully in advance.

  Before midday on the first morning of the war, the CID rounded up the entire German spy ring in the United Kingdom, from Brighton to Newcastle, including twenty-two top-secret agents. Within hours, the German General Staff learned that they had been virtually deprived of intelligence in mainland Britain. When they tried to use their transatlantic cables, they found they were not functioning. If they had been cut, all news reaching the States from the theatre of war would be tinged with a British bias. Maybe America, too, would cease being neutral. The difficulty was compounded in that the wireless station at Sayville on Long Island was not yet finished.

  The Foreign Office ordered all Zeppelin crews to stand by. They told the Admiralty to contact the High Seas Fleet and torpedo-boat flotillas. Over the wireless station at Nauen, just outside Berlin, the message went out: ‘War with England.’

  All ships belonging to the enemy in German ports were seized, including a British steamer, the Castro, stuck in the Kiel canal.

  Herr Meyer, a Foreign Office official, was asking, ‘If we use Nauen, surely the enemy will be able to pluck our messages out of the air?’

  ‘Maybe so,’ was the response of Artur Zimmermann, the big, bluff Under-Secretary, ‘but fortunately, the British will never be able to crack our codes.’

  With the war only thirty-six hours old, there was a meeting in the Speaker’s Library of the Commons between Edward Carson, John Redmond and the Speaker, Lowther.

  At fifty-seven, Redmond had been for fourteen years Chairman of the Irish Nationalist Party. His life-long aim was to achieve Home Rule for Ireland within the British Empire with himself, naturally, as Irish Prime Minister. Few Parliamentarians were prouder of the Empire and the Irish contribution to it in places like Australia and Canada. Squat, with a slightly round face, hawkish in profile, he wore a bow-tie and a flower in his buttonhole. He feared that the war would delay Home Rule.

  Edward Carson was both politically and physically the opposite of Redmond. Tall, lean and reserved, he was hoping that the war would not only delay Home Rule but bury it.

  Redmond stressed that after his pledge of the Irish Volunteers to defend Ireland from German aggressors, the Home Rule Bill had to be put on the statute book, war or no war.

  Carson said bluntly, ‘Ulster will refuse to be part of it.’

  The Speaker heard them out. Then: ‘I assure you both that the Prime Minister intends to go ahead with the Bill.’

  ‘You mean,’ Carson said, his voice rising, ‘Mr Asquith intends to betray Ulster when we can do nothing about it because of the emergency?’

  Afterwards, Redmond, still apprehensive, wrote to Asquith, ‘The Liberal Party has the greatest opportunity that has ever occurred in the history of Ireland to win the Irish people to loyalty to the Empire.’ He feared that without Home Rule his constitutional approach would give way to violence.

  A few days later, in a Dublin house safe from prying eyes, the men of violence met in the shape of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In their eyes, they were the legitimate government of Ireland. In quiet times, they were a moral force, encouraging disaffection, but when the crisis came, as now, they were to await the decision of the Irish people for rebellion.

  ‘Before this war ends,’ said Tom Clarke, ‘we will rise in Dublin and establish a Republic.’

  All eleven around the table nodded.

  He went on, ‘The Clan in the States has promised us military aid. Uncle will also use all his diplomacy to ensure that a rising will give us, like Belgium, the status of belligerents at a final peace conference.’

  They all murmured their approval.

  ‘Is it your wish, gentlemen, that I tell Uncle of our decision?’

  It was agreed unanimously.

  In fact, Clarke’s letter to New York was already on its way by courier.

  After that August meeting of the Brotherhood, McDermott walked back with Clarke to his tobacconist’s shop in Great Britain Street. They felt they had been given a mandate to organize a rising in their own time, in their own way. As two of the three core men of the Executive, they were in a position to dominate the IRB and, through it, top-ranking officers in the Volunteer movement in Dublin and elsewhere.

  Utterly without scruples, they co-opted anyone useful to the cause, dispensing with the interlocking circles by which the Brotherhood normally functioned.

  ‘Remember,’ Clarke said, ‘there never yet was an Irish rising that was not betrayed by informers.’

  Even as they spoke, an event 1,500 miles away was destined to prove more useful to the British than any spy had ever been.

  On 20 August, in the Gulf of Finland, there was an engagement between Russian and German ships. In thick fog, a German cruiser, the Magdeburg, became isolated from the rest of the German fleet and went aground on the red granite island of Odenholm. As the fog began to clear and the Russian fleet closed in, the captain of the Magdeburg saw he was doomed.

  He ordered a radio officer to row out and drop the Navy’s codes into deep water. Having seen him leave, he signalled in code to his command ship that all ciphers had been destroyed.

  But the radio officer’s dinghy capsized and he was drowned. Once in range, the Russian fleet hit the Magdeburg with heavy broadsides. Afterwards, seeing many bodies floating in the shallows, the Russian skipper ordered his crew to bury them. Among the corpses washed up was the radio officer’s. In his arms were lead bindings which an astute Russian sailor recognized as belonging to code-books.


  The skipper sent down divers for the books themselves. To his surprise, they were successful. Even more surprisingly, within days, a decision was made by the Russian Admiralty in St Petersburg to offer them to the British.

  In the States, John Redmond’s pledge of support for the British in the war proved popular among Irish-Americans. It reduced Casement’s chances of raising funds for the Irish Volunteers. Radical elements said, ‘Why fork out to arm them when they intend to do Britain’s dirty work for her?’

  Casement, therefore, told Devoy that he was going to Berlin to ask for military aid.

  Devoy’s grey eyes narrowed. ‘What d’you have in mind?’

  ‘Forming an Irish Brigade from among their prisoners.’

  ‘Like in South Africa?’ Devoy knew that Major MacBride had formed such a Brigade in the Boer War.

  Devoy gave it plenty of thought. Personally, he didn’t give a damn about the Germans, and when he heard Casement saying, ‘Poor Kaiser, poor Kaiser’, he frankly wrote it off as bull-shit.

  Casement was right about one thing, though: the Hun might, just might come in useful.

  The German Ambassador, Count von Bernstorff, Berlin’s top man in the western hemisphere, was just back in the States.

  In a final briefing at his Foreign Office in Berlin, he was told that his best policy in the Anglophile atmosphere of America was to avoid all appearance of aggression towards England. Besides, Berlin was hoping to come to an early understanding with Great Britain.

  As soon as Devoy heard from Clarke that the IRB intended to rebel some time during the war, he asked Bernstorff to meet the Clan na Gael in New York. Bernstorff agreed. From his favourite New York hotel, the Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue, where he kept a regal suite, he was chauffeured to the German Club on 59th Street.