Daly said, ‘That’ll give us plenty of time before the arms ship arrives on Monday morning.’
*
Unlike Spindler, Lieutenant Weisbach had waited for the dark and deeper water.
At 11 p.m., the U-19 was abeam the Loop Head Lighthouse. The weather suddenly turned squally.
On the Aud, with midnight approaching, Spindler glared at the brightening sky. The moon would rise within the hour. He risked a last approach to within a mile of Fenit pier and flashed the green light. Nothing. Disappointed, he steamed back to Inishtooskert.
It was black now, so he had almost to feel his way along the west side. That would give him some shelter from the light of that great blister of a moon. In the stillness, he felt that the rattling of the Aud’s anchor chain must be carrying as far as that Tommy on guard at Fenit harbour.
Weisbach felt his situation had improved with the rising of the moon. The U-19 was now clear for a hasty submergence if that should be necessary.
He headed for the rendezvous. He reached the spot, one mile north-west of Inishtooskert, where he confidently hoped he would meet up with the Aud and the pilot boat.
The Aud had just left to take up anchorage for the night.
At the Volunteer HQ, Hobson was still working in his office when J. J. O’Connell and Eimer O’Duffy burst in.
‘We think you should know,’ O’Connell said, ‘that in the country several companies have received orders to prepare for an insurrection on Easter Sunday.’
Many pieces of a puzzle suddenly formed a pattern in Hobson’s brain: Managhan coming from Limerick with strange talk of an imminent crisis. That Castle document whose contents made no sense from the British point of view. Above all, his impression over many months that there was another secret and manipulative force at work within the Volunteers. And those manoeuvres only three days away.
‘Jesus,’ he said, clicking his fingers. ‘They’re planning a rising on Easter Sunday!’
‘Who are?’ they said together.
Hobson did not answer. He jumped up from his desk.
‘We’ve got to get in touch with MacNeill at once.’
‘My car’s outside,’ O’Connell said.
Weisbach waited for the Aud. When it failed to appear, he started to cruise round. He was not hopeful of making contact. At four miles, the Aud would be invisible against the mountains. Its green lights were oil-sourced, which meant they could only be seen from a mile away. Further, if the Aud’s skipper knew his job, the signals would be visible only from shore, not from further out to sea where the sub was.
He looked to the west for the pilot boat’s green lights. Nothing.
His fear was growing for the safety of his craft.
MacNeill, a gown over his pyjamas, peered through the window of his large Victorian villa, checking to see who was visiting him at this ungodly hour. Satisfied, he opened the front door, putting his fingers to his lips to indicate that his wife and children were asleep. He ushered Hobson and O’Connell into his book-lined study.
Hobson explained briefly all his fears and suspicions, ending with, ‘We have been betrayed.’
MacNeill, rubbing his eyes in tired incredulity, demanded to know who was behind this.
‘Your Director of Operations,’ Hobson said. ‘He planned the Easter manoeuvres as a cover for the rising.’
‘Pearse?’
A generally pacific man, MacNeill could be terrible in his wrath.
‘We must do something. Now.’
‘It’s turned midnight,’ O’Connell pointed out.
‘You woke me, didn’t you?’ MacNeill thundered.
With an effort, Casement heaved himself up into the conning-tower alongside Monteith and Beverley. All three strained their eyes for the green lights of the pilot boat. They were so strung-up, they wanted to look in every direction at once.
Monteith heard the thumping of Beverley’s heart and felt that the final act of their useless tragedy had begun.
Pearse cycled home after an exhausting day. It was well after midnight when his sister Margaret greeted him in the hallway.
‘Did you manage to get Mass and Communion, Pat?’
‘I did.’ He was already on the staircase. ‘I need sleep. I’m all in.’
He was no sooner in his room on the top floor than a car drew up outside with a squeal of tyres. He heard the slamming of the doors and angry voices which he recognized. His sister answered the bell.
‘I am sorry, gentlemen, he has retired for the night.’
‘It’s all right, Margaret.’
Pearse was already descending the stairs. He gestured to MacNeill, Hobson and O’Connell to join him in his study.
‘About these orders of yours to Volunteers in the west,’ MacNeill began peremptorily. ‘Attacks on barracks, seizure of railways. It can mean only one thing.’
Very quietly, Pearse said, ‘A rising, yes. You were deceived but it was necessary.’
MacNeill flowing mane bristled in his rage. A rising was out of the question, he said; the odds against it were ludicrous. The British would withdraw forces from the Western Front rather than allow a Republic on their very doorstep. Outside Dublin the Volunteers were simply not armed or trained, it would be a massacre.
‘What hurts me most,’ he continued, ‘is the lies. I always gave my enemies my word that the Volunteers’ programme would always be public and explicit.’
His spectacles were steaming up.
‘This is treachery, Pearse, for your own selfish and vainglorious ends. War is not a Passion play in the Abbey, you know, and civilians with rifles are not soldiers.’
Pearse was thinking, Another example of a Gaelic League professor selling out the movement. His fine-sounding phrases are camouflage for doing nothing. Irish leaders have always found some excuse for chickening out. He is talking about the waste of innocent Irish blood when 150,000 Irishmen are in the British army, shedding their blood for England. He has a Sunday-school attitude to good and evil. He has no idea that failures can be triumphs, that without deaths there can be no resurrections.
When MacNeill paused for breath, Pearse, in his mesmeric voice, said: ‘You cannot stop the rising. Things have gone too far. Officers will obey me, not you.’
He turned to Hobson. ‘You’re an IRB man. You have a duty to obey our call.’
Hobson reacted bitterly. ‘The IRB constitution says force should be used only when it has popular support.’
Quietly, Pearse said, ‘Your logic is impeccable, Hobson. It’s just that you do not understand the Irish people.’
‘What you are doing,’ MacNeill thundered, ‘is against the teaching of the Church you claim to obey. One condition of waging a just war is that is has some prospect of success and a rising at this time has absolutely none.’
Pearse disliked MacNeill’s textbook theology with its textbook God who would have condemned Jesus for going up to Jerusalem.
‘You are prepared,’ went on MacNeill, ‘to pit a half-armed, half-trained little body of Volunteers against a professional army of a million.’
Pearse. with a little nod, accepted that those were the odds.
‘Can you not see,’ MacNeill said, shudderingly, ‘that many of our countrymen will die, some of them mere boys? Will you tell their mothers how and why they died, will you? The time and circumstances are simply not right for revolutionary action. Only look around you in the streets. Most people are British sympathizers. The thousands of Irishmen in their army prove that. Multiply that by five for their families who are proud of them and depend on them for their livelihood, that is how loyal Ireland is to Britain at present.’
‘We differ, you and I,’ Pearse said, quietly, ‘about what constitutes success and failure.’
‘Yes, we do,’ cried MacNeill. ‘You think that bloodshed is victory enough.’
‘It was enough in Jesus’s case.’
‘You are forgetting something, Pearse,’ MacNeill retorted angrily. ‘Jesus died, he refused to ki
ll. Once you start the wheel of violence turning, who will be able to stop it?’
Pearse muttered, too softly to be heard, ‘That wheel has been turning for 700 years.’
‘As for me, I refuse to get involved in your guilt.’
‘And you intend—’
‘To do all in my power to stop you.’ MacNeill stomped to the door. ‘Short of calling Dublin Castle.’
Hobson and O’Connell followed him out to the car. In the courtyard outside, Pearse heard MacNeill saying, ‘I want you to cancel all Volunteer activity this weekend.’
O’Connell said, ‘I’ll go to Cork straight away.’
Pearse, in considerable anguish, looked through his study window towards the mass of the mountains, quietly reciting lines he had composed six years before:
I have turned my face
To this road before me,
To the deed that I see
And the death I shall die.
His beautiful, doe-eyed mother came in, solicitous.
‘Is there something wrong, Pat?’
He assured her it was nothing. Even if plans had to be trimmed, there was no turning back. Sheer will-power would see him through.
Mrs Pearse, seeing that her dear eldest son was preoccupied, left with, ‘God love you, Patrick.’
For a long time, he sat brooding, no sounds save from a nearby waterfall and wind in tall trees. They made him lonely somehow and, suddenly, sad. He was beginning to feel the hard hand of fate upon him. MacNeill’s spoiling tactics were the sort of thing that had dogged Irish rebellions throughout history.
For another hour and a half the U-19 cruised around the bay. The night had turned murky, starless. In the conning tower, without a compass, the three Irishmen did not know where to look. A smooth sea was running, water whispered on the hulk. It was, frustratingly, an ideal night for gun-running.
Monteith felt his spine hardening like cement and his body grow numb. Had the Germans planned it like this to get rid of them? With the fury of a frustrated soldier, he wanted to fight someone, to tear something to bits. He could not imagine his own people letting them down.
Yet the German officers seemed no less frustrated. If they were pretending, they were superb actors. Their language was becoming more and more colourful.
Monteith felt the submarine was nothing but a grey ghost adrift on a sea of ineptitude. It was clear to him no pilot boat was coming; they would have to row ashore.
Weisbach decided to wait no longer. In the shelter of the bay the sea was perfectly calm and lit by misty moonshine. He would look for a flat stretch of beach.
‘Full-steam ahead.’
As the U-boat moved on the surface towards Tralee Bay at 14 knots, the three Irishmen went below to check their gear for landing. In their cabin, Monteith took his .37 calibre Mauser pistol out of its wooden case and loaded it. Casement, looking forlorn without his beard which he had recently shaved off, was fumbling with his equipment.
‘Can you load one of these, Sir Roger?’
‘I have never killed anything in my life.’
Monteith sat beside him. He showed him how to load, open and eject. He gave him a cartridge clip to practise with. After a while, Casement shook his head and gave it back.
‘Will you load it for me, please?’
In spite of his bad wrist, Monteith did so. He put on the safety catch, replaced the pistol in the holster and handed it over. He caught a look of loathing on Casement’s face.
Hell’s bells, thought Monteith, a revolutionary who hates guns.
Casement was sure the British would capture the arms ship. No rifles for the Volunteers, the enemy alerted, the leaders of the rising seized. It was such a mess. Would they fight without German arms? Not knowing added to his anguish. For half an hour, he closed his eyes and leaned his head on a locker.
At 2.15 a.m., an officer poked his head round the door. ‘Empty your pockets and destroy anything on you in writing.’
Monteith asked the skipper for the boat’s outboard motor to be fitted.
‘Sorry,’ Weisbach said, ‘it would attract attention,’
Who to? Monteith thought, but he did not voice it.
‘The Lieutenant is right,’ Casement said, itching to contact the rebels as soon as possible and tell them how things stood.
The chilliness of the morning hit them as soon as they reached the deck. The boat was lifted from the forward hatch. It was only 12 foot by 4½ foot and a tight fit for them and their belongings. They put on their lifebelts and strapped their gear to the seats. Each had a bag with a change of underclothes, flash lamp, notebooks, a pair of Zeiss binoculars and a sheath-knife. They secured the ammunition, 1,000 rounds for each pistol, in a waterproof tin box and waited for the sub to hove to.
The Quartermaster on the watch, who admired Churchill, whispered to them, ‘Should you see Winnie, tell him, “The North Sea Rats are raiding your corn bins, why not dig them out?” ’
The boat was lowered to the water, where it sat like a squat tub. Monteith complained, ‘Our people are running a revolution and they can’t send out a pilot boat for a shipload of arms.’
‘Hush,’ was Casement’s reply, ‘it will be a much greater adventure going ashore in this cockle shell.’
After handshakes, Beverley took his place in the centre, Casement was in the stern with Monteith in the bow. They pulled away from the submarine as it drifted off in the mists like a great grey whale. They were a couple of miles off shore. The boat had no rudder, so Casement steered with a third oar. To begin with they went in circles, due to the fact that the rowing-oars were not a pair. In spite of his damaged hand, Monteith took them both and shortened his grip on one to make it match the other.
After an hour, Casement made out a line of white foam and they heard the distant thunder of waves breaking on shore. With 200 yards to go, Monteith looked over his shoulder, only to see foam-topped waves, serried like the heads of cobras, rearing over the boat. Dropping from a height of six feet, they crashed on top of them.
‘Look ou-out!’
Casement was hurled against Beverley and, combined, they smashed into Monteith. They had scarcely struggled back to their seats when another wave flipped the boat over. The lifebelts saved them and with one touch Monteith righted the boat. The empty fuel tanks on the sides gave it buoyancy. Beverley and Monteith gripped the sides while Casement, gasping and spluttering, clambered in the stern. He steadied the boat while they got aboard. Fortunately, Monteith had secured the oars.
No sooner had they pulled off again than they hit a sand bank. Rollers swept over them, and the boat refused to budge. Time after time they were struck side-on by waves that threatened to shake the craft to pieces. The cold, lead-like force of the waves slamming every inch of their bodies sapped their energy further.
Monteith dug an oar into the bank and, with a monumental effort, pushed off before the oar gripped the bottom. Losing his balance, he went overboard again. He had clung to the oar so that Beverley was able to grab the end and haul him aboard.
Settled again, they waited for a big wave and levered themselves off the sand bank. Within a few minutes they made it to the beach. They had come to Banna Strand.
They crawled out of the boat, almost spent. While Monteith held the sides, Beverley untied the kit and carried it ashore before helping Casement hobble up the sandy slope.
With his knife, Monteith tried to hole the boat. His hand was swollen to pumpkin-size and every effort jarred it more. In the end, weak and shaky, he had to be content with half-submerging it. As he moved away, a big wave lifted it and dropped it on his right foot. He screeched in pain as he felt his ankle wrenched from under him.
Limping to the beach, he found Casement below high-water mark, with the sea lapping him from head to toe. In moonlight, he seemed like a sleeping child.
Monteith dragged him, seemingly unconscious, up to dry sand. Shattered by the futility of the mission and his affection for his Chief, he took out his pistol. It would
be a kindness to put him out of his misery.
Casement was not unconscious but in a kind of trance. Even in the shatteringly cold water, even when trying to get a foothold in the shingle to wade ashore – was it tiredness, hunger, sickness, a stab of mysticism to which he was always prone? – he felt nothing but an overwhelming joy.
The long exile in America and Germany was over. He was in Ireland, which he thought he would never see again. He was going to his death but nothing mattered now, for he was home at last. A smile played at the corners of his lips; in spite of the misery, for the first time in years, he was happy.
Monteith removed his gun from Casement’s temple and tossed it aside before dragging him to his feet. He had to get Casement’s circulation going soon or he might not make it. He pummelled his legs and body, while water streamed from his hair and clothes, then walked him slowly like a horse after a race.
The sandhills, dotted with rushes and coarse grass, were full of skylarks and Casement heard them singing as they rose and fell in the starless dawn. The first sound he heard above the beat of the breakers and the shuffling of the surf was the larks over the dunes right up to an old Viking fort, the Rath of Currahane.
This was Ireland, the old, the agelessly old Ireland which he loved with every fibre of his being. He was, though sick and wet and practically lifeless, home in Ireland at a time of primroses and skylarks. When they had warmed up a little and wrung out their clothes, Monteith said, ‘Well, Sir Roger, we’ve had the little adventure you spoke of.’
Casement patted him on the shoulder, gratefully. ‘Yes, my friend, and now we are much nearer the end of the chapter.’
Monteith, hurt in hand and foot, took charge. It was his decision to try and find a car to get Casement to Dublin. They would have to hide their belongings. Guns, in these circumstances, would be a liability and they had no strength to carry them. Having buried everything but their overcoats in the sand, they set off.
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