THERE WAS A sensation at New Scotland Yard when the entire crew of the Aud, including the officers, were marched over one evening for interrogation. They blocked the passages and a crowd assembled outside. I always found that when German naval prisoners are examined it is better to take the juniors first, for they frequently make admissions which are useful when the time comes for examining the officers, but in this case we reversed the order.
All had agreed to tell the same story – that they were carrying pit-props with a few arms for the Cameroons and that, having delivered their cargo, they were to become an auxiliary cruiser. The limited coal capacity and the slow speed of the boat (in knots) showed this version to be absurd. They said that they had anchored off the Irish coast to re-stow their cargo, but on this their stories differed. No doubt they were actually engaged in preparing the cargo for landing when the patrol boat came up and signalled by wireless for a cruiser. On this the captain of the Aud had taken alarm and steamed away.
The captain was one of the most unpleasant Germans I have ever met, besides being entirely lacking in a sense of humour. He has since written a book about his experiences which, for that reason, is dull reading. During the course of his examination I observed to him that a naval crew who sunk their ship after capture was guilty of piracy. He looked uncomfortable and said that the orders of his Emperor had to be obeyed. ‘We were not a naval crew, we were a civilian crew.’
I said, ‘You cannot be both.’
‘But we were both,’ he persisted. ‘When we wore uniform we were a warship; when we wore civilian clothes we were a merchant ship. I kept the uniforms hanging on a line and when we broke the war flag the men jumped into them and we became a warship.’ He was seriously annoyed when we laughed.
And now to return to Casement. The submarine on which he was originally to cross had broken down and had had to signal for another, commanded, as it turned out, by a less agreeable captain, to take over the passengers. This captain declined to approach the shore, but put his passengers into a flat-bottomed canvas boat without a rudder and, as Casement described it, ‘left them to their fate’. At the last moment the captain asked Casement what clothes he wanted and Casement, describing the conversation, waved his hand with a theatrical gesture and said, ‘Only my shroud.’ The boat upset in landing and they were all wet through. They buried their belongings in the sand and Casement sent his two companions into the country to obtain help. Monteith did find friends, was driven off in a car and eventually made his way to the United States. Bailey, less fortunate, was arrested. Meanwhile, Casement was sheltering in an old ruin called M’Kenna’s Fort, where, on being arrested, he gave the name of a friend with whom he used to stay in England.
On Saturday, I was taking my turn of night ‘Zeppelin duty’ at New Scotland Yard. At 10.30 p.m. my telephone rang and a voice said, ‘You know that stranger who arrived in the collapsible boat at Currahane – do you know who he is?’
I said, ‘You’re joking?’
‘I am not,’ said the voice, ‘and he will be over early tomorrow morning for you to take him in hand.’ It was not necessary for either of us to give a name. We had been expecting Casement’s arrival for many weeks.
At ten o’clock on Easter Sunday I had my first interview with Sir Roger Casement. He walked into the room rather theatrically – a tall, thin, cadaverous man with thick black hair turning grey, a pointed beard and thin, nervous hands, mahogany-coloured from long tropical service. His forehead was a network of wrinkles, his complexion deeply sunburnt. I told him to sit down and asked him his name.
‘Surely you know it.’
‘I have to guard against the possibility of personation.’
‘Well, I am Sir Roger Casement.’
I administered the usual caution that anything he said might be used against him. At first he was reticent, his great fear being that he might say something that would betray other people, or make him appear a traitor to the Germans, whose guest he had been. As long as the shorthand-writer remained he said little beyond admitting acts of high treason, but when we were alone he became far more communicative. He rose from the armchair and sat easily on the corner of my table. The rising in Ireland, he said, was to have been on Easter Sunday; he was to have landed a week earlier. He professed to know nothing of the intrigues in America which had fixed the date for the rising. He said that he was lying ill in Munich when ‘a trusted friend’ asked him to go to Berlin, for the time had now come to act. When he found that the Germans intended to send only one ship with munitions and not a single German officer, he said that he charged them with criminal folly and that the officer blushed and said, ‘Well, this is all that the government intends to do. You must go with them, because if you refuse your countrymen shall know that you betrayed them.’ They wanted him to go in the Aud herself, but he stipulated for a submarine, in order, so he said, to warn the rebels that they had no chance of success. The breaking down of the submarine prevented this. He was very insistent that the news of his capture should be published, as it would prevent bloodshed. We felt pretty sure that the Irish rebels knew all about his capture from his companion who escaped, quite apart from the fact that the arrest had appeared in the newspapers on the Saturday. When commenting some weeks afterwards upon the Rebellion, the Germans remarked that Casement had credited himself with possessing superhuman powers; that he imagined that his personality among the Irish would carry all before it, but that, in fact, they could not discover that his personal influence was great. They seem to have read him pretty well. The negotiations had really been carried on over his head and there is nothing to show that any of the leaders thought it necessary to consult him before they came to a decision.
I told him that we were aware of his efforts to recruit Irish soldiers from internment camps to fight for the Germans and he said that he had not recruited them for the German but for the Irish Army; that the Kaiser’s proclamation to the Irish was conditional on an Irish Army being enrolled and, as to the oath of allegiance, many great Englishmen had had to break their oath for the sake of their country. He himself had never taken an oath of allegiance, but if he had it would not have weighed with him.
He returned again to his object in coming to Ireland. It was to stop, not to lead, a rising which could only fail with the paltry aid that the Germans had sent. He wanted to prevent ‘the boys’ from throwing away their lives. He went on to say that in the early part of the war the Germans really believed that a rising in Ireland might be successful, but as they grew weaker this belief had begun to fade and now they had only the desire for bloodshed in Ireland as an embarrassment to the British government. He said that Germans would do things to serve the state which they would never do as private individuals and that in all the General Staff he had only met one gentleman. He seemed to regard the German cause as already lost. At the end of the interview he was sent to Brixton Prison to be placed under special observation for fear of an attempt at suicide. There was no staff at the Tower to guard suicidal cases.
Some months earlier, when we first had evidence of Casement’s treachery, his London lodgings had been visited and his locked trunks removed to New Scotland Yard. Towards the end of the interview a policeman entered the room and whispered to me that Casement might have the key of the trunks. I asked him and with a magnificent gesture he said, ‘Break them open; there is nothing in them but clothing and I shall not want them again.’ But something besides clothing was found in one of the trunks – a diary and a cashbook from the year 1903 with considerable gaps. A few days later Casement must have remembered these volumes, for his solicitor demanded the surrender of his personal effects. Everything except these books was sent to him and there came a second letter, pointing out that the police must still be retaining some property. It is enough to say of the diaries that they could not be printed in any age or in any language.
During a subsequent conversation Casement said, ‘You failed to win the hearts of the people when you had your chance.’
I replied, ‘You are speaking for a minority of the Irish people. You must have had a rude awakening when you went to the internment camp to recruit men for the Irish Brigade.’
He said, ‘I never expected to get many. I could have had them all if I had given them money, but though the Germans offered me as much money as I wanted I refused it. Besides, you were competing.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘By sending the Irish prisoners more money and larger parcels than the English prisoners had.’
Nothing would persuade him that this was not intentionally arranged by the British government: as a matter of fact, the parcels were supplied by a committee of Irish ladies.
Casement struck me as one of those men who are born with a strong strain of the feminine in their character. He was greedy for approbation and he had the quick intuition of a woman as to the effect he was making on the people around him. He had a strong histrionic instinct. I have read many of his early letters. They are full of high ideals that ring quite true and his sympathy with the downtrodden and his indignation against injustice were instinctive; but, like a woman, he was guided by instinct and not by reason and where his sympathies were strongly moved it is very doubtful whether any reliance could be placed upon his accuracy. I have often wondered since how much exaggeration there was in his revelations about the Congo and Putumayo. Colleagues who served with him in his official days have told me that they never took his statements quite literally. They always allowed for an imaginative colouring.
A few days before his execution he received a telegram from the person who had been most injured by his statement about Putumayo, imploring him at that solemn moment to retract his unjust charges. As far as I know, he did not reply to this telegram. I have made special inquiry with a view to ascertaining how long Casement had been under the obsessions disclosed in the pages of his diary and I feel certain that they were of comparatively recent growth, probably not much before the year 1910. This would seem to show that some mental disintegration had begun to set in, though it was not sufficient to impair his judgement or his knowledge of right and wrong.
His success with the Germans was due to his curious power of investing others with his overweening belief in his own powers. During the Boer War, according to one of his colleagues, he persuaded the Foreign Office that he could counteract the Boer influence in Delagoa Bay and obtain full information about their activities. Accordingly, he was sent to Delagoa Bay from west Africa, but though he worked there for many months he accomplished nothing. His colleagues could never decide whether the curious swagger in his walk was due to self-satisfaction or to a physical peculiarity. When he visited their offices he preferred to walk about the room, but when he could be induced to sit down he had a way of laying his palms together with the fingers pointing upward that reminded them of the attitude of the praying mantis. In Delagoa Bay he showed no sympathy with the Boers or with the Germans, nor did he discourse upon the wrongs of Ireland, though the Foreign Office had to intervene once when he began to use stationery headed, ‘Consulate of Great Britain and Ireland’. He was excellent company and his colleagues were always glad to see him, though inwardly they were amused by the airs he assumed and the importance he attached to his sayings and doings. He was a good pioneer, a great walker, indifferent of his appearance and his dress and to the hardships he underwent when travelling on duty. He had a way of wearing his coat without putting his arms into the sleeves and he had his overcoat made without sleeves, possibly with an eye to the picturesque. He was a clear and forcible writer and was quite indifferent to money, though he kept his private accounts meticulously.
Casement’s trial for high treason at the High Court will take its place among the most notable of state trials. Certain legal questions arising out of the fact that the acts of high treason had been committed abroad were argued at length. The Lord Chief Justice (Lord Reading), Sir F. E. Smith, the Attorney-General (now Lord Birkenhead) and Mr Serjeant Sullivan played their parts with great distinction. I was sitting just below the witness-box throughout the proceedings. At the luncheon adjournment, when the judge had left the bench, one of the Irish soldier witnesses who had been in the German camp on the occasion of Casement’s visit was left in the witness-box. Casement had just left the dock above his head. He was thirsting for a confidant and I was the only person within earshot. He jerked his thumb at the retreating figure and in a thick brogue made a very opprobrious remark about him.
It is a curious fact that one of the revolvers brought over by Casement practically saved Dublin Castle. An officer of the Royal Irish Constabulary happened to be showing it to the Under-Secretary in the Castle on Easter Monday when he heard a shot fired and, looking out, he saw the sentry writhing on the ground and a ragged crowd rushing in at the gate. He had some cartridges in his pocket, with which he opened fire, keeping the rebels at bay for an hour and twenty minutes. Casement also brought with him a banner, which he intended to hoist over Dublin Castle. It was of green bunting made in Germany. It was last, I believe, in the possession of the headquarters of the Royal Irish Constabulary.
It has never been quite clear to me why the Irish Rebellion was postponed from Easter Saturday to Easter Monday. There was a conflict of authority, as there usually is, in the Irish ranks. The failure to land the arms can scarcely have been responsible for the postponement because, as it proved, there was no lack of arms in Dublin. Since there was no rising on Easter Saturday, we thought it possible that the sinking of the Aud and the arrest of Casement might have had the effect of postponing it altogether. After midday on Monday the question of the arrest of the leaders was still under discussion, though at noon all telegraphic communication with Ireland had been interrupted. It was not until three o’clock that we learned that the Dublin Post Office had been in possession of the rebels since noon, that another party had entrenched themselves in St Stephen’s Green and that there was heavy firing in the city. The rebels had hoped for simultaneous risings all over Ireland, but these failed to take place. It is significant that a police officer who went over to Tralee Bay to bring over witnesses for Casement’s trial had an ovation from the local farmers, who were delighted that the Rebellion had been put down.
It is curious that among the things picked up in Tralee Bay was a document in German giving an account of the enemy losses at Verdun, a strange thing to find on a lonely Irish beach so long after the event.
To Devoy in America came the Irish version of the Rebellion. The rebels put a bold face upon their failure. They said that Casement had sent a message to Dublin, begging them to defer the rising until he arrived. They admitted their bad staff work. They had counted upon 5,000 men in Dublin and secured only 1,500 and they were mostly men belonging to the Transport Workers rather than Sinn Feiners. In fact, there was a strong revolutionary element in the business. The reason why M’Neill had put off the rising from Saturday to Monday was the non-arrival of the munitions. Their main complaint was against the rebels in the south and west, who, though sufficiently armed to have done a good deal, did nothing. They did not even obey orders as regards the landing of munitions. They professed, however, to be pleased with the result of the Rebellion, because they said that for every man in favour of a rebellion before the rising there were now ten.
Two months had scarcely elapsed when they were again planning rebellion. They felt sure of success if only they had sufficient arms and they demanded from the Germans an adequate supply under a strong military escort. On their side they undertook to supply 250,000 men after an initial success. They held out as an inducement to the Germans a Zeppelin base for operations upon England. On 17 June the Germans said they were ready ‘in principle’ to give further aid, but they wanted full particulars. Like other foreign invaders of Ireland, they had learned to distrust the organising ability of the Irish. On 31 December 1916 they promised a new supply of 30,000 rifles and ten machine guns, but this offer was declined by the Irish rebels unless the Germans would undertake to land a military force. The entry of America into the war prevented any further negotiations.