For him, politics aroused contradictory feelings. On one hand, it made him live with unrecognizable intensity—at last he had thrown himself body and soul into Ireland!—but he was irritated by the sense of time wasted in interminable discussions that preceded and at times impeded agreements and action, by the intrigue, vanity, and meanness mixed with the ideals and ideas in daily tasks. He had heard and read that politics, like everything else connected to power, at times brought to light the best in a human being—idealism, heroism, sacrifice, generosity—but also the worst—cruelty, envy, resentment, pride. He confirmed that this was true. He lacked political ambitions, power did not tempt him. Perhaps for that reason, in addition to his prestige as a great international fighter against the abuse of indigenous peoples in Africa and South America, he had no enemies in the nationalist movement. That, at least, is what he believed, for everyone showed him respect. In the autumn of 1913, he mounted a platform to test his wings as a political orator.
At the end of August he had moved to the Ulster of his childhood and youth in an attempt to organize the Irish Protestants opposed to the pro-British extremism of Sir Edward Carson and his followers who, in their campaign against Home Rule, trained their military force in full view of the authorities. The committee, named Ballymoney, that Roger helped to form called for a demonstration at Ballymoney Town Hall. It was agreed that he would be one of the speakers along with Alice Stopford Green, Captain Jack White, Alex Wilson, and a young activist whose name was John Dinsmore. He gave the first public speech of his life on the rainy late afternoon of October 24, 1913, in a meeting room of Ballymoney Town Hall, before five hundred people. The night before, he was very nervous and wrote out his speech and memorized it. He had the feeling that when he went up on the platform he would be taking an irreversible step, that from now on there would be no turning back from the path he had started out on. In the future his life would be devoted to a task that, under the circumstances, would perhaps make him run as many risks as those he faced in the African and South American jungles. His speech, dedicated entirely to denying that the division of the Irish was both religious and political (nationalist Catholics and unionist Protestants) and calling for “unity in the diversity of creeds and ideals of all Irish men and women,” was applauded enthusiastically. After the event, Alice Stopford Green, as she embraced him, whispered in his ear: “Let me play prophet. I see a great political future for you.”
For the next eight months, Roger felt he did nothing else but go up on and come down from platforms, delivering speeches. He read them only at first, then he improvised, following a brief outline. He traveled all over Ireland, attended meetings, encounters, discussions, round tables, some public, some secret, arguing, alleging, proposing, refuting, for hours and hours, often giving up meals and sleep. This total devotion to political action sometimes enthused him and sometimes produced in him a profound dejection. In dispirited moments the pains in his hip and back bothered him again.
During those months at the end of 1913 and the beginning of 1914, political tension continued to increase in Ireland. The division between the unionists of Ulster and the Home Rulers and those favoring independence became so exacerbated it seemed the prelude to civil war. In November 1913, in response to the formation of Sir Edward Carson’s Ulster Volunteers, the Irish Citizen Army was established, whose principal organizer, James Connolly, was a union head and labor leader. This was a military unit, and its public reason for being was to defend workers against the aggression of employers and authorities. Its first commander, Captain Jack White, had served with distinction in the British Army before turning to Irish nationalism. In the founding ceremony a statement of support from Roger was read, for at that time his political friends had sent him to London to collect financial aid for the nationalist movement.
The Irish Volunteers emerged at almost the same time as the Irish Citizen Army through an initiative of Professor Eoin MacNeill, whom Roger supported. From the beginning the organization counted on the support of the clandestine Irish Republican Brotherhood, a militia that demanded Irish independence and was directed, from the innocent tobacco shop that served as his cover, by Tom Clarke, a legendary figure in nationalist circles. He had spent fifteen years in British prisons accused of the terrorist use of dynamite. Then he went into exile in the United States. From there he was sent by the leaders of the Clan na Gael to Dublin to establish a covert network, using his genius for organization. He had succeeded. At the age of fifty-two, he was healthy, tireless, and strict. His true identity had not been detected by British espionage. The two organizations would work in close, though not always easy, collaboration, and many adherents would be loyal to both at the same time. The Volunteers were also joined by members of the Gaelic League, militants from Sinn Féin, taking its first steps under the leadership of Arthur Griffith, affiliates of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and thousands of independents.
Roger worked with Professor MacNeill and Patrick Pearse in writing the founding manifesto of the Volunteers and thrilled among the mass of those attending the first public meeting of the organization, on November 25, 1913, at the Rotunda in Dublin. From the beginning, just as MacNeill and Roger proposed, the Volunteers was a military movement, dedicated to recruiting, training, and arming its members, who were divided into squads, companies, and regiments all over Ireland, to be ready for any outbreak of fighting, something that, given the intemperate political situation, seemed imminent.
Roger committed himself tirelessly to working for the Volunteers. In this way he became acquainted and established close friendships with its principal leaders, among whom were poets and writers, like Thomas MacDonagh, who wrote plays and taught at the university, and the young Joseph Plunkett, disabled and suffering from lung disease who, in spite of his physical limitations, exhibited extraordinary energy: he was as Catholic as Pearse, a reader of the mystics, and one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre. Roger’s activities in favor of the Volunteers occupied his days and nights between November 1913 and July 1914. He spoke every day at its meetings in the large cities, Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Derry, Galway, and Limerick, or in tiny villages and hamlets, before hundreds or barely handfuls of people. His speeches began calmly (“I’m a Protestant from Ulster who defends the sovereignty and liberation of Ireland from the British colonial yoke …”), but as he went on he became more impassioned and tended to conclude in epic transports. He almost always set off thunderous applause in the audience.
At the same time he collaborated in strategic planning for the Volunteers. He was one of the leaders most determined to equip the movement for the struggle for sovereignty that, he was convinced, would pass inevitably from the political plane to military action. To arm themselves they needed money, and it was crucial to persuade Irish lovers of freedom to be generous to the Volunteers.
This was how the idea of sending Roger to the United States was born. The Irish communities there had financial resources and could increase their assistance through a campaign to win over public opinion. Who better to promote it than a celebrated Irishman? The Volunteers decided to consult John Devoy, the leader of the powerful Clan na Gael, which united the large Irish nationalist community in North America. Devoy, born in Kill in County Kildare, had been a covert activist since he was a young man and, accused of terrorism, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison but served only five. He had been in the Foreign Legion, in Algeria. In the United States he founded a newspaper, The Gaelic American, in 1903, forged close ties to North Americans in the establishment, and as a consequence, Clan na Gael had political influence.
While John Devoy studied the proposal, Roger was still dedicated to promoting the Irish Volunteers and their militarization. He became a good friend of Colonel Maurice Moore, inspector general of the Volunteers, whom he accompanied on his tours around the island to see how training was carried out and if the weapons caches were secure. At the request of Colonel Moore, he joined the general staff of the organization.
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p; He was sent to London several times. A clandestine committee operated there, presided over by Alice Stopford Green, who, in addition to collecting money, arranged in Britain and several European countries for the secret purchase of rifles, revolvers, grenades, machine guns, and ammunition, which she had smuggled into Ireland. At these London meetings with Alice and her friends, Roger observed that a war in Europe had stopped being a mere possibility and become a reality in progress: all the politicians and intellectuals who frequented the historian’s evenings at Grosvenor Road believed Germany had already reached the same conclusion, and they didn’t wonder whether there would be a war but when it would break out.
Roger had moved to Malahide, on the coast north of Dublin, though because of his political travels he spent few nights at home. Soon after he settled there, the Volunteers warned him the Royal Irish Constabulary had opened a file on him and that he was being followed by the secret police. One more reason for him to leave for the United States: he would be more useful there to the nationalist movement than if he remained in Ireland and was put behind bars. John Devoy indicated that the leaders of Clan na Gael approved his coming. Everyone believed his presence would accelerate the collection of donations.
He agreed but delayed his departure for a project that intrigued him: a great celebration on April 23, 1914, of the nine-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Clontarf, when the Irish under Brian Boru defeated the Vikings. MacNeill and Pearse supported him, but the other leaders saw in this initiative a waste of time: why squander energy on an operation of historical archaeology when the important thing was the present? There was no time for distractions. The project didn’t materialize, and neither did another initiative of Roger’s, a campaign to collect signatures asking that Ireland participate in the Olympic Games with its own team of athletes.
As he prepared for the journey, he continued speaking at meetings, almost always with MacNeill and Pearse, and sometimes Thomas MacDonagh, in Cork, Galway, Kilkenny. On St. Patrick’s Day he stood on the platform in Limerick, addressing the largest public meeting he had ever seen. The situation worsened day by day. The Ulster unionists, armed to the teeth, openly held marches and military maneuvers until the British government had to take action, sending more soldiers and sailors to the north of Ireland. Then the Curragh Mutiny took place, an episode that would have a significant effect on Roger’s political ideas. At the height of the mobilization of British soldiers and sailors to put a stop to a possible armed action by the ultras of Ulster, General Sir Arthur Paget, commander-in-chief of Ireland, informed the British government that a good number of British officers at the Curragh military camp had told him that if he ordered them to attack Edward Carson’s Ulster Volunteers, they would ask to resign their commissions. The British government gave in to the blackmail and none of the officers was sanctioned.
This event shored up Roger’s conviction: Home Rule would never be a reality because in spite of all its promises, the British government, whether conservative or liberal, would never accept it. John Redmond and those Irish who believed in Home Rule would be frustrated time and time again. This was not the solution for Ireland. Independence was, pure and simple, and that would never be granted willingly. It would have to be seized through political and military action, at the cost of great sacrifices and great heroism, just as Pearse and Plunkett wanted. That was how all the free peoples in the world had obtained their emancipation.
In April 1914, the German journalist Oskar Schweriner arrived in Ireland. He wanted to write some articles on the poor of Connemara. Since Roger had been so active helping the villagers during the typhus epidemic, Schweriner sought him out. They traveled there together and visited the fishing villages and the schools and dispensaries that were beginning to operate. Then Roger translated Schweriner’s articles for the Irish Independent. In conversations with the German reporter, who supported the nationalist cause, Roger reaffirmed the idea he’d had on his trip to Berlin, to connect Ireland’s struggle for emancipation to Germany if an armed conflict broke out between her and Great Britain. With this powerful ally, there would be more possibilities of obtaining from Britain what Ireland with her limited means—a pygmy against a giant—would never achieve. Among the Volunteers the idea was well received: it wasn’t novel, but the imminence of war gave it new currency.
Under these circumstances, it was learned that Edward Carson’s Ulster Volunteers had succeeded in secretly bringing into Ulster, through the port of Larne, 216 tons of weapons. Added to the ones they already had, this shipment gave the unionist militias a power far superior to that of the nationalist Volunteers. Roger had to accelerate his departure for the United States.
He did, but first he had to accompany Eoin MacNeill to London to meet with John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. In spite of all the reversals, Redmond was still convinced that Home Rule would eventually be approved. He defended the good faith of the Liberal British government. A stout, dynamic man, he spoke very quickly, machine-gunning his words. The absolute self-confidence he displayed helped increase the antipathy he inspired in Roger. Why was he so popular in Ireland? His position that Home Rule ought to be obtained in cooperation and friendship with Britain enjoyed the support of the majority of the Irish. But Roger was certain this popular confidence would begin to disappear as the public saw that Home Rule was an illusion used by the imperial government to keep the Irish deceived, demobilizing and dividing them.
What irritated Roger most at the meeting was Redmond’s statement that if war broke out with Germany, the Irish ought to fight alongside Britain as a matter of principle and strategy: in this way they would gain the confidence of the British government and British public opinion, which would guarantee Home Rule in the future. Redmond demanded that twenty-five representatives of his party be on the executive committee of the Volunteers, something the Volunteers were resigned to accepting in order to maintain unity. But not even this concession changed Redmond’s opinion of Roger Casement, whom he accused periodically of being a “radical revolutionary.” In spite of this, during his final weeks in Ireland, Roger wrote two friendly letters to Redmond, exhorting him to act so that the Irish could remain united in spite of their eventual differences. He assured him that if Home Rule became a reality, he would be the first to support it. But if the British government, because of its vulnerability to the Ulster extremists, could not impose Home Rule, the nationalists ought to have an alternative strategy.
Roger was speaking at a meeting of the Volunteers in Cushendun on June 28, 1914, when the news came that a Serbian terrorist had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. At that moment no one there attributed much importance to an episode that, a few weeks later, would be the pretext that unleashed the First World War. Roger’s last speech in Ireland was given in Carn on June 30. By now he was hoarse from speaking so much.
Seven days later he sailed, clandestinely, from the port of Glasgow on the ship Cassandra—the name was a symbol of what the future held for him—bound for Montreal. He traveled in second class, under an assumed name. He had also altered his clothing, generally elegant and now extremely modest, and his face, changing the way he combed his hair and cutting his beard. Now after so much time, he spent some tranquil days on board. During the crossing, he told himself in surprise that the agitation of recent months had the virtue of calming his arthritic pains. He practically had not suffered from them again, and when they did return they were more bearable than before. On the train from Montreal to New York, he prepared the report he would make to John Devoy and the other leaders of Clan na Gael regarding conditions in Ireland and the need of the Volunteers for financial assistance to buy weapons, for considering how the political situation was evolving, violence could break out at any moment. Then, too, the war would open an exceptional opportunity for Irish supporters of independence.
When he reached New York on July 18, he stayed at the Belmont, a modest hotel frequented by Irishmen. That same day, walking
along a street in the burning heat of the New York summer, his encounter occurred with the Norwegian, Eivind Adler Christensen. A casual encounter? That’s what he believed then. Not for an instant did he suspect it could have been planned by the British espionage services who had been following him for months. He was certain his precautions to leave Glasgow in secret had been sufficient. And he had no suspicion at the time of the cataclysm this young man of twenty-four would cause in his life: his physical appearance was not at all that of the helpless vagrant half dead of hunger he claimed to be. In spite of his shabby clothing, Roger thought he was the most beautiful, attractive man he had ever seen. As he watched him eating the sandwich and sipping the drink he had invited him to have, he was confused, ashamed, because his heart had begun to pound and he felt an excitement in his blood he had not experienced for some time. He, always so careful in his gestures, so rigid an observer of good manners, was on the point several times that afternoon and evening of violating good form and following the inducements assaulting him to caress those muscular arms with their golden down or to grasp Eivind’s narrow waist.