Redemption - Leon Uris [327]
“You’re right, Dary. We need to stake our claim. It’s pretty clear, isn’t it? I’ll be waiting.”
“And when I come back, I’ll take on anything they throw on us. I love you so, my Rachael.”
“I take it you’ll be leaving shortly?”
“I need no further training for my job except to harden up a little. I’m off to England and have been promised a newly formed Irish unit.”
“When?”
“Three days.”
“Oh, thank God. I was terrified you were going to leave right now.”
“Saying good-bye to Rory was very hard. But I feel a contentment, a happiness in knowing that I’m a Larkin. I’m happy that we have already been united.”
“Don’t you think we ought to go to our room?”
“I was wondering about that. I’m worried about getting you pregnant again.”
She leaned up and whispered into his ear. “Mom told me there are lots of ways we can do it without actual, well, you know, official fornication.”
87
August 1916
Roger Casement was an off-horse in the republican movement. His role in the Easter Rising, as his role in life, had been one of a loner.
Born to an Ulster Protestant family, this brilliant and compassionate soul joined the British Consular Service where he won international renown as a humanitarian and was ultimately knighted as a Commander of St. Michael and Knight of the Realm.
Casement’s struggle was to break through bureaucratic bulwarks to expose conditions in the Belgian Congo Free State. Native workers on the rubber plantations were starved, killed, or had their ears cut off. Women and children were punished by amputation of their limbs.
Casement found more of the same in British-owned plantations in Brazil, where a common punishment was fire-branding the genital openings of both men and women.
Like many good Irish missionaries who went into places that only Irish missionaries would dare, Sir Roger finally wrecked his health and returned to Ireland and retired.
Having fought the cruel treatment of colonials all his career, he was inexorably drawn to protest the centuries of bondage of his own country. Casement joined a long list of Anglo-Protestants from Wolfe Tone to Charles Stewart Parnell who took up the cause of republicanism.
The Brotherhood took advantage of his years as a skilled diplomat and assigned him a number of overseas missions. As the time for the Rising drew near, Casement was dispatched to America to obtain Irish-American support and money. The mission was a failure.
He was then sent to Germany to obtain arms. The Germans had been supplying vast numbers of arms to the Ulster Volunteers before the war and at the same time, keeping an open line to the Brotherhood, their main purpose to embarrass the British.
To test the waters now, the German Staff came up with a clever plan. They had captured a few thousand Irishmen on the Western Front. Casement was given the offer to try to form an Irish Brigade for the German army from these prisoners.
Casement was only able to enlist fifty-two men to fight the British, and some of those were of questionable background.
The bloom was off the rose. Instead of the hundred thousand rifles that Casement insisted were necessary to support the Rising in the countryside, the Germans agreed to send one shipload of twenty thousand, just to keep their hand in.
These arms on the converted freighter Aud ended up at the bottom of Tralee Bay due to missed signals. Casement had been returned by submarine and was turned in to the Constabulary by an informer from the “Irish-German” volunteers.
As the Easter Rising was bombarded into submission, the countryside failed to join in. Sir Roger Casement was whisked away to London to be separated from the run-of-the-mill Catholic rebels. Here, indeed, the British had bagged the traitor’s traitor, one of their own who could be tried in London and held aloft as a name to be reviled for all times.
He had been a man of six feet, greatly handsome, bearded and with extraordinary, seeking dark eyes. His imprisonment