The Dream of the Celt

XIII

He woke, caught between alarm and surprise. Because in the confusion of his nights, on this one the thought of his friend—ex-friend now—Herbert Ward had kept him frightened and tense as he dreamed. But it was not in Africa, where they had met when both were working for the expedition of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, or afterward, in Paris, where Roger had gone to visit Herbert and Sarita several times, but on the streets of Dublin, precisely in the midst of the uproar, the barricades, the shots, the cannon fire, and the great collective sacrifice of Easter Week. Herbert Ward in the middle of the insurgent Irish, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, fighting for the independence of Ireland! How could the human mind, given over to sleep, construct such absurd fantasies?

He recalled that a few days earlier the British cabinet had met without reaching any decision regarding the petition for clemency. His lawyer, George Gavan Duffy, had told him. What was going on? Why this new delay? Gavan Duffy thought it was a good sign: there was dissension among the ministers, who had not achieved the required unanimity. There was hope, then. But waiting meant dying many times each day, each hour, each minute.

Thinking of Herbert Ward saddened him. They would never be friends again. The death of the Wards’ son Charles, so young, so handsome, so healthy, on the Neuve Chapelle front in January 1916, had opened a chasm between them that nothing could close. Herbert was the only real friend he had made in Africa. From the first moment he had seen in this man—somewhat older than himself, who had an outstanding personality, had traveled half the world (New Zealand, Australia, San Francisco, Borneo), and was more cultured than all the Europeans around them, including Stanley—someone with whom he had learned a good number of things and with whom he shared concerns and longings. Unlike the other Europeans recruited by Stanley for this expedition in the service of Leopold II, who aspired only to obtaining money and power in Africa, Herbert loved the adventure for its own sake. He was a man of action but had a passion for art, and he approached the Africans with respectful curiosity. He investigated their beliefs, their customs and religious objects, their apparel and adornments, which interested him from an esthetic and artistic, as well as an intellectual and spiritual point of view. Herbert sketched and made small sculptures with African motifs. In their long conversations at nightfall, when they put up the tents, prepared the food, and got ready to rest after the marches and labors of the day, he confided to Roger that one day he would leave all these tasks to devote himself only to being a sculptor and leading an artist’s life in Paris, “the art capital of the world.” His love for Africa never left him. On the contrary, distance and the passage of time had increased it. He recalled the Wards’ London house, 53 Chester Square, filled with African objects. And, above all, his studio in Paris, its walls covered by spears, javelins, arrows, shields, masks, paddles, and knives in all shapes and sizes. Among the stuffed heads of animals on the floor and the animal skins covering leather armchairs, they had spent entire nights recalling their travels through Africa. Frances, the Wards’ young daughter whom they called Cricket, sometimes dressed in native tunics, necklaces, and adornments, and performed a Bakongo dance that her parents accompanied with clapping and monotonous singing.

Herbert was one of the few people to whom Roger confided his disenchantment with Stanley, Leopold II, and the idea that had brought him to Africa: that the Empire and colonization would open to Africans the way to modernization and progress. Herbert agreed completely with him, when they confirmed that the real reason for the presence of Europeans in Africa was not to help the Africans out of paganism and barbarism, but to exploit them with a greed that acknowledged no limits to abuse and cruelty.

But Herbert Ward never took very seriously the progressive conversion of Roger to the nationalist ideology. He tended to mock him, in the affectionate manner typical of him, warning him against tinsel patriotism—flags, anthems, uniforms—which, he would say, always represented, sooner or later, a regression to provincialism, mean-spiritedness, and the distortion of universal values. And yet, this citizen of the world, as Herbert liked to call himself, when faced with the inordinate violence of the world war, had reacted like so many millions of Europeans and had also taken refuge in patriotism. The letter in which he broke off his friendship with Roger was filled with the patriotic sentiment he had once mocked, the love for the flag and his native land that once had seemed primitive and contemptible to him. Imagining Herbert Ward, that Parisian Englishman, involved with the men of Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin, James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, Patrick Pearse’s Volunteers, fighting in the streets of Dublin for the independence of Ireland, was sheer nonsense. And yet, as he waited for dawn, lying on the narrow cot in his cell, Roger told himself that after all, there was something rational in the depths of that irrationality, for in his dream he had tried to reconcile two things he loved and longed for: his friend and his country.

Early in the morning, the sheriff came to announce a visitor. Roger felt his heart racing when he went into the visitors’ room and saw Alice Stopford Green sitting on the single small bench in the narrow room. When she saw him she stood and walked forward, smiling, to embrace him.

“Alice, Alice dear,” Roger said. “How wonderful to see you. I thought we wouldn’t see each other again. At least in this world.”

“It wasn’t easy to obtain this second permit,” Alice said. “But, as you see, my obstinacy finally convinced them. You don’t know how many doors I knocked on.”

His old friend, who usually dressed with studied elegance, and had done so on her previous visit, now wore a rumpled dress, a kerchief tied carelessly around her head, some gray strands peeking out. On her feet were muddied shoes. Not only her attire had become impoverished. Her expression denoted weariness and discouragement. What had happened to her during this time to account for the change? Had Scotland Yard harassed her again? She denied that, shrugging, as if that old episode had no importance. Alice didn’t touch on the petition for clemency and its postponement until the next Council of Ministers. Roger supposed nothing was known yet about this and didn’t mention it either. Instead he told her about the absurd dream he’d had, imagining Herbert Ward mixing with Irish rebels in the middle of the skirmishes and battles of Easter Week in the center of Dublin.

“Gradually more news about how things happened is getting out,” Alice said, and Roger noted that his friend’s voice became sad and enraged at the same time. And he also noticed that, when they heard them talking about the Irish insurrection, the sheriff and guard, standing near them with their backs turned, became rigid and no doubt listened more carefully. He was afraid the sheriff would warn them it was prohibited to speak about this subject, but he didn’t.

“Then have you learned something else, Alice?” he asked, lowering his voice until it became a murmur.

He saw that the historian turned slightly pale as she nodded. She was silent for a long while before answering, as if wondering whether she ought to perturb her friend by bringing up a subject that was painful to him, or as if she had so many things to say about it, she didn’t know where to begin. Finally she chose to answer that though she had heard and still was hearing many versions of what had been experienced in Dublin and some other cities in Ireland the week of the Rising—contradictory things, facts mixed with fantasies, myths, realities, exaggerations, and inventions, which occurred when an event aroused an entire people—she gave a good deal of credit to the testimony above all of Austin, a nephew of hers, a Capuchin monk recently arrived in London. He was a fountain of firsthand information, for he had been there, in Dublin, in the middle of the fighting, as a nurse and spiritual attendant, going from the General Post Office, the general headquarters from which Patrick Pearse and James Connolly directed the uprising, to the trenches on St. Stephen’s Green, where Countess Constance Markievicz commanded the action, with a buccaneer’s large pistol and her impeccable Volunteer’s uniform, to the barricades constructed in the Jacob’s Biscuit Factory and places in Boland’s Mill occupied by the rebels under Éamon de Valera, before the British troops surrounded them. The testimony of Brother Austin, Alice thought, probably came closest to that unreachable truth only future historians would completely reveal.

There was another long silence Roger didn’t dare to interrupt. It was only a few days since he had seen her, but Alice seemed to have aged ten years. She had wrinkles on her forehead and neck, and her hands were covered with spots. Her clear eyes were no longer shining. He noted her sadness but was sure Alice would not cry in front of him. Could it be that clemency had been denied and she didn’t have the courage to tell him?

“Do you know what my nephew remembers most, Roger?” Alice added. “It isn’t the shooting, the bombs, the wounded, the blood, the flames of the fires, the smoke that didn’t let them breathe, but the confusion. The immense, enormous confusion that reigned all week in the revolutionaries’ positions.”

“Confusion?” Roger repeated, very quietly. Closing his eyes, he tried to see, hear, and feel it.

“The immense, enormous confusion,” Alice repeated, with emphasis. “They were prepared to be killed, and at the same time, they experienced moments of euphoria. Incredible moments. Of pride. Of freedom. Even though none of them, not the leaders and not the militants, ever knew exactly what they were doing or what they wanted to do. That’s what Austin says.”

“Did they know at least why the weapons they were expecting hadn’t arrived?” Roger murmured when he saw that Alice had again fallen into a long silence.

“They didn’t know anything about anything. Among themselves they said the most fantastic things. No one could disprove them because nobody knew what the real situation was. Extraordinary rumors circulated that everybody believed because they needed to believe there was a way out of the desperate situation they found themselves in. That a German army was approaching Dublin, for example, and companies, battalions had landed at different points on the island and were advancing toward the capital. That in the interior, in Cork, Galway, Wexford, Meath, Tralee, everywhere, including Ulster, the Volunteers and the Citizen Army had risen up by the thousands, occupying barracks and police stations and advancing from every direction toward Dublin with reinforcements for the besieged fighters. They fought half-dead from thirst and hunger, almost without ammunition, and had all their hopes pinned on unreality.”

“I knew that would happen,” said Roger. “I didn’t arrive in time to stop the madness. Now, once again, Irish freedom is farther away than ever.”

“Eoin MacNeill tried to stop them when he found out,” said Alice. “The military command of the IRB kept him in the dark about the plans for the Rising because he was opposed to an armed action if there was no German support. When he learned that the military command of the Volunteers, the IRB, and the Irish Citizen Army had called on people for military maneuvers on Easter Sunday, he gave a counterorder prohibiting that march and forbidding the Volunteers to go out to the streets if they didn’t receive instructions signed by him. This sowed a good deal of confusion. Hundreds, thousands of Volunteers stayed home. Many tried to communicate with Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, but couldn’t. Afterward, those who obeyed MacNeill’s counterorder had to fold their arms while those who disobeyed it got themselves killed. For that reason, many Sinn Féin and Volunteers now hate MacNeill and consider him a traitor.”

Again she fell silent, and Roger became distracted. Eoin MacNeill a traitor! How stupid! He imagined the founder of the Gaelic League, the editor of the Gaelic Journal, one of the founders of the Irish Volunteers, who had dedicated his life to fighting for the survival of the Irish language and culture, accused of betraying his brothers and sisters for wanting to prevent a romantic uprising doomed to failure. In the prison where they had sent him he must be the object of abuse, perhaps that icy contempt Irish patriots used to punish the tepid and the cowardly. How bad that gentle, cultured university professor must feel, filled with love for the language, customs, and traditions of his country, torturing himself, wondering, Did I do the wrong thing when I gave the counterorder? I wanted only to save lives, but have I contributed instead to the failure of the rebellion by sowing disorder and division among the revolutionaries? He identified with Eoin MacNeill. They resembled each other in the contradictory positions that history and circumstances had placed them in. What would have happened if, instead of being detained in Tralee, he had managed to speak with Pearse, Clarke, and the other leaders of the military command? Would he have convinced them? Probably not. And now, perhaps, they’d also call him a traitor.

“I’m doing something I shouldn’t do, darling,” said Alice, forcing a smile. “Giving you only the bad news, the pessimistic view.”

“Can there be any other after what has happened?”

“Yes, there is,” the historian declared in a resolute voice, blushing. “I was also against the rising, in these circumstances. And yet …”

“And yet what, Alice?”

“For a few hours, a few days, an entire week, Ireland was a free country, darling,” she said, and it seemed to Roger that Alice trembled with emotion. “An independent, sovereign republic, with a president and a provisional government. Austin hadn’t arrived yet when Patrick Pearse came out of the Post Office and read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and the creation of the constitutional government of the Republic of Ireland, signed by the seven. There weren’t many people there, it seems. Those who were and heard him must have felt something very special, don’t you agree, darling? I was opposed, as I’ve told you. But when I read that text I began to cry aloud, in a way I’ve never cried before. ‘In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom …’ You see, I’ve memorized it. And I’ve regretted with all my strength not having been there with them. You understand, don’t you?”

Roger closed his eyes. He saw the scene, clear and vibrant. In front of the General Post Office, under an overcast sky that threatened rain, before a hundred or two hundred people armed with shotguns, revolvers, knives, pikes, cudgels, most of them men but also a good number of women in kerchiefs, rose the slender, graceful, sickly figure of Patrick Pearse, with his thirty-six years and his steely gaze, filled with a Nietzschean “will to power” that had always allowed him, especially from the time he was seventeen, joined the Gaelic League, and soon became its indisputable leader, to rise above every misfortune, sickness, repression, internal struggle, and give material form to his life’s mystic dream—the armed uprising of the Irish against the oppressor, the martyrdom of the saints that would redeem an entire people—reading, in the messianic voice that the emotion of the moment magnified, the carefully chosen words that brought to a close centuries of occupation and servitude and initiated a new era in the history of Ireland. He listened to the religious, sacred silence that Pearse’s words must have created in that corner of the center of Dublin, still intact because the shooting hadn’t begun yet, and he saw the faces of the Volunteers who looked out from the windows of the Post Office and nearby buildings on Sackville Street taken by the rebels, to contemplate the simple, solemn ceremony. He listened to the clamor, the applause, the long-lives, the hurrahs with which, when the reading of the seven names that signed the Proclamation had concluded, the words of Patrick Pearse were rewarded by the people on the street, at the windows, on the roofs, and the brevity and intensity of the moment when Pearse himself and the other leaders ended the celebration, explaining there was no time to lose. They had to return to their posts, fulfill their obligations, prepare to fight. He felt his eyes grow wet. He, too, had begun to tremble. In order not to cry, he said hurriedly:

“It must have been very moving, of course.”

“It’s a symbol and history is made of symbols,” Alice Stopford Green agreed. “It doesn’t matter that they shot Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, Plunkett, and the rest of the signers of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. On the contrary. Those shootings have baptized this symbol with blood, giving it a halo of heroism and martyrdom.”

“Exactly what Pearse and Plunkett wanted,” said Roger. “You’re right, Alice. I would have liked to be there with them too.”

Just as she was inspired by the action outside the Post Office, Alice was moved that so many members of the rebel women’s organization, Cumann na mBan, had taken part in the uprising. The Capuchin monk had seen that with his own eyes. In all the rebel centers women were charged by the leaders to cook for the combatants, but then, as skirmishes broke out, the importance of the action opened the fan of responsibilities for the militants of Cumann na mBan, whom the shooting, bombs, and fires tore out of improvised kitchens and turned into nurses. They bandaged the wounded and helped surgeons remove bullets, suture wounds, and amputate limbs threatened with gangrene. But perhaps the most important role of those women—adolescents, adults, those approaching old age—had been as couriers when, because of the increasing isolation of the rebel barricades and posts, it was indispensable to turn to the cooks and nurses and send them on their bicycles and, when those became scarce, on foot, to fetch and carry messages, oral or written reports (with instructions to destroy, burn, or eat those papers if they were wounded or captured). Brother Austin assured Alice that for the six days of the rebellion, in the midst of bombings and gunfire, explosions that demolished roofs, walls, and balconies and transformed the center of Dublin into an archipelago of fires and mountains of scorched, bloodstained rubble, he never stopped seeing those angels in skirts, going and coming, grasping the handlebars like Amazons on their mounts and pedaling furiously, serene, heroic, intrepid, defying the bullets, carrying the messages and reports that broke the quarantine that the British Army tried strategically to impose on the rebels, isolating them before crushing them.

“When they could no longer serve as couriers because troops were occupying the streets and traffic was impossible, many took the revolvers and rifles of their husbands, fathers, and brothers and fought as well,” said Alice. “Along with them, Constance Markievicz showed that not all women belong to the weaker sex. Many fought as she did and died or were wounded with their weapons in their hands.”

“Do you know how many?”

Alice shook her head.

“There are no official figures. Those that are mentioned are pure fantasy. But one thing is certain. They fought. The British soldiers who detained them and dragged them to the barracks at Richmond and to Kilmainham Prison know it. They wanted to subject them to courts martial and shoot them, too. I know from a very good source: a minister. The British cabinet was terrified, and with reason, to think that if they began shooting women, all of Ireland would be up in arms this time. Prime Minister Asquith himself telegraphed the military chief in Dublin, Sir John Maxwell, categorically forbidding him to shoot a single woman. That’s how Constance Markievicz’s life was saved. A court martial condemned her to death but the sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment due to pressure from the government.”

But it hadn’t all been enthusiasm, solidarity, and heroism in the civilian population of Dublin during the week of fighting. The Capuchin monk witnessed looting in the shops and stores on Sackville Street and other centrally located streets, committed by vagrants, petty criminals, or simply the poor from nearby marginal neighborhoods, which put the leaders of the IRB, the Volunteers, and the Citizen Army in a difficult position, since they had not foreseen this delinquent deviation in the rebellion. In some cases the rebels tried to stop the sacking of hotels, even firing shots in the air to frighten away the looters devastating the Gresham Hotel, but in others they left them alone, confused by how these humble, hungry people, in whose interests they thought they were fighting, confronted them in a fury to be allowed to rob the elegant stores in the city.

Not only thieves confronted the rebels on the streets of Dublin. So did many mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of the police and soldiers the insurgents had attacked, wounded, or killed during the Rising, sometimes large groups of fearless women agitated by grief, desperation, and rage. In some cases these women even attacked rebel outposts, insulting, stoning, and spitting at the combatants, cursing them and calling them murderers. That had been the most difficult trial for those who believed they had justice, goodness, and truth on their side: discovering that those confronting them were not the enemy dogs of Empire, the soldiers of the army of occupation, but humble Irishwomen blinded by suffering, who did not see in them the liberators of their country but the murderers of their loved ones, Irishmen like themselves whose only crime was being poor and taking up the trade of soldier or policeman, the way the poor of this world have always earned their living.

“Nothing is black-and-white, darling,” Alice remarked. “Not even in so just a cause. Here, too, those confused grays appear that cloud everything.”

Roger agreed. What his friend had just said applied to him. No matter how cautious one was in planning actions with the greatest lucidity, life, more complex than any calculation, made schemes explode and replaced them with uncertain, contradictory situations. Wasn’t he a living example of those ambiguities? His interrogators, Reginald Hall and Basil Thomson, believed he came from Germany to lead the Rising, whose leaders hid it from him because they knew he thought it could not succeed at that time. Could you ask for greater incongruities?

Would demoralization now spread among the nationalists? Their best cadres were dead, shot, or in prison. Rebuilding the independence movement would take years. The Germans, whom so many of the Irish, like him, trusted, had turned their backs. Years of sacrifice and perseverance dedicated to Ireland, irremediably lost. And he, here in an English prison, waiting for the outcome of a petition for clemency that probably would be turned down. Wouldn’t it have been better to die there, with the poets and mystics, shooting and being shot at? His death would have had a rounded meaning instead of an equivocal ending on the gallows, like a common criminal. Poets and mystics. That’s what they were and that’s how they had acted, choosing as the focus of the rebellion not a barracks or Dublin Castle, the citadel of colonial power, but a civilian building, the Post Office, recently renovated. Chosen by civilized citizens, not politicians or soldiers. They wanted to win over the population before defeating the British soldiers. Hadn’t Joseph Plunkett told him so clearly in their discussions in Berlin? A rebellion of poets and mystics longing for martyrdom to shake the sleeping masses who believed, as John Redmond did, in the pacific way and the good will of the Empire to achieve the freedom of Ireland. Were they ingenuous or clairvoyant?

He sighed, and Alice patted his arm affectionately.

“It’s sad and exciting to talk about this, isn’t it, darling Roger?”

“Yes, Alice. Sad and exciting. At times I feel enraged at what they did. Other times, I envy them with all my soul, and my admiration for them has no limits.”

“The truth is, all I do is think about this. And about how much I need you, Roger,” said Alice, taking him by the arm. “Your ideas, your lucidity, would help me to see the light in the midst of so much darkness. Do you know something? Not now, but sometime soon, something good will come out of everything that’s happened. There are already signs.”

Roger agreed without understanding completely what she meant.

“For the present, the followers of John Redmond are losing more strength every day throughout Ireland,” she added. “We, who were in the minority, now have the majority of the Irish people on our side. You may think it’s a lie, but I swear to you it isn’t. The shootings, the courts martial, the deportations are doing us a great service.”

Roger noticed that the sheriff, always with his back to them, moved as if he were going to turn and order them to be quiet. But again he didn’t do it. Alice seemed optimistic now. According to her, perhaps Pearse and Plunkett were not so misguided. Because every day in Ireland, in the streets, churches, neighborhood associations, and guilds, spontaneous demonstrations of sympathy for the martyrs, those who had been shot or sentenced to long prison terms, were multiplying, along with shows of hostility toward the police and soldiers of the British army. They were the object of insults and taunts from passersby, to the extent that the military government ordered police and soldiers to always patrol in groups, and when they weren’t on duty to dress in civilian clothes, because the people’s hostility was demoralizing to the forces of law and order.

According to Alice, the most notable change was in the Catholic Church. The hierarchy and most of the clergy always were closer to the pacifist and gradualist theses, more in favor of Home Rule for Ireland and John Redmond and his followers in the Irish Parliamentary Party than the separatist radicalism of Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League, the IRB, and the Volunteers. But since the Rising, this had changed. Perhaps the religious conduct of the insurgents during the week of fighting had an influence on this. The testimonies of priests, among them Brother Austin, present at the barricades, buildings, and places transformed into rebel centers, were conclusive: they had celebrated Masses, offered confession and communion, and many combatants had asked for their blessing before beginning to fire. In all the strongholds the insurgents respected the leaders’ categorical prohibition against consuming even a drop of alcohol. In the periods of calm, the rebels kneeled and prayed the rosary aloud. Not one of those executed, including James Connolly, who had proclaimed himself a socialist and was known as an atheist, had failed to request the assistance of a priest before facing the firing squad. In a wheelchair, still bleeding from the bullet wounds he had received in battle, Connolly was shot after kissing a crucifix handed to him by the chaplain of Kilmainham Prison. Since May, Masses of thanksgiving and homages to the martyrs of Easter Week proliferated throughout Ireland. There was not a Sunday when the priests in their sermons at Mass did not exhort the faithful to pray for the souls of the patriots executed and buried in secret by the British army. Sir John Maxwell had made a formal protest to the Catholic hierarchy, and instead of giving him explanations, Bishop O’Dwyer justified his priests, accusing the general of being “a military dictator” and acting in an anti-Christian manner with the executions and above all his refusal to return the bodies of those shot to their families. That the military government, sheltered by the suppression of rights under martial law, would have buried the patriots in secret to avoid their graves becoming centers of republican pilgrimage caused indignation even among sectors that until now had not seen themselves in sympathy with the radicals.

“In short, the papists gain more ground every day and we Anglican nationalists are shrinking like La Peau de chagrin, that novel by Balzac. All that’s missing is for you and me to convert to Catholicism too, Roger,” Alice joked.

“I already practically have,” replied Roger. “And not for political reasons.”

“I never would. Don’t forget, my father was a clergyman in the Church of Ireland,” Alice said. “Your converting doesn’t surprise me, I’ve seen it coming for some time. Do you remember how we joked with you at the gatherings in my house?”

“Those unforgettable gatherings,” Roger said with a sigh. “I’m going to tell you something. Now, with so much free time to think, on many days I’ve added it up: where and when was I happiest? At the Tuesday gatherings, in your house on Grosvenor Road, dear Alice. I never told you, but I would leave those meetings in a state of grace. Exalted and happy. Reconciled with life. Thinking, ‘What a shame I didn’t study, didn’t go to university.’ Listening to you and your friends, I felt as distant from culture as the natives of Africa or Amazonia.”

“Something similar happened to me and them with you, Roger. We envied your travels, your adventures, your having lived so many different lives in those places. I once heard Yeats say, ‘Roger Casement is the most universal Irishman I’ve known. A real citizen of the world.’ I don’t think I ever told you that.”

They recalled a discussion about symbols, years earlier in Paris, with Herbert Ward. He had shown them the recent casting of one of his sculptures he was very pleased about: an African sorcerer. In fact, it was a beautiful piece that, in spite of its realistic character, showed everything secret and mysterious in the man, his face covered with cuts, armed with a broom and a skull, conscious of the powers conferred upon him by the divinities of the forest, streams, and animals in whom the men and women of the tribe trusted blindly to save them from spells, diseases, fears, and to put them in touch with the afterlife.

“We all carry one of these ancestors inside us,” said Herbert, pointing at the bronze sorcerer who, with half-closed eyes, seemed enraptured in one of those dreams into which infusions of herbs plunged him. “The proof? The symbols we pay homage to with reverential respect. Coats of arms, flags, crosses.”

Roger and Alice disagreed, claiming that symbols should not be seen as anachronisms from the irrational era of humanity. On the contrary, a flag, for example, was the symbol of a community that felt solidarity and shared beliefs, convictions, customs, respecting individual differences and discrepancies that did not destroy but strengthened the common denominator. Both confessed that seeing an Irish republican flag waving in the wind always moved them. How Herbert and Sarita had mocked them for that statement.

When she learned that while Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a good number of Irish republican flags had been raised on the roofs of the Post Office and Liberty Hall, and then saw the photos of buildings occupied by the rebels in Dublin, like the Imperial and Metropole hotels, with flags at the windows and parapets that blew in the wind, Alice had felt a lump in her throat. That must have caused endless joy in those who experienced it. Later she also learned that in the weeks before the insurrection, while the Volunteers were preparing homemade bombs, sticks of dynamite, grenades, pikes, and bayonets, the members of Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary, were gathering medicines, bandages, disinfectants, and sewing the tricolor flags that erupted on the morning of Monday, April 24, on the roofs of central Dublin. The house of the Plunketts in Kimmage had been the most active workshop for weapons and flags for the uprising.

“It was a historic event,” Alice declared. “We abuse words. Politicians especially apply the word historic to any piece of foolishness. But those republican flags in the sky of old Dublin were historic. It will always be remembered with great fervor. A historic event. It has gone around the world, darling. In the United States many papers published it on the front page. Wouldn’t you have liked to see it?”

Yes, he would have liked to see that too. According to Alice, more and more people on the island were defying the prohibition and placing republican flags on the façades of their houses, even in Belfast and London, pro-British citadels.

On the other hand, in spite of the war on the Continent, with disturbing news every day—military actions produced dizzying numbers of victims and the outcome was still uncertain—in Britain many people were prepared to help those deported from Ireland by the military authorities. Hundreds of men and women considered subversive had been expelled and were now scattered throughout Britain, ordered to settle in remote localities and, in the great majority of cases, without resources to survive. Alice, who belonged to humanitarian associations that were sending them money, foodstuffs, and clothing, told Roger they had no difficulty collecting funds and help from the general public. In this, too, the participation of the Catholic Church had been important.

Among the deportees were dozens of women. Many of them—Alice had spoken personally with some—in spite of their solidarity, held a certain rancor toward the commanders of the rebellion who had made it difficult for women to collaborate with the insurgents. And yet almost all the commanders, willingly or not, eventually admired the women in the strongholds and made use of them. The only one who flatly refused to admit women into Boland’s Mill and all the neighboring territory controlled by his companies was Éamon de Valera. His arguments irritated the militants of Cumann na mBan because they were conservative: a woman’s place was in the home and not on the barricade, and her natural tools were the distaff, pots and pans, flowers, needle and thread, not the pistol or the rifle. And her presence could distract the combatants, who, to protect her, would neglect their obligations. The tall, thin professor of mathematics, leader of the Irish Volunteers, with whom Roger had often spoken and maintained an abundant correspondence, was condemned to death by one of those secret, hasty courts martial that tried the leaders of the Rising. But he was saved at the last minute. At the very moment when, having confessed and taken communion, he waited with complete serenity, a rosary between his fingers, to be taken to the back wall of Kilmainham Gaol where the shootings took place, the court decided to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. According to rumors, the companies under the command of Éamon de Valera, in spite of his complete lack of military training, acted with great efficiency and discipline, inflicting a good number of losses on the enemy. They were the last to surrender. But the rumors also said the tension and sacrifices of those days had been so harsh that at one moment his subordinates in the station where his command post operated thought he was losing his mind because of his erratic behavior. His was not the only case. In the rain of lead and fire, without sleep, food, or water, some had gone mad or suffered nervous breakdowns at the barricades.

Roger had become distracted, recalling the elongated silhouette of Éamon de Valera, his solemn, ceremonious speech. He noticed that Alice was referring now to a horse, with feeling and tears in her eyes. The historian had a great love for animals, but why did this one affect her in so special a way? Gradually he understood that her nephew had told her the story. It dealt with the horse of one of the British lancers who, on the first day of the insurrection, charged the Post Office and were driven back, losing three men. The horse was shot several times and collapsed in front of a barricade, badly wounded. It neighed in terror and piercing pain. It managed at times to stand, but weakened by loss of blood, fell again after attempting to walk a few steps. Behind the barricade an argument broke out between those who wanted to kill it so it wouldn’t suffer any more and those who opposed this, thinking it would recover. Finally, they shot it and had to fire the rifle twice to put an end to its agony.

“It wasn’t the only animal that died on the streets,” said Alice, distressed. “Many died, horses, dogs, cats, innocent victims of human brutality. Many nights I have nightmares about them. Poor things. We humans are worse than animals, aren’t we, Roger?”

“Not always, darling. I assure you some are as ferocious as we are. I’m thinking about snakes, for example, whose venom kills you slowly, as you gasp for breath. And the candirú fish of the Amazon that enters your body through the anus and causes hemorrhages. In short …”

“Let’s talk about something else,” said Alice. “Enough of war, battles, the wounded, and the dead.”

But a moment later she told Roger it was amazing how support for Sinn Féin and the IRB was growing among the hundreds of Irish deported and brought to British prisons. Even moderates and independents, and known pacifists, were affiliating with these radical organizations. And a great number of petitions were appearing all over Ireland asking for amnesty for the condemned. In the United States, too, in all the cities where there were Irish communities, protest demonstrations continued against the excesses of the repression following the Rising. John Devoy had done fantastic work and succeeded in having the best of North American society, from artists and entrepreneurs to politicians, professors, and journalists, sign the petitions for amnesty. The House of Representatives approved a motion, written in very severe terms, condemning the summary death sentences for adversaries who had surrendered their weapons. In spite of the defeat, things had not gotten worse with the Rising. In terms of international support, the situation had never been better for the nationalists.

“The visit has run overtime,” the sheriff interrupted. “You have to say goodbye now.”

“I’ll get another permit, I’ll come to see you before …” Alice said and then fell silent, standing up. She had turned very pale.

“Of course, Alice dear,” Roger agreed, embracing her. “I hope you do. You don’t know how good it is for me to see you. How it calms me and fills me with peace.”

But it didn’t happen this time. He went back to his cell with a tumult of images in his mind, all related to the Easter Week rebellion, as if the memories and testimonies of his friend had taken him out of Pentonville Prison and thrown him into the midst of the street fighting, into the din of battle. He felt an immense nostalgia for Dublin, its buildings and redbrick houses, the tiny gardens protected by wooden fences, the noisy streetcars, the misshapen neighborhoods of precarious dwellings and impoverished, barefoot people surrounding islands of affluence and modernity. How did all that look after artillery fire, incendiary bombs, collapsed buildings? He thought of the Abbey Theatre, the Olympia, the warm, fetid bars smelling of beer, the conversations throwing off sparks. Would Dublin be again what it once was?

The sheriff didn’t offer to take him to the showers and he didn’t ask him to. The jailer looked so dejected, his expression so detached and absent, he didn’t want to bother him. It made Roger unhappy to see the man suffering in this way, saddened he could do nothing to lift his spirits. Violating regulations, the sheriff had come twice to his cell to talk at night, and each time Roger had agonized at not being able to give Mr. Stacey the serenity he was searching for. The second time, like the first, he had spoken only of his son, Alex, and his death in combat against the Germans in Loos, the unknown place in France he referred to as if it were a cursed spot. Once, after a long silence, the jailer confessed to Roger how bitter the memory was of the time he whipped Alex, still a little boy, for stealing a pastry from the bakery on the corner. “It was wrong and should have been punished,” said Mr. Stacey, “but not so harshly. Whipping a young boy like that was unpardonable cruelty.” Roger tried to reassure him, reminding him that he and his siblings, including his sister, were sometimes hit by Captain Casement, his father, and they had never stopped loving him. But was Mr. Stacey listening to him? He remained silent, ruminating on his pain, his respiration deep and agitated.

When the jailer closed the cell door, Roger lay down on his cot. He sighed, restless. The conversation with Alice had not done him good. Now he felt sadness at not having been there in his Volunteer uniform, Mauser in hand, taking part in the Rising, not caring that this armed action would end in a slaughter. Perhaps Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, and the others were right. It wasn’t a question of winning but of resisting as much as possible. Of sacrificing oneself, like the Christian martyrs of heroic times. Their blood was the seed that germinated, did away with pagan idols and replaced them with Christ the Redeemer. The blood shed by the Volunteers would also bear fruit, it would open the eyes of the blind and win freedom for Ireland. How many companions and friends from Sinn Féin, the Volunteers, the Citizen Army, the IRB had been at the barricades, knowing it was a suicidal battle? No doubt hundreds, thousands, Patrick Pearse the first among them. He always believed martyrdom was the principal weapon of a just struggle. Didn’t that form part of the Irish character, the Celtic inheritance? The Catholic ability to accept suffering was already in Cuchulain, in the mythic heroes of Ireland and their great feats, and by the same token, in the serene heroism of the saints his friend Alice had studied with so much love and knowledge: an infinite capacity for great gestures. An impractical spirit of the Irish, perhaps, but compensated for by immoderate generosity in embracing the most daring dreams of justice, equality, and happiness. Even when defeat was inevitable. No matter how rash the plan of Pearse, Tom Clarke, Plunkett, and the others, in those six days of unequal combat the spirit of the Irish people had come into view for the world to admire: indomitable in spite of so many centuries of servitude, idealistic, fearless, ready for anything in a just cause. How different from the attitude of those compatriots who were prisoners in Limburg camp, blind and deaf to his exhortations. Theirs was the other face of Ireland: the face of the submissive, those who, because of centuries of colonization, had lost the valiant spark that brought so many women and men to the barricades of Dublin. Had he made another mistake in his life? What would have happened if the German weapons on the Aud had reached the hands of the Volunteers on the night of April 20 in Tralee Bay? He imagined hundreds of patriots on bicycles, in automobiles and carts, on mules and donkeys, spreading out under the stars and distributing weapons and ammunition throughout the territory of Ireland. Would the twenty thousand rifles, ten machine guns, and five million rounds of ammunition in the hands of the insurgents have changed things? At least the battles would have lasted longer, the rebels would have defended themselves better and inflicted more losses on the enemy. Happily he noted he was yawning. Sleep would erase those images and calm his disquiet. He thought he was sinking.

He had a pleasant dream. His mother appeared and disappeared, smiling, beautiful, and graceful in her wide straw hat, a ribbon hanging from it that floated in the breeze. A coquettish flowered parasol protected the whiteness of her cheeks from the sun. Anne Jephson’s eyes were fixed on him and Roger’s were fixed on her and nothing and no one seemed capable of interrupting their silent, tender communication. But suddenly Captain Roger Casement appeared in the grove wearing his resplendent Light Dragoons uniform. He looked at Anne Jephson with eyes that showed an obscene greed. So much vulgarity offended and frightened Roger. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have the strength to prevent what would happen or to start running and rid himself of that horrible presentiment. With tears in his eyes, trembling with terror and indignation, he saw the captain lift up his mother. He heard her give a scream of surprise and then a forced, complaisant little laugh. Trembling with disgust and jealousy, he saw her kick in the air, showing her slim ankles, while his father ran, carrying her among the trees. They were becoming lost from sight in the grove and their laughter tapered off until it disappeared. Now he heard the wind sighing and the warbling of the birds. He didn’t cry. The world was cruel and unjust, and rather than suffering like this, it would be better to die.

The dream went on for a long while, but when he woke, still in darkness, minutes or hours later, Roger no longer remembered its outcome. Not knowing the time disturbed him again. Occasionally he forgot, but the slightest uneasiness, doubt, or worry made the piercing distress of not knowing what moment of the day or night he was in produced ice in his heart, the feeling of having been expelled from time, of living in a limbo where before, now, afterward did not exist.

A little more than three months had passed since his capture, and he felt as if he had spent years behind bars, in an isolation in which day by day, hour by hour, he was losing his humanity. He didn’t tell Alice, but if he once had been encouraged by the hope the British government would accept the petition for clemency and commute the death penalty to imprisonment, he had lost it now. In the climate of rage and desire for vengeance in which the Easter Rising had placed the Crown, in particular the military, Britain needed an exemplary punishment for the traitors who saw in Germany, the enemy against whom the Empire was fighting in the fields of Flanders, Ireland’s ally in her struggle for emancipation. The strange thing was that the cabinet had put off the decision for so long. What were they waiting for? Did they want to prolong his agony, making him pay for his ingratitude toward the country that decorated him and knighted him and which he had repaid by conspiring with its adversary? No, in politics feelings didn’t matter, only interest and profit. The government must be coldly evaluating the advantages and damages his execution would bring. Would it serve as a warning? Would the government’s relations with the Irish worsen? The campaign to discredit him claimed no one would cry over this human disgrace, this degenerate that decent society would be rid of thanks to the gallows. It was stupid to have left those diaries for anyone to find when he went to the United States. A piece of negligence that the Empire would make very good use of and that for a long time would cloud the truth of his life, his political conduct, and even his death.

He fell back to sleep. This time, instead of a dream, he had a nightmare he hardly remembered the next morning. In it there appeared a little bird, a canary with a clear voice martyrized by the bars of the cage in which it was enclosed. This could be seen in the desperation with which it beat its small golden wings unceasingly, as if with this movement the bars would widen and let it leave. Its eyes moved constantly in their sockets, pleading for commiseration. Roger, a boy in short pants, told his mother that cages shouldn’t exist, or zoos, and animals always ought to live in freedom. At the same time, something secret was happening, a danger was approaching, something invisible that his sensibility detected, something insidious, treacherous, already there and prepared to strike. He was perspiring, trembling like a small sheet of paper.

He woke, so agitated he could barely breathe. He was choking. His heart was pounding so hard it perhaps was the beginning of a heart attack. Should he call the guard on duty? He stopped immediately. What could be better than dying here, on his cot, a natural death that would free him from the gallows? Moments later his heart calmed down and he could breathe again normally.

Would Father Carey come today? He wanted to see him and have a long conversation about subjects and concerns that had a great deal to do with the soul, religion, and God, and very little to do with politics. And immediately, as he became more tranquil and began to forget his recent nightmare, he recalled his last meeting with the prison chaplain and the moment of sudden tension that filled him with anxiety. They were talking about his conversion to Catholicism. Father Carey told him once again he shouldn’t talk about “conversion,” for having been baptized as a child, he had never left the Church. The act would be a reactualization of his status as a Catholic, something that didn’t require a formal step. In any case—and at that moment, Roger noticed that Father Carey hesitated, searching carefully for words to avoid offending him—His Eminence Cardinal Bourne had thought that if it seemed suitable to Roger, he could sign a document, a private text between him and the Church, expressing his will to return, a reaffirmation of his status as a Catholic and at the same time a testimony of renunciation and repentance for old errors and faults.

Father Carey could not hide how uncomfortable he felt.

There was silence. Then, Roger said softly:

“I won’t sign any document, Father Carey. My reincorporation into the Catholic Church should be something intimate, with you as the only witness.”

“That’s how it will be.”

Another tense silence followed.

“Was Cardinal Bourne referring to what I suppose?” Roger asked. “I mean, the campaign against me, the accusations concerning my private life. Is that what I should atone for in a document in order to be readmitted to the Catholic Church?”

Father Carey’s breathing had become more rapid. Again he searched for words before responding.

“Cardinal Bourne is a good and generous man, with a compassionate spirit,” he finally stated. “But don’t forget, Roger, you have on your shoulders the responsibility to watch over the good name of the Church in a country where Catholics are a minority and there are still those who foment great phobias concerning us.”

“Tell me frankly, Father Carey: has Cardinal Bourne made it a condition of my being readmitted to the Catholic Church that I sign a document repenting of the vile, vicious things I’m accused of in the press?”

“It isn’t a condition, merely a suggestion,” said the cleric. “You can accept it or not and that won’t change anything. You were baptized. You’re a Catholic and will go on being one. Let’s not talk about this matter any further.”

And in fact, they spoke no more about it. But the thought of that dialogue returned periodically and led him to wonder whether his desire to return to his mother’s church was pure or stained by the circumstances of his situation. Wasn’t it an act decided for political reasons? To show his solidarity with the Irish Catholics in favor of independence and his hostility to the minority, most of them Protestant, who wanted to continue as part of the Empire? In the eyes of God, what validity would a conversion have that at bottom obeyed nothing spiritual but his longing to feel sheltered by a community, to be part of a great tribe? God would see in that kind of conversion the gesticulations of a shipwrecked man.

“What matters now, Roger, is not Cardinal Bourne, or me, or the Catholics in England, or the ones in Ireland,” said Father Carey. “What matters now is you. Your reencounter with God. There’s the strength, the truth, the peace you deserve after an intense life filled with the many trials you’ve had to face.”

“Yes, yes, Father Carey,” Roger agreed eagerly. “I know. Exactly. I try to make myself heard, to reach Him. At certain times, not very often, it seems I have. Then I finally feel a little peace, that incredible calm. Like certain nights in Africa, with a full moon, the sky filled with stars, not a drop of wind moving the trees, the murmur of the insects. Everything so beautiful, so tranquil, I would always think: ‘God exists. How, seeing what I see, could I even imagine He doesn’t?’ But at other times, most of the time, I don’t see Him, He doesn’t answer, He doesn’t listen to me. In my life, most of the time, I’ve felt very alone. Nowadays it happens very frequently. But God’s solitude is much worse. Then, I tell myself: ‘God doesn’t listen to me and won’t listen to me. I’m going to die as alone as I’ve lived.’ It’s something that torments me day and night, Father.”

“He is there, Roger. He listens to you. He knows what you feel, that you need Him. He will not fail. If there’s something I can guarantee, that I’m absolutely sure of, it’s that God will not fail you.”

In the dark, stretched out on his cot, Roger thought Father Carey had imposed on himself a task as heroic or even more heroic than that of the rebels at the barricades: bringing consolation and peace to desperate, destroyed creatures who were going to spend many years in a cell or were preparing themselves for the gallows. A terrible, potentially dehumanizing work that on many days must have driven Father Carey, above all at the beginning of his ministry, to despair. But he knew how to hide it. He always stayed calm and at every moment transmitted a feeling of comprehension and solidarity that did Roger so much good. Once they had talked about the Rising.

“What would you have done, Father Carey, if you had been in Dublin during those days?”

“Go to lend spiritual aid to whoever needed it, as so many priests did.”

He added that it wasn’t necessary to agree with the rebels’ idea that the freedom of Ireland would be achieved only with weapons to offer them spiritual support.

Of course it wasn’t what Father Carey believed; he had always urged a visceral rejection of violence. But he would have gone to hear confessions, give communion, pray for whoever asked him to, help the nurses and doctors. That is what a good number of male and female religious had done, and the hierarchy had supported them. Shepherds had to be where the flock was, didn’t they?

All of that was true, but it was also true there was never enough room for the idea of God in the limited space of human reason. It had to be squeezed in with a shoehorn because it never fit completely. Roger and Herbert Ward had often spoken about this. “In matters concerning God, you have to believe, not reason,” Herbert would say. “If you reason, God vanishes like a mouthful of smoke.”

Roger had spent his life believing and doubting. Not even now, at the door of death, was he capable of believing in God with the resolute faith of his mother, his father, or his brothers and sister. How lucky those people were for whom the existence of the Supreme Being had never been a problem but a certainty, thanks to which the world was ordered and everything had an explanation and a reason for being. People who believed in that way would undoubtedly achieve a resignation in the face of death never known by those, like him, who had lived playing hide-and-seek with God. Roger recalled that he had once written a poem with that title: “Hide-and-Seek with God.” But Herbert Ward assured him it was very bad, and he threw it away. Too bad. He would have liked to reread and correct it now.

Dawn was beginning to break. A small ray of light appeared between the bars on the high window. Soon they’d come so he could take away the bucket of urine and excrement, and then they would bring him breakfast.

He thought the first meal of the day arrived later than usual. The sun was already high in the sky and a cold, golden light illuminated his cell. He spent a long time reading and rereading the maxims of Thomas à Kempis regarding the mistrust of knowledge that makes human beings arrogant, and the waste of time it is to “ponder dark, mysterious things,” ignorance of which we would not be reproached for at the Final Judgment, when he heard the large key turn in the lock and the cell door open.

“Good morning,” said the guard, leaving the dark roll and cup of coffee on the floor. Or would it be tea today? For inexplicable reasons, breakfast frequently changed from tea to coffee or coffee to tea.

“Good morning,” said Roger, standing and going to pick up the bucket. “Are you later today than usual or am I mistaken?”

Faithful to the order of silence, the guard didn’t answer and it seemed he avoided looking him in the eye. He moved away from the door to let him pass, and Roger went out to the long, soot-filled passageway, carrying the bucket. The guard walked two paces behind him. He felt his spirits rise with the summer sun reflecting on the thick walls and stone floor, producing gleams that seemed like sparks. He thought about the parks of London, the Serpentine, the tall plane trees, poplars, and chestnut trees of Hyde Park, and how beautiful it would be to walk there right now, anonymous among the sportsmen riding horses or bicycles and the families with children who, taking advantage of the good weather, had come to spend the day outdoors.

In the deserted bathroom—they must have given instructions that his time for cleaning up would be different from that of the other prisoners—he emptied and scrubbed the bucket. Then he sat on the toilet without success—constipation had been a lifelong problem—and, finally, removing the blue prison smock, he vigorously washed and scrubbed his body and face. He dried himself with the partially damp towel hanging from a screw eye. He returned slowly to his cell with the clean bucket, enjoying the sun that came into the passageway from the barred windows high on the wall and the noises—unintelligible voices, horns, steps, motors, squeaks—that gave him the impression of having reentered time and disappeared as soon as the guard locked the cell door with a key.

The drink could be tea or coffee. He didn’t care how tasteless it was, since the liquid, as it went down in his chest toward his stomach, helped to relieve the acidity that always troubled him in the morning. He kept the roll in case he became hungry later.

Lying on his cot, he resumed reading the Imitation of Christ. At times he thought it childishly ingenuous, but then, when he turned the page, he encountered a thought that disturbed him and led him to close the book. He began to meditate. The monk said it was useful for a man to suffer sorrows and adversities from time to time because that reminded him of his condition: he was “exiled on this earth” and should not place any hope in the things of this world, only in those of the hereafter. It was true. The German monk in his convent at Agnetenberg, five hundred years earlier, had hit the nail on the head, expressed a truth that Roger had experienced firsthand. Or, to be specific, ever since his mother’s death when he was a boy plunged him into an orphanhood he could never escape. That was the word that best described what he had always felt himself to be in Scotland, England, Africa, Brazil, Iquitos, Putumayo: an exile. For a good part of his life, he had boasted of his status as a citizen of the world, which, according to Alice, Yeats admired in him: someone who isn’t from anywhere because he’s from everywhere. For a long time he had told himself that this privilege granted him a freedom unknown to those who lived anchored in a single place. But Thomas à Kempis was right. He had never felt he was from anywhere because that was the human condition: exile in this vale of tears, a transient destiny until, with death and the hereafter, men and women would return to the fold, their nutritive source, where they would live for all eternity.

On the other hand, Thomas à Kempis’s prescription for resisting temptation was naïve. Had that pious man, there in his solitary convent, ever been tempted? If he had, it couldn’t have been so easy for him to resist and defeat the “devil who never sleeps and is always on the prowl hunting for someone to devour.” Thomas à Kempis said no one was so perfect that he never felt temptation, and it was impossible for a Christian to see himself absolved from “concupiscence,” the root of all the others.

He had been weak and succumbed to concupiscence many times. Not as many as he had written in his pocket diaries and notebooks, even though writing what he hadn’t experienced, what he only had wanted to experience, was undoubtedly also a way—cowardly and timid—to have the experience and therefore surrender to temptation. Was he paying for that in spite of not really having enjoyed it except in the uncertain, ungraspable way fantasies were experienced? Would he have to pay for everything he hadn’t done, had only desired and written about? God would know how to differentiate and surely would punish those rhetorical errors less severely than the sins he had really committed.

In any event, writing what he hadn’t experienced, in order to pretend he had, already carried an implicit punishment: the sensation of failure and frustration in which the lying games in his diaries always ended (as did the real experiences, for that matter). But now those irresponsible games had placed in the hands of the enemy a formidable weapon to vilify his name and memory.

Yet it wasn’t easy to know to which temptations Thomas à Kempis was referring. They could come so disguised, so deceptive, that they were confused with benign things, with esthetic enthusiasms. Roger recalled, in those distant years of his adolescence, that his first feelings for well-formed bodies, virile muscles, the harmonious slimness of adolescents, did not seem a malicious, concupiscent emotion but a manifestation of sensibility and esthetic enthusiasm. This is what he had believed for a long time. And this same artistic vocation was what had induced him to learn how to take photographs in order to capture those beautiful bodies on pieces of cardboard. At some moment he realized, when he was already living in Africa, that his admiration was not healthy or, rather, it was not only healthy but healthy and unhealthy at the same time, for those harmonious, sweating, muscular bodies, without a drop of oil, in which he could perceive the material sensuality of felines, produced in him, along with ecstasy and admiration, avidity, desire, a mad longing to caress them. This was how temptations became part of his life, revolutionized it, filled it with secrets, anguish, fear, but also with startling moments of pleasure. And remorse and bitterness, of course. At the supreme moment, would God do the arithmetic? Would He pardon him? Punish him? He felt curious, not terrified. As if it didn’t concern him but was an intellectual exercise or conundrum.

And at that moment, he heard with surprise the heavy key entering the lock again. When the door of his cell opened, a sudden blaze of light came in, the strong sun that suddenly seemed to set August mornings in London on fire. Blinded, he was aware that three people had entered the cell. He couldn’t make out their faces. He stood. When the door closed he saw that the person closest to him, almost touching him, was the governor of Pentonville Prison, whom he had seen only a few times. He was an older man, thin and wrinkled, dressed in a dark suit. His expression was grave. Behind him was the sheriff, as white as a sheet, and a guard who looked at the floor. It seemed to Roger that the silence lasted for centuries.

Finally, looking into his eyes, the governor spoke, at first with a hesitant voice that became firmer as his statement proceeded:

“I am fulfilling my duty to communicate to you that this morning, August second, 1916, the Council of Ministers of the government of His Majesty the king has met, studied the petition for clemency presented by your lawyers, and rejected it in a unanimous vote of the ministers present. Consequently, the sentence of the court that tried and condemned you for high treason will be carried out tomorrow, August third, 1916, in the courtyard of Pentonville Prison, at nine o’clock in the morning. According to established custom, for his execution the criminal does not have to wear the prison uniform and may put on the civilian clothes taken from him when he entered the prison, which will be returned to him. Similarly, I am obliged to communicate to you that the chaplains, the Catholic priest Father Carey and Father MacCarroll of the same faith, will be available to lend you spiritual assistance if you so desire. They will be the only persons with whom you may communicate. If you wish to leave letters for family members with your final arrangements, the establishment will provide writing materials. If you have some other request to make, you may do so now.”

“At what time will I be able to see the chaplains?” Roger asked, and he thought his voice was hoarse and icy.

The governor turned to the sheriff, they exchanged a few whispered phrases, and the sheriff responded:

“They’ll come early in the afternoon.”

“Thank you.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the three men left the cell and Roger listened to how the guard inserted the key in the lock.

XIV

Roger Casement initiated the period in his life when he would be most deeply immersed in the problems of Ireland by traveling to the Canary Islands in January 1913. As the ship sailed into the Atlantic, a great weight lifted. He was detaching himself from images of Iquitos, Putumayo, the rubber plantations, Manaus, the Barbadians, Julio C. Arana, the intrigues of the Foreign Office, and he retrieved a commitment he could now pour into his country’s affairs. He had already done what he could for the natives of Amazonia. Arana, one of their worst persecutors, would not raise his head again: a ruined man who had lost his good name, it was not impossible he would end his days in prison. Now he had to concern himself with other natives, the ones from Ireland. They, too, needed to free themselves from the Aranas exploiting them, though with weapons more refined and hypocritical than those of the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian rubber barons.

But in spite of the liberation he felt on leaving London, both during the crossing and the month he stayed in Las Palmas, he was bothered by deteriorating health. The arthritic pains in his hip and back occurred at any time of the day and night. Analgesics did not have the effect they’d once had. He had to spend hours lying in bed in his hotel or in a cold sweat in an armchair on the terrace. He moved with difficulty, always with a cane, and he could no longer take long excursions through the countryside or along the foothills as he had on earlier trips, for fear that in the middle of the walk the pain would paralyze him. His best memories of those weeks in early 1913 were the hours he spent submerged in Ireland’s past, thanks to his reading of a book by Alice Stopford Green, The Old Irish World, in which history, mythology, legend, and traditions were combined to portray a society of adventure and fantasy, conflicts and creativity, where a struggling, generous people grew in the face of a difficult nature, and celebrated courage and inventiveness with their songs, their dances, their hazardous games, their rites and customs: an entire patrimony that the British occupation came to shatter and attempt to annihilate, without complete success.

On the third day he was in the city of Las Palmas he went out, after supper, to walk around the port, a district filled with taverns, bars, and small hotels connected to brothels. In Santa Catalina Park, near Las Canteras beach, after examining his surroundings, he approached two young men with the air of sailors to ask for a light. He spoke with them for a moment. His imperfect Spanish, mixed with Portuguese, provoked hilarity in the boys. He suggested going for a drink, but one of them had a date, and so he was with Miguel, the younger one, a dark boy with curly hair just out of adolescence. They went to a narrow, smoky bar called Almirante Colón, Admiral Columbus, where an older woman was singing accompanied by a guitar player. After the second drink, Roger, sheltered by the semidarkness of the place, extended a hand and rested it on Miguel’s leg. The boy smiled, agreeing. Emboldened, Roger moved his hand toward his fly. He felt the boy’s sex and a wave of desire ran through him from head to toe. For many months—How many? he thought, three, six?—he had been a man without sex, desires, or fantasies. It seemed to him that with his excitement, youth and love of life returned to his veins. “Can we go to a hotel?” he asked. Miguel smiled, not agreeing or refusing, but he didn’t make the slightest effort to get up. Instead, he asked for another glass of the strong, spicy wine they had been served. When the woman finished singing, Roger asked for the bill. He paid and they left. “Can we go to a hotel?” he eagerly asked again in the street. The boy seemed undecided, or perhaps he delayed answering in order to make him beg and increase the fee he’d obtain for his services. Then Roger felt what seemed the slash of a knife in his hip that made him hunch over and lean against the railing of a window. This time the pain didn’t come gradually, as it had on other occasions, but all at once, and more intense than usual. Like the slash of a knife, yes. He had to sit on the ground, doubled over. Frightened, Miguel hurried away, not asking what had happened or saying goodbye. Roger stayed there a long time, hunched over, eyes closed, waiting for the red-hot blade mortifying his back to lessen. When he could stand, he had to walk several blocks, very slowly, dragging his feet, until he found a car that would take him to the hotel. Only at dawn did the pain ease, allowing him to sleep. In his sleep, agitated and filled with nightmares, he suffered and felt pleasure at the edge of a precipice he was constantly in danger of falling into.

The next morning, as he had breakfast, he opened his diary and, writing slowly in a tiny hand, made love to Miguel several times, first in the darkness of Santa Catalina Park hearing the murmur of the sea, and then in the foul room of a small hotel where they heard the howl of the ships’ sirens. The dark boy rode him, mocking him, “You’re an old man, that’s what you are, a very old old man,” and slapping him on the buttocks, which made him moan, perhaps in pain, perhaps with pleasure.

He did not attempt another sexual adventure for the rest of the month he spent in the Canaries, or during his trip to South Africa and the weeks he was in Cape Town and Durban with his brother Tom and sister-in-law Katje, paralyzed by the fear of experiencing again, because of his arthritis, a situation as ridiculous as the one that frustrated his encounter with the Canarian sailor in Santa Catalina Park. From time to time, as he had done so often in Africa and Brazil, he made love alone, scribbling on the pages of his diary, in a nervous, hurried hand, synthetic phrases, sometimes as unrefined as those lovers of a few minutes or hours whom he then had to gratify. These simulacra plunged him into a depressing stupor, and he tried to space them, for nothing made him so conscious of his solitude and clandestine situation, which, he knew very well, would be with him until his death.

The enthusiasm he felt for Alice Stopford Green’s book about old Ireland made him ask his friend for more reading material on the subject. The package of books and pamphlets Alice sent him arrived when he was about to sail on the Grantully Castle for South Africa, on February 6, 1913. He read day and night during the crossing and continued reading in South Africa, so that in spite of the distance, during those weeks he again felt very close to Ireland, the one of today, yesterday, and the remote one, a past he seemed to be making his own with the texts Alice selected for him. In the course of the voyage the pains in his back and hip diminished.

The encounter with Tom, after so many years, was difficult. Contrary to what Roger had thought when he decided to visit him, hoping the trip would bring him closer to his older brother and create between them an emotional connection that in fact had never existed, it confirmed instead that they were strangers. Except for the blood kinship, the two had nothing in common. All these years they had written to each other, generally when Tom and his first wife, Blanche Baharry, an Australian, had financial problems and wanted Roger to help them. He had never failed to do so, except when the loans his brother and sister-in-law asked for were too large for his budget. Tom’s second marriage was to a South African, Katje Ackerman, and they had started a tourist business that wasn’t going well. His brother looked older than he was and had turned into a prototypical South African, rustic, browned by the sun and life outdoors, with informal, somewhat coarse manners, and even the way he spoke English sounded much more South African than Irish. He wasn’t interested in what was going on in Ireland, Great Britain, or Europe. His obsessive subject was the financial problems he faced in the lodge he had opened with Katje in Durban. They thought the beauty of the place would attract tourists and hunters, but not many came and the maintenance costs were higher than they had calculated. They’d had many hopes for this project and were afraid that if the situation continued, they would have to sell the lodge at a loss. Even though his sister-in-law was more amusing and interesting than his brother—she had a liking for the arts as well as a sense of humor—Roger eventually regretted having made the long journey only to visit the couple.

In mid-April he began the return to London. By then he felt more energetic and, thanks to the South African climate, the arthritis pains had eased. Now his attention was focused on the Foreign Office. He could not go on postponing the decision or requesting more unpaid leave. Either he would take up the consulate in Río de Janeiro again, as his superiors had requested, or give up diplomacy. The idea of returning to Río, a city he never liked, for in spite of the physical beauty of its surroundings, he’d always felt it was hostile to him, became intolerable. But that wasn’t all. He did not want to live duplicitously again, work as a diplomat in the service of an empire he condemned emotionally and in principle. During the entire voyage back to England he made calculations: he had scant savings, but by living a frugal life—it was easy for him—and with the pension he would receive for the years he had accumulated as a functionary, he would manage. When he reached London, his decision was made. The first thing he did was go to the Ministry of Foreign Relations with his resignation, explaining that he was retiring from the service for reasons of health.

He remained in London for only a few days, arranging his retirement from the Foreign Office and preparing to travel to Ireland. He did this happily, but also with some anticipatory nostalgia, as if he were leaving England forever. He saw Alice a few times and his sister Nina, from whom, in order not to worry her, he hid Tom’s financial losses. He tried to see Edmund D. Morel, who, curiously, had not answered any of the letters he had written in the past three months. But his old friend, the Bulldog, would not receive him, claiming trips and obligations that clearly were excuses. What could have happened to this companion in struggles whom he admired and loved so much? Why had he turned cold? What gossip or intrigue had estranged him? A short while afterward, Herbert Ward told him in Paris that Morel, having learned of the harshness with which Roger criticized England and the Empire with regard to Ireland, avoided seeing him in order not to have to tell him of his opposition to those kinds of political attitudes.

“The thing is that even though you don’t realize it, you’ve turned into an extremist,” Herbert said, half in jest, half seriously.

In Dublin, Roger rented a small old house at 55 Lower Baggot Street. It had a minuscule garden with geraniums and hydrangeas that he trimmed and watered early in the morning. It was a quiet district of shopkeepers, artisans, and cheap stores where on Sundays families would go to Mass, the women dressed as if for a party and the men in dark suits and caps, their shoes polished. In the corner pub, which had cobwebs and a barmaid who was a dwarf, Roger would drink dark beer with the neighborhood greengrocer, tailor, and shoemaker, discuss the news of the day, and sing old songs. The fame he had achieved in England for his campaigns against the crimes in the Congo and Amazonia had spread to Ireland, and in spite of his desire to lead a simple, anonymous life, since his arrival in Dublin he found himself pursued by a great variety of people—politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and members of cultural clubs and centers—to give talks, write articles, and attend social gatherings. He even had to pose for a well-known painter, Sarah Purser. In her portrait of him, Roger appeared rejuvenated, with an air of certainty and triumph; he didn’t recognize himself.

Once again he resumed his studies of old Irish. His teacher, Mrs. Temple, with a cane, spectacles, and a little veiled hat, came three times a week to give him Gaelic lessons and make assignments that she would correct afterward with a red pencil and rate with generally low grades. Why did he have so much difficulty learning the language of the Celts with whom he so wanted to identify? He had a facility for languages, had learned French, Portuguese, at least three African languages, and could make himself understood in Spanish and Italian. Why did the vernacular language to which he felt so connected elude him in this way? Each time he learned something with great effort, in a few days, sometimes in a few hours, he would forget it. From then on, without saying anything to anyone, least of all in political discussions when, out of principle, he maintained the opposite, he began to wonder whether the dream of people like Professor Eoin MacNeill and the poet and pedagogue Patrick Pearse was realistic, whether it wasn’t chimerical to believe they could revive the language persecuted and made clandestine by the colonizer, turned into the language of a minority, almost extinguished, and transform it back into the mother tongue of the Irish. Was it possible that in the Ireland of the future English would recede and, thanks to the schools, in newspapers, the sermons of parish priests, and politicians’ speeches, be replaced by the language of the Celts? In public Roger said yes, it was not only possible but necessary if Ireland was to recover its authentic personality. It would be a long process, taking several generations, but inevitable because only when Gaelic was again the national language would Ireland be free. Still, in the solitude of his study on Lower Baggot Street, when he faced the Gaelic composition exercises Mrs. Temple had left him, he told himself it was a useless effort. Reality had advanced too far in one direction to turn back. English had become the way to communicate, speak, be, and feel for an immense majority of the Irish, and trying to renounce it was a political whim whose only result would be a Babelic confusion that would culturally transform his beloved Ireland into an archaeological curiosity, isolated from the rest of the world. Was it worth it?

In May and June of 1913 his quiet life of study was brusquely interrupted when, as the result of a conversation with a journalist from the Irish Independent, who spoke to him of the poverty and primitivism of the fishermen of Connemara, he decided on an impulse to travel to that region in the west of Galway where, he had heard, a more traditional Ireland was still intact and the people kept old Irish alive. Instead of a historical relic, in Connemara Roger encountered a spectacular contrast between the beauty of the sculpted mountains, the slopes swept by clouds, and virgin bogs at whose edges the dwarf horses native to the region loitered, and people who lived in ghastly poverty, without schools and without doctors, in total destitution. To make matters worse, some cases of typhus had just appeared. The epidemic could spread and cause havoc. The man of action in Roger, at times dormant but never dead, immediately went to work. He wrote an article in the Irish Independent, “The Irish Putumayo,” and created an assistance fund to which he was the first donor and subscriber. At the same time, he pursued public action with the Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches and various welfare associations, and urged physicians and nurses to go to the villages of Connemara as volunteers to support the scant official public health efforts. The campaign was successful. Many donations came in from Ireland and England. Roger made three trips to the region bringing medicines, clothing, and foodstuffs for the affected families. Moreover, he created a committee to provide Connemara with health dispensaries and construct elementary schools. Because of the campaign, in those two months he had exhausting meetings with clergymen, politicians, authorities, intellectuals, and journalists. He was surprised at the consideration with which he was treated, even by those who disagreed with his nationalist positions.

In July he returned to London to see his doctors, who had to inform the Foreign Office whether the reasons of health he claimed for giving up diplomacy were correct. Even though he didn’t feel bad in spite of his intense activity in Connemara, he thought the examination would be a mere formality. But the physicians’ report was more serious than he had expected: the arthritis in his spinal column, iliac region, and knees had worsened. It could be relieved with rigorous treatment and a very quiet life, but it couldn’t be cured. And he should not ignore that if it progressed, it might leave him crippled. The Ministry of Foreign Relations accepted his resignation and in view of his condition, granted him a decent pension.

Before returning to Ireland, he decided to go to Paris, accepting an invitation from Herbert and Sarita Ward. He was happy to see them again and share the warm atmosphere of the African enclave of their house. All of it seemed like an emanation from the large studio, where Herbert showed him a new collection of his sculptures of Africa’s men and women and some of its fauna. They were vigorous pieces in bronze and wood from the last three years, which he would exhibit in the fall in Paris. While Herbert showed them to him, recounting anecdotes, showing him sketches and small models of each one, abundant images returned to Roger’s memory of the time when he and Herbert worked for the Stanley and Sanford expeditions. He had learned a great deal listening to Herbert describe his adventures in half the world, the picturesque people he met on his Australian wanderings, his vast reading. His intelligence was just as sharp, his spirit just as jovial and optimistic. His wife, Sarita, a North American heiress, was his spiritual twin, an adventurer as well, and something of a bohemian. They got along wonderfully. They traveled on foot through France and Italy. They had brought up their children with the same cosmopolitan, restless, curious spirit. Now the two boys were at boarding school in England, but they spent all their vacations in Paris. The little girl, Cricket, lived with them.

The Wards took him for supper to a restaurant in the Tour Eiffel where they could see the bridges over the Seine and the neighborhoods of Paris, and to the Comédie Française to see Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire.

But not everything was friendship, understanding, and affection in the days he spent with the couple. He and Herbert had disagreed about many things but their friendship had never cooled; on the contrary, disagreements vivified it. This time was different. One night they argued so sharply that Sarita had to intervene, obliging them to change the subject.

Herbert had always had a tolerant, somewhat amused attitude toward Roger’s nationalism. But that night he accused his friend of embracing the nationalist idea in a way that was too exalted, not very rational, almost fanatical.

“If the majority of the Irish want to separate from Great Britain, well and good,” he said. “I don’t think Ireland will gain very much by having a flag, a coat of arms, and a president of the republic. Or that her economic and social problems will be solved because of it. In my opinion, it would be better to adopt the Home Rule of Redmond and his followers. They’re Irish too, aren’t they? And the great majority compared to those like you who want secession. Well, the truth is, none of it concerns me very much. But, on the other hand, I am concerned to see how intolerant you’ve become. Before, you gave reasons, Roger. Now you only shout with hatred against a country that’s yours, too, the country of your parents and brothers and sister. A country you’ve served so honorably all these years and that has recognized you for this, hasn’t it? It has knighted you, given you the most important decorations in the kingdom. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Should I become a colonialist in gratitude?” Roger interrupted. “Should I accept for Ireland what you and I rejected for the Congo?”

“Between the Congo and Ireland there’s an astronomical distance, it seems to me. Or are the English chopping off the hands of the natives on the peninsulas of Connemara and destroying their backs with whippings?”

“The methods of colonization in Europe are more refined, Herbert, but no less cruel.”

During his last days in Paris, Roger avoided touching again on the subject of Ireland. He didn’t want his friendship with Herbert damaged. He told himself sadly that in the future, when he found himself increasingly involved in the political struggle, the distances between himself and Herbert would undoubtedly keep growing until, perhaps, they destroyed their friendship, one of the closest he’d had in his life. Am I turning into a fanatic? he would ask himself from then on, at times with alarm.

When he returned to Dublin at the end of the summer, he could not resume his study of Gaelic. The political situation had become agitated, and from the first moment he found himself drawn to take part in it. The Home Rule proposal that would have given Ireland a parliament and ample administrative and economic freedom, supported by John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party, had been approved in the House of Commons in November 1912. But the House of Lords rejected it two months later. In January 1913, in Ulster, a unionist citadel dominated by the local Anglophile and Protestant majority, the enemies of Home Rule led by Sir Edward Henry Carson unleashed a virulent campaign. They formed the Ulster Volunteer Force, with more than forty thousand members enrolled. It was a political organization and a military force, prepared, if Home Rule was approved, to combat it with weapons. Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party continued fighting for autonomy. The second reading of the bill was approved in the House of Commons and again defeated in the House of Lords. On September 23 the Unionist Council approved reconstituting itself as the Provisional Government of Ulster, that is, separating from the rest of Ireland if Home Rule was passed.

Roger began writing in the nationalist press, now using his full name, criticizing the Ulster unionists. He denounced the abuses by Protestants of the Catholic minority in that province, firing Catholic workers from factories and discriminating against the town councils of Catholic districts in budgets and jurisdictions. “When I see what is occurring in Ulster,” he stated in one article, “I no longer feel Protestant.” In all his journalism he deplored the fact that the attitude of the ultras divided the Irish into enemy bands, something with tragic consequences for the future. In another article he censured the Anglican clergy for protecting abuses against the Catholic community with their silence.

In spite of the fact that in his political conversations he appeared skeptical about the idea that Home Rule would free Ireland of her dependence, in his articles he allowed a glimmer of hope: if the law were approved without changes that would distort it, and Ireland had a parliament, elected her officials, and administered her revenues, she would be on the threshold of sovereignty. If that brought peace, what did it matter if her defense and diplomacy continued in the hands of the British Crown?

During this time he became closer friends with two Irishmen who had devoted their lives to the defense, study, and diffusion of the language of the Celts: Professor Eoin MacNeill and Patrick Pearse. Roger came to feel a great affinity for the radical, intransigent crusader for Gaelic and independence that Pearse was. He had joined the Gaelic League in his adolescence and dedicated himself to literature, journalism, and teaching. He had founded and directed two bilingual schools, St. Enda’s for boys and St. Ita’s for girls, the first institutions dedicated to recovering Gaelic as the national language. In addition to writing poems and drama, in pamphlets and articles he maintained his thesis that if the Celtic language were not regained, independence would be useless because Ireland would continue to be a colonial possession culturally. His intolerance in this area was absolute; in his youth he had even gone so far as to call Yeats—whom he would later admire without reservation—a “traitor” for writing in English. He was shy, a bachelor with a robust, imposing physique, a tireless worker with a small defect in one eye, and an exalted, charismatic speaker. When it wasn’t a question of Gaelic or the emancipation, and he was with people he knew well, Patrick Pearse became a man crackling with humor and congeniality, talkative and extroverted, who sometimes surprised his friends by disguising himself as an old woman who begged for alms in the center of Dublin, or a brassy young lady who immodestly strolled through the doors of taverns. But his life was characterized by monkish sobriety. He lived with his mother and brothers, didn’t drink or smoke, and had no known love affairs. His best friend was his inseparable brother Willie, a sculptor and art teacher at St. Enda’s. On the entrance wall of the school, surrounded by the tree-covered hills of Rathfarnham, Pearse had engraved a sentence the Irish sagas attributed to Cuchulain: “I care not though I were to live but one day and one night, if only my fame and deeds live after me.” People said he was celibate. He practiced his Catholic faith with military discipline, to the extreme of fasting often and wearing a hair shirt. During this time, when he was so involved in the hectic activity, intrigues, and incitements of political life, Roger often told himself that perhaps the invincible affection Patrick Pearse elicited was due to his being one of the very few politicians he knew whom politics had not deprived of his sense of humor, and because his civic action was totally principled and disinterested: he cared about ideas and scorned power. But he was made uneasy by Pearse’s obsession with conceiving of Irish patriots as the contemporary version of the early martyrs: “Just as the blood of the martyrs was the seed of Christianity, that of the patriots will be the seed of our liberty,” he wrote in an essay. A beautiful phrase, Roger thought. But wasn’t there something ominous in it?

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.

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.

When he learned that the young man had no place to sleep, he invited him to his hotel. He took a small room for him on the same floor as his. In spite of the accumulated fatigue of his long journey, that night Roger didn’t close his eyes. He savored and suffered imagining the athletic body of his new friend immobilized by sleep, his blond hair tousled and that delicate face, with its very light blue eyes, resting on his arm, sleeping perhaps with lips open, showing his white, even teeth.

Having met Eivind Adler Christensen was so powerful an experience that the next day, at his first appointment with John Devoy, with whom he had important matters to discuss, that face and figure returned to his memory, distancing him for moments at a time from the small office where they talked, overwhelmed by the heat.

The old, experienced revolutionary, whose life resembled an adventure novel, made a strong impression on Roger. He carried his seventy-two years with vigor and transmitted an infectious energy in his gestures, movements, and way of speaking. Taking notes in a small notebook with a pencil whose point he periodically wet in his mouth, he listened to Roger’s report on the Volunteers without interrupting, but when he stopped he asked innumerable questions, requesting details. Roger marveled that John Devoy was so extensively informed about what went on in Ireland, including matters supposedly kept absolutely secret.

He was not a cordial man. He had been hardened by his years in prison, by clandestinity and struggle, but he inspired confidence, the sense that he was frank, honest, and held granite-like convictions. In that talk and those they would have for the rest of the time he remained in the United States, Roger saw that he and Devoy coincided point by point in their opinions on Ireland. Devoy, too, believed it was too late for Home Rule, that now the only objective of Irish patriots was emancipation, and that armed actions would be an indispensable complement to negotiations. The British government would agree to negotiate only when military operations created a situation so difficult that granting independence would be a lesser evil for London. In this imminent war, approaching Germany was vital for the nationalists: her logistical and political support would give the independence movement greater efficacy. Devoy told him that in the Irish community in the United States, there was no unanimity in this matter. John Redmond’s theses also had partisans here, even though the leadership of Clan na Gael agreed with Devoy and Roger.

In the days that followed, Devoy introduced him to most of the organization’s leaders in New York, as well as John Quinn and William Bourke Cockran, two influential North American lawyers who lent assistance to the Irish cause. Both had relationships with high circles in the executive branch and the U.S. Congress.

Roger noted the good impression he had made on the Irish communities when, at John Devoy’s request, he began to speak at meetings and gatherings to collect funds. He was known for his campaigns in defense of the indigenous peoples of Africa and Amazonia, and his rational, emotive oratory reached every member of the public. At the end of the meetings where he spoke, in New York, Philadelphia, and other East Coast cities, contributions increased. The leaders of Clan na Gael joked with him that at this rate they’d become capitalists. The Ancient Order of Hibernians invited him to be the main speaker at the largest meeting in the United States that Roger took part in.

In Philadelphia he met another of the great nationalist leaders in exile, Joseph McGarrity, a close collaborator of John Devoy’s in Clan na Gael. In fact, Roger was in his house when they heard the news of the successful covert unloading of fifteen hundred rifles and ten thousand rounds of ammunition for the Volunteers at Howth. The news provoked immense joy among the leaders and was celebrated with a toast. A short while later he learned that after the unloading, there was a serious incident at Bachelor’s Walk between Irishmen and British soldiers of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers Regiment, with three dead and more than forty wounded. Was the war beginning, then?

In almost all his travels around the United States, at meetings of Clan na Gael, and public events, Roger appeared accompanied by Eivind Adler Christensen. He introduced him as his assistant and confidant. He had bought him more presentable clothing and had brought him up to date on the Irish problem, about which the young Norwegian said he was totally ignorant. He was uncultured but not a fool, he learned quickly and proved very discreet at Roger’s meetings with John Devoy and other members of the organization. If the presence of Christensen aroused their misgivings, they kept it to themselves, for they never asked Roger intrusive questions about his companion.

When, on August 4, 1914, Great Britain declared war on her enemy, Roger and the leaders of Clan na Gael had already decided he would leave for Germany. He would go as a representative of the supporters of independence to establish a strategic alliance in which the Kaiser’s government would lend political and military assistance to the Volunteers. In return, they would campaign against the enlistment of Irishmen in the British Army, which the Ulster unionists as well as the followers of John Redmond defended. This project was discussed with a small number of leaders of the Volunteers, including Patrick Pearse and Eoin MacNeill, who approved it without reservation. The German embassy in Washington, to which Clan na Gael had links, collaborated in the plans. The German military attaché, Captain Franz von Papen, came to New York and met twice with Roger. He expressed enthusiasm at the rapprochement among Clan na Gael, the Irish IRB, and the German government. After consulting Berlin, he informed them that Roger Casement would be welcomed in Germany.

Roger expected the war, like almost everyone else, and as soon as the threat became a reality, he threw himself into action with the enormous energy he was capable of. His position in favor of the Reich was charged with an anti-British virulence that surprised his colleagues in Clan na Gael, even though many of them were also wagering on a German victory. He had a violent argument with John Quinn, who had invited him to spend a few days at his luxurious residence, for affirming that this war was a plot caused by England’s resentment and envy as a country in decadence faced with a vigorous power at the height of its industrial and economic development and with a growing population. Germany represented the future because it carried no colonial ballast, while Britain, the very incarnation of an imperial past, was condemned to extinction.

In August, September, and October of 1914, Roger, as during his best times, worked day and night, writing articles and letters, giving talks and speeches in which, with maniacal insistence, he accused Britain of being the cause of this European catastrophe and urged the Irish not to give in to the siren songs of John Redmond, campaigning for them to enlist. Meanwhile, the Liberal government approved Home Rule in parliament but postponed putting it into effect until the war was over. The division within the Volunteers was inevitable. The organization had grown at an extraordinary rate, and Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party were in the large majority. More than 150,000 Volunteers followed him, while barely 11,000 remained with Eoin MacNeill and Patrick Pearse. None of this lessened the pro-German fervor of Roger Casement, who, at every meeting in the United States, presented the Kaiser’s Germany as the victim in this war and the best defender of Western civilization. “It isn’t love of Germany that speaks through your mouth but hatred of England,” John Quinn said during their argument.

In September 1914, Roger published a small book in Philadelphia: Ireland, Germany, and Freedom of the Seas: A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914, a collection of his essays and articles favorable to Germany. The book would later be published in Berlin with the title The Crime Against Europe.

His pronouncements in favor of Germany impressed the accredited diplomats of the Reich in the United States. The German ambassador in Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorff, traveled to New York to meet privately with him and the trio of leaders of Clan na Gael—John Devoy, Joseph McGarrity, and John Keating. Captain Franz von Papen was also present. It was Roger, as agreed upon by his companions, who expounded the nationalists’ request to the German diplomat: fifty thousand rifles and ammunition. They could be unloaded in secret at various Irish ports by the Volunteers. They would be used in an anticolonialist military uprising that would immobilize significant British military forces, which ought to be taken advantage of by the Kaiser’s naval and military forces to unleash an offensive against the military garrisons on the English coast. To broaden pro-German feeling in Irish public opinion, it was indispensable for the German government to issue a statement guaranteeing that, in the event of victory, it would support the Irish desire for liberation from the colonial yoke. By the same token, the German government had to commit to giving special treatment to Irish soldiers who might be taken prisoner, separating them from the British and giving them the opportunity to join an Irish Brigade that would fight “alongside, but not inside” the German army against the common enemy. Roger would organize the brigade.

Count von Bernstorff, with his robust appearance, monocle, and chest covered with medals, listened attentively. Captain von Papen took notes. The ambassador had to consult Berlin, of course, but he added that the proposal seemed reasonable to him. And, in effect, a few days later, at a second meeting, he informed them that the German government was prepared to hold talks on the matter in Berlin, with Roger as the representative of the Irish nationalists. He gave them a letter asking the authorities to offer every assistance to Sir Roger during his stay in Germany.

He immediately began to prepare for his trip. He saw that Devoy, McGarrity, and Keating were surprised when he told them he would travel to Germany with his assistant, Eivind Adler Christensen. Since it had been planned, for reasons of security, that he would travel by ship from New York to Christiania, the Norwegian’s help as a translator in his own country would be useful, and in Berlin as well, for Eivind also spoke German. He did not request additional funds for his assistant. The amount Clan na Gael gave him for travel and housing—$3,000—would be enough for both of them.

If his New York comrades saw something strange in his determination to have the young Viking who remained mute at their meetings accompany them to Berlin, they said nothing about it. They agreed without comment. Roger wouldn’t have been able to take the trip without Eivind. With him a tide of youth, of hope, and—the word made him blush—of love had entered his life. It hadn’t happened to him before. He’d had sporadic street adventures with people whose names, if they were their names and not mere nicknames, he forgot almost immediately, or with the phantoms his imagination, desires, and solitude invented on the pages of his diaries. But with the “beautiful Viking,” as he called him when they were alone, he had the sensation during these weeks and months that, beyond pleasure, he had at last established a loving relationship that could endure and take him out of the solitude his sexual preference had condemned him to. He didn’t talk about these things with Eivind. He wasn’t ingenuous and often told himself the most probable thing, even the certain thing, was that the Norwegian was with him out of self-interest, because with Roger he ate twice a day, had a roof over his head, slept in a decent bed, had clothes and the security that, as he had confessed, he hadn’t enjoyed for a long time. But in the end Roger discarded all precautions in his daily exchanges with the boy, who was attentive and affectionate with him, seemed to live to attend to him, handed him articles of clothing, was willing to take care of every errand. He always behaved respectfully toward him, even at the most intimate moments, maintaining distance, not allowing himself any abuse of confidence, any vulgarity.

They bought second-class passage on the Oskar II, from New York to Christiania, which sailed in mid-October. Roger, who carried papers with the name James Landy, changed his appearance, cutting his hair close to the scalp and whitening his tanned complexion with creams. The ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy on the high seas and escorted to Stornoway, in the Hebrides, where it was subjected to a rigorous search. But Roger’s true identity was not detected. The couple reached Christiania safe and sound at nightfall on October 28. Roger had never felt better. If anyone had asked, he would have responded that in spite of all the problems, he was a happy man.

And yet, at the very hour and minute when he believed he had caught the will-o’-the-wisp—happiness—the most bitter period in his life was beginning, a failure, he would think afterward, that would cloud everything good and noble in his past. The day they arrived in the capital of Norway, Eivind told him he had been kidnapped for a few hours by strangers and taken to the British consulate, where he was interrogated about his mysterious companion. Roger naïvely believed him, and thought this episode offered a providential opportunity to demonstrate the artful deceptions and murderous intentions of the British authorities. In reality, as he would learn later, Eivind had gone to the consulate offering to sell him out. This matter only served to obsess Roger and make him waste weeks and months in useless measures and preparations that, in the end, brought no benefit to the Irish cause and undoubtedly were the butt of jokes in the Foreign Office and British Intelligence, where they must have viewed him as a pathetic novice conspirator.

When did his disillusionment begin with the Germany that, perhaps simply because of his rejection of Britain, he had begun to admire and call a model of efficiency, discipline, culture, and modernity? Not during his first weeks in Berlin. On the fairly bizarre trip from Christiania to the German capital, accompanied by Richard Meyer, who would be his intermediary to the Kaiser’s Ministry of Foreign Relations, he was still filled with illusions, convinced Germany would win the war and her victory would be decisive for the emancipation of Ireland. His first impressions of the cold, rainy, fogbound city that Berlin was that autumn were good. Both the undersecretary of state for foreign relations, Arthur Zimmermann, and Count Georg von Wedel, chief of the British section at the chancellery, received him with amiability and were enthusiastic about his plans for a brigade composed of Irish prisoners. Both were advocates of the German government making a statement in favor of Irish independence. And on November 20, 1914, the Reich did just that, perhaps not in terms as explicit as Roger had hoped for, but clear enough to justify the position of those like him who defended an alliance of Irish nationalists with Germany. Still, by that date, in spite of his enthusiasm for the statement—undoubtedly one of his successes—and the fact that the secretary of state for foreign relations finally told him the military high command had ordered Irish prisoners of war to be placed in a single camp where he could visit them, Roger began to sense that reality would not yield to his plans but instead would do everything to make them fail.

The first hint that matters were taking unexpected paths was learning, in the only letter from Alice Stopford Green he received in eighteen months—a letter that took a transatlantic parabolic detour to reach him, making a stop in New York, where the envelope, name, and address were changed—that the British press had reported his presence in Berlin. This had instigated an intense polemic between the nationalists who favored and those who opposed his decision to side with Germany in the war. Alice objected to it: she told him so in categorical terms. She added that many firm advocates of independence agreed with her. At most, said Alice, she could accept Irish neutrality in the European war but not making common cause with Germany. Tens of thousands of Irishmen were fighting for Great Britain: how would these compatriots feel knowing that noted Irish nationalists identified with the enemy firing cannon at them and gassing them in the trenches of Belgium?

Alice’s letter had the effect of a lightning bolt. That the person he most admired, the one he thought agreed with him politically more than any other, should condemn what he was doing, and tell him so in those terms, left him stunned. Things probably were seen differently from London, without the perspective of distance. But even though he told himself every justification, something remained in his consciousness, disturbing him: his political mentor, friend, and teacher disagreed with him for the first time and thought that instead of helping he was harming the Irish cause. From then on, a question echoed in his mind with the sound of an evil omen: What if Alice is right and I’ve made a mistake?

During that same month of November, the German authorities had him travel to the front, in Charleville, to talk with military leaders about the Irish Brigade. Roger told himself that if he was successful and a military unit was formed that would fight beside German forces for the independence of Ireland, perhaps the scruples of many of his comrades, like Alice, would disappear. They would accept that sentimentality was a hindrance in politics, that Ireland’s enemy was Britain and the enemies of her enemies were Ireland’s friends. The trip, though brief, left him with a good impression. The high-ranking German officers fighting in Belgium were certain of victory. They all applauded the idea of the Irish Brigade. He didn’t see very much of the war itself: troops on the roads, hospitals in the villages, lines of prisoners guarded by armed soldiers, distant cannon fire. When he returned to Berlin, good news was waiting for him. Acceding to his request, the Vatican had agreed to send two priests to the camp where the Irish prisoners were being assembled: an Augustinian, Father O’Gorman, and a Dominican, Father Thomas Crotty. O’Gorman would stay for two months and Crotty for as long as necessary.

And if Roger had not met Father Thomas Crotty? He probably would not have survived the terrible winter of 1914–1915, when all of Germany, especially Berlin, was pounded by snowstorms that made roads and streets impassable, gales that uprooted bushes and shattered windows, and temperatures fifteen and twenty degrees below zero that, because of the war, often had to be endured without light or heat. Physical ailments again assailed him brutally: the pains in his hip and iliac bone made him shrink into his seat, unable to stand. On many days he thought he would be permanently crippled here in Germany. Hemorrhoids bothered him again. Going to the bathroom became a torment. His body felt weakened and fatigued, as if twenty years had suddenly fallen on him.

During this period his lifesaver was Father Thomas Crotty. Saints exists, they’re not myths, he would say to himself. What else was Father Crotty? He never complained, he adapted to the worst situations with a smile on his lips, symptom of his good humor and vital optimism, his personal conviction that there were enough good things in life to make it worth living.

He was a fairly short man with thinning gray hair and a round, red face in which his light eyes seemed to sparkle. He came from a very poor peasant family in Galway, and sometimes, when he was happier than usual, he would sing Gaelic lullabies he had heard his mother sing when he was a boy. When he learned that Roger had spent twenty years in Africa and close to a year in Amazonia, he told him that ever since he was in the seminary, he had dreamed of working as a missionary in a remote country, but the Dominican order decided on another destiny for him. In the camp he became friends with all the prisoners because he treated all of them with the same consideration, not caring about their ideas and beliefs. Since he saw from the beginning that only a tiny minority would be persuaded by Roger’s ideas, he kept rigorously impartial, never speaking for or against the Irish Brigade. “Everyone here is suffering, and they are God’s children and for that reason our brothers, isn’t that so?” he said to Roger. In his long conversations with Father Crotty, politics rarely was mentioned. They talked a great deal about Ireland, her past, her heroes, saints, and martyrs, but in the mouth of Father Crotty, the Irish who appeared most often were those long-suffering, anonymous laborers who worked from sunrise to sundown to earn a crust of bread, and those who had been obliged to emigrate to America, South Africa, and Australia in order not to die of hunger.

It was Roger who led Father Crotty to speak about religion. The Dominican was very discreet in this as well, no doubt thinking that Roger, as an Anglican, preferred to avoid an area of conflict. But when Roger spoke of his spiritual perplexity and confessed that recently he had been feeling more and more attracted by Catholicism, the religion of his mother, Father Crotty gladly agreed to discuss the subject. Patiently he dealt with his curiosity, his doubts and questions. Once Roger dared to ask him point blank: “Do you think that what I’m doing is the right thing or am I mistaken, Father Crotty?”

The priest became very serious: “I don’t know, Roger. I wouldn’t want to lie. I simply don’t know.”

Roger didn’t know now either, after the first days of December 1914, when, following a walk through Limburg camp with the German generals De Graaf and Exner, he finally spoke to the hundreds of Irish prisoners. No, reality did not respect his predictions. How naïve and foolish I was, he would tell himself, his mouth suddenly filled with the taste of ashes, remembering the bewildered faces, the mistrust, the hostility of the prisoners when he explained, with all the fire of his love for Ireland, the reason for the Irish Brigade, the mission it would carry out, the gratitude of their motherland for the sacrifice. He recalled the sporadic hurrahs for John Redmond that interrupted him, the disapproving, even threatening noises, the silence that followed his words. Most humiliating of all was that when his speech was over, the German guards surrounded him and accompanied him out of the camp, because even though they hadn’t understood his words, the attitudes of most of the prisoners let them surmise that this could end in aggression against the speaker.

And that was exactly what happened the second time Roger went to Limburg to speak to them, on January 5, 1915. On this occasion, the prisoners were not content to make angry faces and show their disgust with gestures and looks. They whistled and insulted him. “How much did Germany pay you?” was the most frequent shout. He had to stop speaking, because the shouts were deafening. He had become the target of a rain of pebbles, spit, and various projectiles. The German soldiers hurried him away.

He never recovered from that experience. The memory, like a cancer, would unceasingly eat away at him inside.

“Should I give this up, in view of the general rejection, Father Crotty?”

“You should do what you believe is best for Ireland, Roger. Your ideals are pure. Unpopularity is not always a good criterion for deciding the justice of a cause.”

From then on he would live in a wrenching duplicity, pretending to the German authorities that the Irish Brigade was moving forward. True, there were few members so far, but that would change when the prisoners overcame their initial distrust and understood the advantage for Ireland, and consequently for themselves, of friendship and collaboration with Germany. In his heart he knew very well that what he was saying wasn’t true, there would never be mass support for the brigade, and it would never be more than a small, symbolic group.

If this was true, why continue? Why not go into reverse? Because that would have been the equivalent of suicide, and Roger did not want to commit suicide. Not yet. Not that way, at any rate. And therefore, with ice in his heart, in the first months of 1915, as he continued wasting time on the Findlay affair, Christensen’s communication with the British consul, he negotiated an agreement with the authorities of the Reich on the Irish Brigade. He demanded certain conditions and his interlocutors, Arthur Zimmermann, Count Georg von Wedel, and Count Rudolf Nadolny, listened to him very seriously, writing in their notebooks. At the next meeting they informed him the German government accepted his demands: the brigade would have its own uniforms and Irish officers; it would choose the battlefields where it would take part in the action; the costs would be returned to the German government by the republican government of Ireland as soon as it was constituted. He knew as well as they that all this was a pantomime, because the Irish Brigade in the middle of 1915 did not even have the volunteers to form a company: it had barely recruited fifty men, and it was unlikely that all of them would persevere in their commitment. He often asked himself: How long will the farce go on? In his letters to Eoin MacNeill and John Devoy he felt obliged to assure them that, even though slowly, the Irish Brigade was becoming a reality. Little by little, the number of volunteers was increasing. It was imperative for them to send him Irish officers to train the brigade and head the future sections and companies. They promised they would, but they failed too: the only officer who arrived was Captain Robert Monteith. Though it’s true the unbreakable Monteith by himself was worth an entire battalion.

The first indications Roger had of what would come were at the end of winter, when the first green buds began to appear on the trees along Unter den Linden. The undersecretary of state for foreign relations, at one of their periodic meetings, told him the German high command did not have confidence in his assistant Eivind Adler Christensen. There were signs he might be an informant for British Intelligence. Roger ought to distance himself from him immediately.

The warning took him by surprise and initially he discounted it. He asked for proof. They replied that the German intelligence services would not have made such a statement if they did not have powerful reasons to do so. At this time Eivind wanted to go to Norway for a few days to visit his family, and Roger encouraged him to leave. He gave him money and saw him off at the station. He never saw him again. From then on, another reason for distress was added to the earlier ones: could it be possible the Viking god was a spy? He searched through his memory trying to discover in these recent months, when they had lived together, some action, attitude, contradiction, stray word that would betray him. He found nothing. He tried to find calm by telling himself this lie was a maneuver by prejudiced and puritanical Teutonic aristocrats who, suspecting his relations with the Norwegian were not innocent, wanted them to separate, using any ruse, even slander. But doubt returned and kept him awake at night. When he learned that Eivind Adler Christensen had decided to go back to the United States from Norway, without returning to Germany, he was glad.

On April 20, 1915, young Joseph Plunkett arrived in Berlin as a delegate from the Volunteers and the IRB, after incredible travels through half of Europe to escape the nets of British Intelligence. How had he made that kind of effort in his physical state? He couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven but was emaciated, partially crippled by polio, and suffering from a case of tuberculosis that was devouring him and at times gave his face the look of a skull. The son of a prosperous aristocrat, Count George Noble Plunkett, director of the National Museum in Dublin, Joseph, who spoke English with an aristocratic accent, dressed haphazardly in baggy trousers, a frock coat that was too big for him, and a hat pulled down to his eyebrows. But it was enough to hear him speak, and to talk with him awhile, to discover that behind the clownish appearance, the ruined body in its carnival attire, was a superior intelligence, more penetrating than most, an enormous literary culture, and an ardent spirit with a vocation for struggle and sacrifice for the Irish cause that moved Roger greatly when he conversed with him in Dublin. He wrote mystical poetry, was, like Patrick Pearse, a devout believer, and had a thorough knowledge of the Spanish mystics, especially St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, whose verses he would recite from memory in Spanish. Like Patrick Pearse, within the Volunteers he had always aligned himself with the radicals, and this brought him closer to Roger. Listening to them, Roger often told himself that Pearse and Plunkett seemed to be searching for martyrdom, convinced that only by showing the extravagant heroism and contempt for death of those titanic heroes who marked Irish history, from Cuchulain and Finn MacCool and Owen Roe to Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, and sacrificing themselves like the Christian martyrs of early times, would they persuade the majority of the idea that the only way to achieve freedom was to pick up weapons and wage war. From the immolation of the children of Ireland a free country would be born without colonizers or exploiters, where law, Christianity, and justice would reign. The somewhat mad romanticism of Joseph Plunkett and Patrick Pearse had frightened Roger at times in Ireland. But during these weeks in Berlin, listening to the young poet and revolutionary on pleasant days when spring filled the gardens with flowers and trees in the parks were recovering their green, Roger felt touched, longing to believe everything the newcomer was telling him.

He brought inspiring news from Ireland. The division in the Volunteers because of the European war had served to clarify matters, according to him. True, a large majority still followed the theses of John Redmond about remaining loyal to the Empire and enlisting in the British Army, but the minority loyal to the Volunteers counted on many thousands of people resolved to fight, a real army, united, compact, lucid about its objectives, resolved to die for Ireland. And now there was close cooperation between the Volunteers, the IRB, as well as the Irish Citizen Army, formed by Marxists and trade unionists such as Jim Larkin and James Connolly, and the Sinn Féin of Arthur Griffith. Even Sean O’Casey, who had ferociously attacked the Volunteers, calling them “bourgeois, daddy’s spoiled little boys,” seemed to favor the collaboration. The Provisional Committee, led by Tom Clarke, Patrick Pearse, and Thomas MacDonagh, among others, prepared for insurrection day and night. Circumstances were favorable. The European war created a unique opportunity. It was imperative for Germany to help them with the shipment of some fifty thousand rifles and a simultaneous action by their army on British territory, attacking the Irish ports militarized by the Royal Navy. The combined action would perhaps decide the German victory. Ireland would finally be independent and free.

Roger agreed: this had been his concept for a long time and the reason he came to Berlin. He insisted again that the Provisional Committee should establish that a German offensive was a sine qua non for the uprising. Without that invasion, the rebellion would fail, for the logistical force was too unequal.

“But Sir Roger,” Plunkett interrupted, “you are forgetting a factor that prevails over military weaponry and the number of soldiers: mysticism. We have it. The English don’t.”

They spoke in a half-empty tavern. Roger had beer and Joseph a soft drink. They smoked. Plunkett told him that Larkfield Manor, his house in the neighborhood of Kimmage, in Dublin, had been turned into a forge and an arsenal where grenades, bombs, bayonets, and pikes were made and flags were sewn. He said all this with lofty gestures, in a state of trance. He told him too that the Provisional Committee had decided to hide from Eoin MacNeill the agreement about the rebellion. Roger was surprised. How could that kind of secret be kept from someone who had been the founder of the Volunteers and was still its president?

“We all respect him and no one doubts Professor MacNeill’s patriotism and honesty,” Plunkett explained. “But he’s soft. He believes in persuasion and peaceful means. He’ll be informed when it’s too late to stop the uprising. Then, as no one doubts, he’ll join us at the barricades.”

Roger worked day and night with Joseph preparing a thirty-two-page plan with details of the uprising. They both presented it to the chancellery and the admiralty. The plan maintained that the British armed forces in Ireland were dispersed in reduced garrisons and could easily be overcome. The German diplomats, functionaries, and military men listened, impressed, to this malformed young man dressed like a clown who, when he spoke, was transformed, explaining with mathematical precision and great intellectual coherence the advantages of a German invasion to coincide with the nationalist revolution. Those, in particular, who spoke English listened to him intrigued by the assurance, fierceness, and exalted rhetoric with which he expressed himself. But even those who didn’t understand and had to wait for the interpreter to translate his words looked with astonishment at the zeal and frenetic gesticulation of this damaged emissary of the Irish nationalists.

They listened to him, took notes on what Joseph and Roger asked of them, but their replies did not commit them to anything. Not the invasion nor the shipment of fifty thousand rifles and the necessary ammunition. All of that would be studied within the war’s global strategy. The Reich agreed with the aspirations of the Irish people and intended to support their legitimate desires: they went no further than that.

Joseph Plunkett spent almost two months in Germany, living with a frugality comparable with that of Roger himself, until June 20, when he left for the Swiss border, on his way back to Ireland via Italy and Spain. The young poet paid no particular attention to the small number of adherents the Irish Brigade had attracted and did not show the least sympathy for it. The reason?

“To serve in the Brigade, the prisoners have to break their oath of loyalty to the British army,” he told Roger. “I was always opposed to our people enlisting in the ranks of the occupier. But once they did, a vow made before God cannot be broken without sinning and losing one’s honor.”

Father Crotty heard this conversation and kept silent. He was like that, a sphinx, for the entire afternoon the three spent together, listening to the poet, who monopolized the conversation. Afterward, the Dominican remarked to Roger:

“This boy is out of the ordinary, no doubt about it. Because of his intelligence and devotion to a cause. His Christianity is that of the Christians who died in Roman circuses, devoured by wild beasts. But also of the Crusaders who reconquered Jerusalem by killing all the ungodly Jews and Muslims they encountered, including women and children. The same burning zeal, the same glorification of blood and war. I confess, Roger, that people like him, even though they may be the ones who make history, fill me with more fear than admiration.”

A recurrent subject in the conversations between Roger and Joseph at this time was the possibility the insurrection might occur without a German invasion or, at least, a bombardment of the ports on Irish territory protected by the Royal Navy. Even in that case Plunkett advocated going ahead with the insurrectionist plans: the European war had created an opportunity that should not be squandered. Roger thought it would be suicide. No matter how heroic and intrepid they were, the revolutionaries would be crushed by the machinery of the Empire. It would use the opportunity to carry out an implacable purge. The liberation of Ireland would be delayed another fifty years.

“Am I to understand that if the revolution breaks out with no intervention by Germany, you will not be with us, Sir Roger?”

“Of course I’ll be with you. But knowing it will be a useless sacrifice.”

Young Plunkett looked him in the eye for a long time, and Roger seemed to detect a feeling of pity in his gaze.

“Permit me to speak to you frankly, Sir Roger,” he murmured at last, with the gravity of someone who knows he possesses an irrefutable truth. “There is something you haven’t understood, it seems to me. This isn’t a question of winning. Of course we’re going to lose this battle. It’s a question of enduring. Of resisting. For days, weeks. And dying in such a way that our death and our blood will increase the patriotism of the Irish until it becomes an irresistible force. It’s a question of a hundred revolutionaries being born for each one of us who dies. Isn’t that what happened with Christianity?”

He didn’t know how to answer. The weeks that followed Plunkett’s departure were very intense for Roger. He continued asking that Germany free those Irish prisoners who deserved it for reasons of health, age, intellectual and professional status, and good behavior. This gesture would make a good impression in Ireland. The German authorities had been reluctant but now began to give in. They drew up lists and discussed names. Finally, the military high command agreed to free a hundred professionals, teachers, students, and businessmen with respectable credentials. There were many hours and days of discussions, a tug of war that left Roger exhausted. On the other hand, he agonized over the idea that the Volunteers, following the ideas of Pearse and Plunkett, would unleash an insurrection before Germany had decided to attack Britain, and pressed the chancellery and admiralty to give him an answer regarding the fifty thousand rifles. Their responses were vague, until one day, at a meeting in the Ministry of Foreign Relations, Count Blücher said something that disheartened him:

“Sir Roger, you don’t have an accurate idea of proportions. Examine a map objectively and you will see how little Ireland represents in geopolitical terms. No matter how much sympathy the Reich may have for your cause, other countries and regions are more important to German interests.”

“Does this mean we won’t receive the weapons, Count? Germany flatly rejects an invasion?”

“Both matters are still under study. If it were up to me, I’d reject the invasion, of course, in the near future. But the specialists will decide. You’ll have a definitive answer anytime now.”

Roger wrote a long letter to John Devoy and Joseph McGarrity, giving them his reasons for opposing an uprising that did not count on a German action. He urged them to use their influence with the Volunteers and the IRB to dissuade them from rash action. At the same time, he assured them he was still making every effort to obtain the weapons. But his conclusion was dramatic: “I have failed. I’m useless here. Let me return to the United States.”

During this time his ailments flared up. Nothing had any effect on his arthritis pains. Constant colds with high fevers frequently obliged him to stay in bed. He had lost weight and suffered from insomnia. To make matters worse, in this condition he learned that The New York World had published an article, surely filtered through British counterespionage, according to which Sir Roger Casement was in Berlin receiving large sums of money from the Reich to foment a rebellion in Ireland. He sent a letter of protest—“I work for Ireland, not Germany”—that wasn’t published. His friends in New York dissuaded him from the idea of a lawsuit: he would lose, and Clan na Gael was not prepared to waste money on judicial litigation.

In May 1915, the German authorities acceded to an insistent demand of Roger’s: that the volunteers in the Irish Brigade be separated from the other prisoners in Limburg. On May 20, the fifty Brigade members, harassed by their companions, were transferred to the small camp in Zossen, near Berlin. They celebrated the occasion with a Mass officiated by Father Crotty, and there were toasts and Irish songs in an atmosphere of camaraderie that helped to raise Roger’s spirits. He announced to Brigade members that within a few days they would receive the uniforms he had designed himself, and a handful of Irish officers would arrive soon to direct their training. They, who constituted the first company of the Irish Brigade, would pass into history as the pioneers of a great exploit.

Immediately after this meeting, he wrote another letter to Joseph McGarrity, telling him about the opening of the Zossen camp and apologizing for the catastrophic tone of his previous letter. He had written it in a moment of discouragement but now felt less pessimistic. The arrival of Joseph Plunkett and the camp at Zossen were a stimulus. He would continue working for the Irish Brigade. Though small, it was an important symbol in the big picture of the European war.

Early in the summer of 1915, he left for Munich. He stayed in the Basler Hof, a modest but pleasant hotel. The Bavarian capital depressed him less than Berlin, though here he led an even more solitary life than in the capital. His health continued to deteriorate, and pains and chills obliged him to stay in his room. His monkish life consisted of intense intellectual work. He drank many cups of coffee and constantly drew on black tobacco cigarettes that filled his room with smoke. He wrote endless letters to his contacts in the chancellery and the admiralty and maintained a daily spiritual and religious correspondence with Father Crotty. He reread the priest’s letters and guarded them like a treasure. One day he attempted to pray. He hadn’t for a long time, at least not in this way, concentrating, trying to open to God his heart, his doubts, his anguish, his fear of having been wrong, asking for mercy and guidance in his future conduct. At the same time he wrote short essays about the errors an independent Ireland ought to avoid, using the experience of other nations, in order not to fall into corruption, exploitation, the astronomical distances that everywhere separated the poor and the rich, the powerful and the weak. But at times he became discouraged: what was he going to do with these texts? It made no sense to distract his friends in Ireland with essays about the future when they found themselves submerged in an overwhelming present.

When the summer was over, feeling somewhat better, he traveled to the camp at Zossen. The men in the Brigade had received the uniforms he had designed, and all of them looked good with the Irish insignia on their visors. The camp seemed well ordered and functioning. But inactivity and confinement were undermining the morale of the fifty Brigade members in spite of Father Crotty’s efforts to raise their spirits. He organized athletic competitions, meetings, classes and debates on a variety of subjects. Roger thought it a good time to flash before them the incentive of action.

He gathered them in a circle and explained a possible strategy that would get them out of Zossen and give them back their freedom. If at this moment it was impossible for them to fight in Ireland, why not do it under other skies where the same battle for which the Brigade was created was being fought? The world war had spread to the Middle East. Germany and Turkey were fighting to expel the British from their Egyptian colony. Why couldn’t they participate in the struggle against colonization and for the independence of Egypt? Since the Brigade was still small, it would have to join another unit of the army, but they would do it preserving their Irish identity.

The proposal had been discussed by Roger with the German authorities and accepted. Devoy and McGarrity agreed. Turkey would take the Brigade into its army, under the conditions Roger described. There was a long discussion. In the end, thirty-seven members declared they were prepared to fight in Egypt. The rest needed to think about it. But what concerned all the Brigade members now was something more urgent: the prisoners at Limburg had threatened to denounce them to the British authorities so their families in Ireland would stop receiving combatant pensions from the British Army. If this happened, their parents, wives, and children would starve to death. What was Roger going to do about that?

It was obvious the British government would impose this kind of reprisal and it hadn’t even occurred to him. Seeing the anxious faces of the Brigade members, he managed only to assure them that their families would never be unprotected. If they stopped receiving the pensions, patriotic organizations would help them. That same day he wrote to Clan na Gael asking that a fund be established to compensate the families of Brigade members who were victims of this reprisal. But Roger had no illusions: the way things were going, the money that came into the coffers of the Volunteers, the IRB, and Clan na Gael was for buying weapons, the first priority. In anguish he told himself that because of him, fifty humble Irish families would go hungry and perhaps be ravaged by tuberculosis next winter. Father Crotty tried to calm him, but this time his words brought him no tranquility. A new subject for concern had been added to those tormenting him, and his health suffered another relapse. Not only his physical but his mental health as well, as had happened during his most difficult times in the Congo and Amazonia. He felt himself losing his mental equilibrium. At times his head seemed like an erupting volcano. Would he lose his mind?

He returned to Munich and from there continued sending messages to the United States and Ireland regarding financial support for the families of the Brigade members. Since his letters, in order to mislead British Intelligence, passed through several countries where envelopes and addresses were changed, replies took one or two months to arrive. His anxiety was at its height when Robert Monteith finally appeared to take military command of the Brigade. The officer brought not only his impetuous optimism, decency, and adventurous spirit, but also a formal promise that the families of Brigade members, if they were the object of reprisals, would receive immediate assistance from the Irish revolutionaries.

Captain Monteith, who traveled to see Roger as soon as he arrived in Germany, was disconcerted to find him so ill. He admired him, treated him with enormous respect, and told him no one in the Irish movement suspected he was in so precarious a state. Roger forbade him to tell anyone about his health and traveled with him back to Berlin. He introduced Monteith at the chancellery and the admiralty. The young officer was burning with impatience to begin work and displayed an unshakeable optimism regarding the future of the Brigade that Roger, deep inside, had lost. During the six months he remained in Germany, Robert Monteith was, like Father Crotty, a blessing for Roger. Both kept him from sinking into a discouragement that perhaps might have pushed him to madness. The cleric and the soldier were very different and yet, Roger told himself many times, they were incarnations of two prototypes of Irishmen: the saint and the warrior. Alternating with them, he recalled some conversations with Patrick Pearse, when he combined the altar with arms and stated that the result of the fusion of these two traditions, martyrs and mystics and heroes and warriors, would be the spiritual and physical strength to break the chains that bound Ireland.

They were different but both had a natural integrity, generosity, and devotion to the ideal, which, seeing that Father Crotty and Captain Monteith did not waste time in changes of mood and periods of demoralization, as he did, often made Roger ashamed of his doubts and fluctuations. Both men had laid out a path and followed it without deviation, without being intimidated by obstacles, convinced that in the end victory awaited them: of God over evil and of Ireland over her oppressors. Learn from them, Roger, be like them, he repeated to himself, like a short, fervent prayer.

Robert Monteith was a man very close to Tom Clarke, for whom he also professed a religious devotion. He spoke of his tobacco shop—his clandestine general headquarters—at the corner of Great Britain Street and Sackville Street as a “sacred place.” According to the captain, the old fox, survivor of many British prisons, was the one who directed from the shadows all the revolutionary strategy. Wasn’t he deserving of admiration? From his small shop on a poor street in the center of Dublin, this veteran whose body was small, thin, spare, worn by suffering and the years, who had devoted his life to fighting for Ireland, spending fifteen years in prison because of it, had managed to lead the IRB, a secret military and political organization that reached every corner of the country, and not be captured by the British police. Roger asked if the organization was really as successful as he said. The captain’s enthusiasm was overflowing:

“We have companies, sections, platoons with their officers, weapons depots, messengers, codes, slogans,” he affirmed, gesturing euphorically. “I doubt there’s an army in Europe more efficient and motivated than ours, Sir Roger. I’m not exaggerating in the least.”

According to Monteith, preparations had reached their high point. German weapons were all that was missing for the insurrection to break out.

Monteith began working immediately, instructing and organizing the fifty recruits at Zossen. He went frequently to the Limburg camp to try to overcome resistance to the Brigade among the other prisoners. He persuaded a few, but the immense majority continued to show him complete hostility. Nothing could demoralize him. His letters to Roger, who had returned to Munich, swelled with enthusiasm and gave him encouraging news about the tiny brigade.

The next time they saw each other in Berlin, a few weeks later, they had supper alone in a small restaurant in Charlottenburg filled with Romanian refugees. Captain Monteith, arming himself with valor and choosing his words very carefully in order not to offend him, said suddenly:

“Sir Roger, don’t think of me as meddling or insolent. But you cannot go on in this condition. You’re too important to Ireland, to our struggle. For the sake of the ideals you have done so much for, I beg you to consult a physician. You have a nervous ailment. It’s not uncommon. Responsibility and worries take their toll. It was inevitable that this would happen. You need help.”

Roger stammered a few evasive words and changed the subject. But the captain’s recommendation alarmed him. Was his mental state so evident that this officer, always so respectful and discreet, had found the courage to tell him something like this? He heeded what he said. After some inquiries, he decided to visit Dr. Oppenheim, who lived outside the city among the trees and streams of Grunewald. He was an elderly man who inspired confidence, for he seemed experienced and reliable. They had two long sessions in which Roger told him about his condition, his problems, insomnia, and fears. He had to submit to mnemotechnical tests and very detailed questions. Finally, Dr. Oppenheim assured him he needed to go to a sanatorium and receive treatment. If he didn’t, his mental state would continue the process of destabilization that had already begun. The doctor called Munich himself and arranged an appointment for him with a colleague and disciple, Dr. Rudolf von Hoesslin.

Roger did not become a patient in Dr. von Hoesslin’s clinic but saw him several times a week for several months. The treatment was helpful.

“I’m not surprised, with the things you have seen in the Congo and the Amazon and what you are doing now, that you suffer from these problems,” the psychiatrist said. “What’s noteworthy is that you’re not a raving madman and haven’t committed suicide.”

He was still a young man, passionate about music, a vegetarian, and a pacifist. He was opposed to this war and all wars and dreamed that one day universal brotherhood—“a Kantian peace,” he called it—would be established all over the world, borders would disappear, and men would acknowledge one another as brothers. Roger would leave his sessions with Dr. von Hoesslin calmed and encouraged. But he wasn’t sure he was getting better. He’d always had this sense of well-being when he chanced to meet a healthy, good, idealistic person.

He made several trips to Zossen, where, as was to be expected, Robert Monteith had won over all the recruits in the Brigade. Thanks to his intense efforts, there were ten more volunteers. The marches and training were going wonderfully. But Brigade members continued to be treated like prisoners by German soldiers and officers, and at times mistreated. Captain Monteith took steps at the admiralty so that the volunteers would have a margin of freedom, as Roger had been promised, be allowed to go into town and have a beer in a tavern from time to time. Weren’t they allies? Why were they still treated as enemies? So far these efforts had not produced the slightest result.

Roger lodged a protest. He had a violent scene with General Schneider, commander of the garrison in Zossen, who told him he could not give more freedom to men who lacked discipline, had a propensity for fighting, and even committed robberies in the camp. According to Monteith, the accusations were false. The only incidents were the result of German sentries insulting Brigade members.

Roger’s final months in Germany were filled with constant arguments and moments of great tension with the authorities. The sense of having been deceived only grew until he left Berlin. The Reich had no interest in the liberation of Ireland. It never took seriously the idea of a joint action with the Irish revolutionaries. The chancellery and the admiralty had made use of his naïveté and good faith, making him believe things they had no intention of doing. The project of the Irish Brigade fighting with the Turkish army against the British in Egypt, studied in every detail, was frustrated when it seemed about to be realized, with absolutely no explanation. Zimmermann, von Wedel, Nadolny, and all the officials who took part in the planning suddenly became shifty and evasive. They refused to receive him on trivial pretexts. When he did succeed in speaking to them, they were always extremely busy, could grant him only a few minutes; the matter of Egypt was not their responsibility. Roger became resigned: his dream of the Brigade as a small symbolic force in the Irish struggle against colonialism had gone up in smoke.

Then, with the same ardor he had brought to his admiration of Germany, he began to feel toward that country a dislike that was turning into hatred similar to, or perhaps greater than, the hatred Britain inspired in him. He said as much in a letter to the lawyer John Quinn, after telling him about the mistreatment he was receiving from the authorities. “And so it is, my friend, that I have come to hate the Germans so much that, rather than die here, I prefer a British gallows.”

His state of irritation and physical indisposition obliged him to return to Munich. Dr. von Hoesslin insisted he become a patient in a rest home in Bavaria, using a categorical argument: “You’re on the brink of a crisis from which you will never recover unless you rest and forget about everything else. The alternative is that you will lose your reason or suffer a psychic break that will incapacitate you for the rest of your days.”

Roger obeyed. For some days his life entered a period of so much peace he felt disembodied. Pills made him sleep ten and twelve hours a day. Then he would take long walks, on the cold mornings of a winter that refused to leave, through a nearby wood of maple and ash trees. He was denied tobacco and alcohol and ate frugal vegetarian meals. He had no desire to read or write. He would spend hours with his mind blank, feeling like a ghost.

Robert Monteith violently pulled him out of this lethargy one sunny morning early in March 1916. Because of the importance of the matter, the captain had obtained leave from the German government to come to see him. Still under the influence of what had happened, he spoke in a rush:

“An escort came to take me out of the camp at Zossen and to Berlin, to the admiralty. A large group of officers, including two generals, was waiting for me. This is what they told me: ‘The Irish Provisional Committee has decided the uprising will take place on April 23.’ In other words, in a month and a half.”

Roger leaped out of bed. His fatigue seemed to disappear all at once and his heart turned into a furiously beating drum. He couldn’t speak.

“They’re asking for rifles, riflemen, artillerymen, machine guns, ammunition,” Monteith continued, agitated by emotion. “They want the ship escorted by a submarine. The weapons ought to reach Fenit on Tralee Bay, in County Kerry, on Easter Sunday at about midnight.”

“Then they aren’t going to wait for German armed action,” Roger said at last. He thought of a catastrophe, of rivers of blood dyeing the water of the Liffey.

“The message also has instructions for you, Sir Roger,” Monteith added. “You should remain in Germany as ambassador of the new Republic of Ireland.”

Roger let himself fall back on the bed, crushed. His comrades hadn’t told him of their plans before informing the German government. And they had ordered him to stay here while they had themselves killed in one of those acts of defiance that Patrick Pearse and Joseph Plunkett liked so much. Did they mistrust him? There was no other explanation. Since they were aware of his opposition to a unilateral uprising, they thought he would be a hindrance in Ireland and preferred him to remain here with his arms folded, holding the bizarre position of ambassador of a republic this rebellion and this bloodbath would make more remote and improbable.

Monteith waited, in silence.

“We’re going to Berlin immediately, Captain,” said Roger, sitting up again. “I’ll dress, pack my bag, and we’ll leave on the first train.”

They did. Roger managed to write a few hurried lines of thanks to Dr. Rudolf von Hoesslin. His mind churned endlessly on the long trip, with small intervals for exchanging ideas with Monteith. When he reached Berlin, his line of conduct was clear. His personal problems had moved into the background. The priority now was to pour his energy and intelligence into obtaining what his comrades had requested: rifles, ammunition, and German officers who could organize military actions efficiently. Second, he would leave for Ireland with the cargo of weapons. There he would try to persuade his friends to wait; with a little more time the European war might create situations more favorable to the insurrection. Third, he had to keep the fifty-three members of the Irish Brigade from leaving for Ireland. The British government would unceremoniously execute them as traitors if they were captured by the Royal Navy. Monteith had complete freedom to decide what he wanted to do. Knowing him, it was certain he would go to die with his comrades for the cause to which he had consecrated his life.

In Berlin they stayed in the Eden Hotel. The next morning they began negotiations with the authorities. The meetings took place in the shabby, ugly building of the Admiralty. Captain Nadolny received them at the door and led them to a room where there were always people from the chancellery and military men. New faces were mixed with those of old acquaintances. From the start they were told categorically that the German government refused to send officers to advise the revolutionaries.

On the other hand, they agreed to the weapons and ammunition. For hours and days they did calculations and studies of the most reliable way for them to reach the designated place on the date indicated. Finally, they decided the shipment would go in the Aud, a British ship that had been seized, reconditioned, and painted, and would fly a Norwegian flag. Neither Roger nor Monteith nor any Brigade member would travel on the Aud. This issue caused arguments, but the German government did not give in: the presence of Irishmen on board would compromise the subterfuge of passing the ship off as Norwegian, and if the deception was discovered, the Reich would be in a delicate situation in terms of international opinion. Then Roger and Monteith insisted on traveling to Ireland at the same time as the weapons. There were hours of proposals and counterproposals, when Roger tried to convince them that if he went there he could persuade his friends to wait until the war was more favorable to the German side, because under those circumstances the Rising could be combined with a parallel action by the German navy and infantry. Finally the admiralty agreed that Casement and Monteith would travel to Ireland in a submarine and take along a Brigade member to represent his comrades.

Roger’s refusal to let the Irish Brigade travel to join the insurrection instigated serious clashes with the Germans. But he did not want Brigade members summarily executed without even having the opportunity to die fighting. That wasn’t a responsibility he would take on.

On April 7, the high command informed Roger that the submarine they would travel on was ready. Captain Monteith chose Sergeant Bailey to represent the Brigade. They gave him false papers bearing the name Julian Beverly. The high command confirmed to Roger that even though the revolutionaries had asked for fifty thousand rifles, only twenty thousand, with ten machine guns and five million rounds of ammunition, would arrive north of Inishtooskert Island in Tralee Bay on the day indicated, after ten at night: a pilot with a rowboat or launch, identified by two green lights, should wait for the ship.

Between April 7 and the day of departure, Roger did not close his eyes. He wrote a short will asking that if he died, all his correspondence and papers be given to Edmund D. Morel, “an exceptionally just and noble person,” so that with the documents he might compose a “memoir to save my reputation after my passing.”

Even though Monteith, like Roger, intuited that the uprising would be crushed by the British army, he burned with impatience to leave. They had a private conversation for a couple of hours on the day Captain Boehm gave them the poison they had asked him for in the event of their capture. The officer told them it was Amazonian curare. The effect would be instantaneous. “Curare is an old friend of mine,” Roger said, smiling. “In Putumayo, in fact, I saw Indians who paralyzed birds in flight with darts dipped in this poison.” Roger and Monteith went for a beer in a nearby Kneipe.

“I imagine it hurts you as much as it does me to leave without saying goodbye or giving explanations to Brigade members,” said Roger.

“I’ll always have it on my conscience,” Monteith agreed. “But it’s the correct decision. The insurrection is too important for us to run the risk of its being infiltrated.”

“Do you think I have any chance of stopping it?”

The officer shook his head.

“I don’t think so, Sir Roger. But you’re very respected there and perhaps your words will have an effect. In any case, you have to understand what is happening in Ireland. We’ve been preparing for this for years. What do I mean, years? Centuries, I should say. How much longer will we go on being a captive nation? And in the twentieth century. Besides, there’s no doubt that thanks to the war, this is the moment when England is weaker than Ireland.”

“Aren’t you afraid of death?”

Monteith shrugged.

“I’ve seen it up close many times. In South Africa, during the Boer War, it was very close. We’re all afraid of death, I imagine. But there are deaths and then there are deaths, Sir Roger. To die fighting for your homeland is a death as honorable as dying for your family or your faith. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, I do,” Roger said. “I hope if it comes to it, we die like that and not by swallowing this Amazonian potion that must be indigestible.”

On the eve of their departure, Roger went to Zossen for a few hours to say goodbye to Father Crotty. He didn’t go into the camp. He sent for the Dominican, and they took a long walk through a wood of firs and birches beginning to turn green. Father Crotty was distraught as he listened to Roger’s confidences, not interrupting him once. When he finished speaking, the priest crossed himself. He was silent for a long time.

“To go to Ireland thinking the uprising is doomed to failure is a form of suicide,” he said, as if thinking aloud.

“I’m going with the intention of stopping it, Father. I’ll talk to Tom Clarke, Joseph Plunkett, Patrick Pearse, all the leaders. I’ll make them see the reasons why this sacrifice seems useless to me. Instead of accelerating independence, it will delay it. And …”

He felt his throat closing and he stopped speaking.

“What is it, Roger? We’re friends, and I’m here to help you. You can trust me.”

“I have a vision I can’t get out of my head, Father Crotty. Those idealists and patriots who are going to be mangled, leaving their families destroyed and indigent, subject to terrible reprisals, at least are conscious of what they are doing. But do you know who I think about all the time?”

He told him that in 1910 he had gone to give a talk at the Hermitage, the place in Rathfarnham, in the outskirts of Dublin, where St. Enda’s, Patrick Pearse’s bilingual school, was located. After speaking to the students, he gave them an object he had brought from his trip through Amazonia—a Huitoto blowgun—as a prize for the best composition in Gaelic by a final-year student. He had been enormously moved by these dozens of young men exulting in the idea of Ireland, the militant love with which they recalled its history, its heroes, its saints, its culture, the state of religious ecstasy in which they sang the ancient Celtic songs. And, too, the profoundly Catholic spirit that reigned in the school along with their fervent patriotism: Pearse had succeeded in having both things fuse and become one in those young people, as they had in him and his brother and sister, Willie and Margaret, who also taught at St. Enda’s.

“All those young men will be killed, they’re going to be cannon fodder, Father Crotty. With rifles and revolvers they won’t even know how to fire. Hundreds, thousands of innocents like them facing cannon, machine guns, the officers and soldiers of the most powerful army in the world. And they’ll achieve nothing. Isn’t it terrible?”

“Of course it’s terrible, Roger,” the cleric agreed. “But perhaps it’s not accurate to say they’ll achieve nothing.”

He paused again for a long time and then began to speak slowly, distressed and moved.

“Ireland is a profoundly Christian country, as you know. Perhaps because of its particular situation as an occupied country, it was more receptive than others to Christ’s message. Or because we had enormously persuasive missionaries and apostles like Saint Patrick, the faith took deeper root there than in other places. Ours is a religion above all for those who suffer. The humiliated, the hungry, the defeated. That faith has prevented us from disintegrating as a country in spite of the force crushing us. In our religion martyrdom is central. To sacrifice oneself, immolate oneself. Didn’t Christ do that? He became flesh and subjected himself to the most awful cruelty. Betrayal, torture, death on the cross. Didn’t it do any good, Roger?”

Roger thought of those convinced the struggle for liberty was both mystic and civic.

“I understand what you mean, Father Crotty. I know that people like Pearse, Plunkett, even Tom Clarke, who’s thought of as realistic and practical, are aware the uprising is a sacrifice. And they’re certain their death can create a symbol that will move all the energies of the Irish. I understand their will to sacrifice. But do they have the right to bring in people who lack their experience and lucidity, young people who don’t know they’re going to the slaughter only to set an example?”

“I don’t admire what they’re doing, Roger. I’ve already told you that,” Father Crotty murmured. “Martyrdom is something a Christian resigns himself to, not an end he seeks out. But hasn’t history perhaps made humanity progress in this way, with gestures and sacrifices? In any case, the person who concerns me now is you. If you’re captured, you won’t have the chance to fight. You’ll be tried for high treason.”

“I became involved in this, Father Crotty, and my obligation is to be consistent and follow through to the end. I’ll never be able to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. Can I ask for your blessing?”

He kneeled, Father Crotty blessed him, and they said goodbye with an embrace.

XV

When Fathers Carey and MacCarroll entered his cell, Roger had already received the paper, pen, and ink he had asked for and with a steady hand and no hesitation had written two brief letters in succession, one to his cousin Gertrude and another open letter to his friends. The two letters were very similar. To Gee, along with some deeply felt phrases telling her how much he had loved her and the good memories he had of her, he said: “Tomorrow, St. Stephen’s Day, I’ll have the death I’ve looked for. I hope God forgives my errors and accepts my prayers.” The letter to his friends showed the same tragic fortitude: “My final message for everyone is a sursum corda. I wish the best to those who will take my life and those who have tried to save it. All of you are now my brothers.”

John Ellis, the hangman, dressed as always in dark colors and accompanied by his assistant, a young man who introduced himself as Robert Baxter and seemed nervous and frightened, came to take his measurements—height, weight, and neck size—in order, he explained without constraint, to determine the height of the gallows and the thickness of the rope. As he measured him with a yardstick and wrote in a notebook, he told him that in addition to this job, he continued to practice his profession as a barber in Rochdale, where his clients tried to draw out the secrets of his work, but with respect to that subject, he was a sphinx. Roger was glad when they left.

A short while later, a guard brought the last delivery of letters and telegrams already reviewed by the censors. They were from people he didn’t know: they wished him luck or insulted him and called him traitor. He barely looked through them, but a long telegram caught his attention. It was from the rubber king Julio C. Arana. It was dated in Manaus and written in a Spanish even Roger could tell was filled with mistakes. He exhorted him “to be just by confessing his guilt, known only by Divine Justice, to a human court, with regard to his behavior in Putumayo.” He accused him of having “invented facts and influenced the Barbadians to confirm irresponsible acts that never happened” with the sole purpose of “obtaining titles and a fortune.” It ended this way: “I forgive you, but it is necessary for you to be just and declare now in a total and truthful way the real facts that nobody knows better than you.” Roger thought: His lawyers didn’t write this telegram: he did.

He felt calm. The fear that in the previous days and weeks would produce sudden shudders and send chills down his spine had completely disappeared. He was certain he would go to his death with the same serenity as Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, Joseph Plunkett, James Connolly, and all the valiant men who had sacrificed themselves in Dublin during that week in April so Ireland would be free. He felt detached from problems and distress and ready to make his peace with God.

Father Carey and Father MacCarroll were very serious when they came in and shook his hand with affection. He had seen Father MacCarroll three or four times but had not spoken much to him. He was a Scot and had a small tic of the nose that gave his expression a comic slant. On the other hand, with Father Carey he felt fully confident. He returned the copy of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis.

“I don’t know what to do with it, please give it to someone. It’s the only book they’ve allowed me to read in Pentonville Prison. I don’t regret it. It has been good company. If you ever communicate with Father Crotty, tell him he was right. Thomas à Kempis was, as he told me, a saintly man, simple and filled with wisdom.”

Father MacCarroll told him the sheriff was taking care of his civilian clothes and would bring them in soon. In the prison storeroom they had become wrinkled and dirty, and Mr. Stacey himself was having them cleaned and pressed.

“He’s a good man,” said Roger. “He lost his only son in the war and he, too, has been half dead with grief.”

After a pause, he asked them to concentrate now on his conversion to Catholicism.

“Reincorporation, not conversion,” Father Carey reminded him again. “You were always a Catholic, Roger, by the decision of your mother you loved so much and whom you’ll soon see again.”

The narrow cell seemed even more cramped with three people in it. They barely had room to kneel. For twenty or thirty minutes they prayed, at first silently and then aloud, Our Fathers and Hail Marys, the clerics at the beginning of the prayer and Roger at the end.

Then Father MacCarroll withdrew so that Father Carey could hear Roger’s confession. The priest sat on the edge of the bed and Roger remained on his knees at the beginning of his long, very long enumeration of real or presumed sins. When he first burst into tears in spite of the efforts he made to contain them, Father Carey had him sit beside him. This was how the final rite proceeded, in which, as he spoke, explained, remembered, asked, Roger felt that in fact he was coming closer and closer to his mother. For moments he had the fleeting impression that Anne Jephson’s slim silhouette appeared and disappeared on the redbrick wall of the prison.

He cried often, as he didn’t recall ever having cried, no longer trying to hold back his tears, because with them he felt unburdened of tension and bitterness and it seemed to him not only his spirit but also his body became much lighter. Father Carey, silent and unmoving, let him speak. At times he asked a question, made an observation, a brief, calming comment. After telling him his penance and giving him absolution, he embraced him: “Welcome again to what was always your home, Roger.”

A very short while later the cell door opened again and Father MacCarroll came in, followed by the sheriff. Mr. Stacey carried Roger’s dark suit and white shirt and collar, his tie and his vest, and Father MacCarroll had his high shoes and socks. It was the clothing Roger had worn on the day the court at the Old Bailey had condemned him to death by hanging. The articles were immaculately cleaned and pressed, and his shoes had just been blackened and polished.

“I’m very grateful for your kindness, Sheriff.”

Mr. Stacey nodded. His face, as usual, was chubby and sad. But now he avoided looking him in the eye.

“Could I shower before putting on these clothes, Sheriff? It would be a shame to dirty them with this disgusting body of mine.”

Mr. Stacey agreed, this time with a complicit little half smile. Then he left the cell.

Squeezing together, the three men managed to sit on the cot. They sat there, at times silent, at times praying, at times conversing. Roger spoke to them of his childhood, his early years in Dublin, in Jersey, of the vacations he and his brothers and sister had spent with his maternal uncles in Scotland. Father MacCarroll was happy to hear him say the Scottish vacations had been for him as a boy an experience of paradise, that is, of purity and joy. In a low voice Roger softly sang some of the children’s songs his mother and uncles had taught him, and also recalled how the great deeds of the Light Dragoons in India, which Captain Roger Casement recounted to him and his siblings when he was in a good mood, made him dream.

Then he let them speak, asking them to tell him how they became priests. Had they entered the seminary led by a vocation or forced by circumstances, hunger, poverty, the desire to receive an education, as was the case with so many Irish clerics? Father MacCarroll had been orphaned when very young. He was taken in by aged relatives, who enrolled him in a parish school where the priest, who was fond of him, convinced him the Church was his vocation.

“What could I do but believe him?” Father MacCarroll reflected. “The truth is, I entered the seminary without much conviction. The call from God came afterward, during my later years of study. I became very interested in theology. I would have liked to devote myself to studying and teaching. But as we know, man proposes and God disposes.”

Father Carey’s case had been very different. His family, well-to-do merchants in Limerick, were Catholic in name more than in deed, so he did not grow up in a religious environment. In spite of this he had heard the call very young and could even point out the event that perhaps had been decisive: a eucharistic congress, when he was thirteen or fourteen years old, where he heard a missionary priest, Father Aloysius, recount the work carried out in the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala by the male and female religious with whom he had spent twenty years of his life.

“He was so good a speaker he overwhelmed me,” said Father Carey. “It’s his fault I’m still doing this. I never saw him again or heard anything about him. But I’ve always remembered his voice, his fervor, his rhetoric, his long beard. And his name: Father Aloysius.”

When the cell door was opened and his usual frugal supper brought in—broth, salad, and bread—Roger realized they had spent several hours talking. The afternoon was dying and night beginning, though some sun still shone through the bars on the small window. He refused the supper and kept only the bottle of water.

And then he recalled that on one of his first expeditions in Africa, in the first year of his stay on the Dark Continent, he had spent a few days in the small village of a tribe whose name he had forgotten (the Bangui, perhaps?). With the help of an interpreter he talked with several villagers. In this way he learned that the community elders, when they felt they were going to die, made a small bundle of their few possessions, and discreetly, without saying goodbye to anyone, trying to pass unnoticed, went into the jungle. They looked for a tranquil place, a small beach on the shore of a lake or river, the shade of a large tree, a rocky knoll. There they lay down to wait for death without disturbing anyone. A wise, elegant way to depart.

Fathers Carey and MacCarroll wanted to spend the night with him, but Roger refused. He assured them he was fine, calmer than he had been in the last three months. He preferred to be alone and rest. It was true. When the clerics saw the serenity he displayed, they agreed to go.

When they had gone, Roger spent a long time looking at the clothes the sheriff had left him. For a strange reason, he had been certain he would bring him the clothing he had on when he was captured that desolate dawn of April 21 in the circular fortification the Celts called McKenna’s Fort, consisting of eroded stones overlaid with dead leaves, bracken, and damp, and surrounded by trees where birds sang. Barely three months and they seemed like centuries. What could have happened to those clothes? Had they been archived too, along with his file? The suit Mr. Stacey pressed for him, the one he would die in within a few hours, had been bought for him by the lawyer, Gavan Duffy, so he would appear presentable before the court that tried him. In order not to wrinkle it, he laid it flat under the thin mattress on the cot. And he lay down, thinking a long night of insomnia awaited him.

Astonishingly, he fell asleep quickly. He must have slept for many hours because, when he opened his eyes with a small start, though the cell was dark, he could see dawn beginning to break in the small barred rectangle of the window. He recalled having dreamed about his mother. Her face was sorrowful and he, a child, consoled her by saying, “Don’t be sad, we’ll see each other again soon.” He felt calm, without fear, wanting it to be over once and for all.

Not long afterward, or perhaps it was but he hadn’t realized how much time had gone by, the door opened and from the threshold the sheriff—his face tired and his eyes bloodshot, as if he hadn’t closed them all night—said:

“If you want to shower, it should be now.”

Roger nodded. When they were walking toward the bathroom along the long corridor of blackened bricks, Mr. Stacey asked if he had been able to get some rest. When Roger said he had slept a few hours, the sheriff murmured, “I’m happy for you.” Then, as Roger was anticipating how pleasant it would be to feel the stream of cool water on his body, Mr. Stacey told him that many people, priests and ministers among them, had spent all night at the entrance to the prison, praying and holding crucifixes and signs opposing the death penalty. Roger felt strange, as if he were no longer himself, as if someone else were replacing him. He stood for some time under the cold water. He soaped carefully and rinsed, rubbing his body with both hands. When he returned to the cell, Father Carey and Father MacCarroll were there again. They told him the number of people crowded at the doors to Pentonville, praying and waving placards, had grown a great deal since the previous night. Many were parishioners brought by Father Edward Murnaue from the small Holy Trinity Church that was attended by Irish families in the district. But there was also a group cheering the execution of the “traitor.” The news left Roger indifferent. The clerics waited outside his cell while he dressed. He was surprised at how much weight he had lost. The clothes and shoes swam on him.

Escorted by the two priests and followed by the sheriff and an armed guard, he went to the chapel of Pentonville Prison. He hadn’t been there before. It was small and dark, but there was something welcoming and peaceful in this space with the oval ceiling. Father Carey celebrated Mass and Father MacCarroll was the acolyte. Roger was moved as he followed the ritual, though he didn’t know whether it was because of the circumstances or because he would take communion for the first and last time. It will be my first communion and my viaticum, he thought. Afterward he attempted to say something to Fathers Carey and MacCarroll but couldn’t find the words and remained silent, trying to pray.

When he returned to his cell, breakfast had been left next to his bed, but he didn’t want to eat anything. He asked the time, and now they finally told him: 8:40 a.m. I have twenty minutes, he thought. At almost the same time the governor of the prison arrived, along with the sheriff and three men in civilian clothes, one of them undoubtedly the doctor who would confirm his death, another a functionary of the Crown, and the hangman with his young assistant. Mr. Ellis, a rather short, powerful man, also wore dark clothes, like the others, but the sleeves of his jacket were rolled up in order to work more comfortably. He carried a rope coiled around his arm. In his well-bred, hoarse voice he asked him to put his hands behind his back because he had to tie them. As he bound his hands, Mr. Ellis asked a question that seemed absurd: “Am I hurting you?” He shook his head no.

Father Carey and Father MacCarroll had begun to say litanies aloud. They continued saying them as they accompanied him, one on each side, on the long walk through areas of the prison he was not familiar with: stairways, halls, a small courtyard, all of them deserted. Roger barely noticed the places he was leaving behind. He prayed and responded to the litanies and felt happy that his step was firm and no sob or tear escaped him. At times he closed his eyes and begged God for mercy, but what appeared in his mind was the face of Anne Jephson.

At last they came out on an open site flooded with sun. A squad of armed guards was waiting for them. They surrounded a square wooden framework that had a small staircase with eight or ten steps. The governor read a few phrases, no doubt the sentence, which Roger paid no attention to. Then he asked whether Roger wanted to say anything. Again he shook his head, but very quietly he murmured: “Ireland.” He turned to the priests and both embraced him. Father Carey gave him the blessing.

Then Mr. Ellis approached and asked him to stoop so he could put on the blindfold, since Roger was too tall for him. He bent down, and as the hangman put on the blindfold that submerged him in darkness, he thought Mr. Ellis’s fingers were less firm now, less in control than when he had tied his hands. Taking him by the arm, the hangman helped him climb the steps to the platform, slowly so he wouldn’t stumble.

He listened to some movements, the priests’ prayers, and finally, again, a whisper from Mr. Ellis asking him to lower his head and bend down a little, please, sir. He did, and then he felt him place the rope around his neck. He could still hear Mr. Ellis’s last whisper. “If you hold your breath, it will be faster, sir.” He obeyed.