ROGER CASEMENT

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4604, 2 October 1934, Page 3

ROGER CASEMENT

FATAL IDEALISM.

STORY OF HIS TREASON. A FANTASTIC ATTEMPT. It was Good Friday in the year 1916. A murky dusk was settling rapidly, over the wind-swept Kerry coast of Ireland. Through the failing light, the watch aboard H.M.S. Bluebell, on patrol duty ninety miles off the southern coast, sighted a vessel painted impeccably in the Norwegian colours. The captain of the British ship was immediately suspicious. He signalled that the strange vessel, which gave the name Aud, must follow the Bluebell to harbour. All night the two boats steamed southeast in the direction of Queenstown, but three and a half miles out of port the crew, 1 of the Bluebell noted that something had gone wrong on the Aud. The ship seemed to falter. Her engines stopped, and a cloud of white smoke appeared. Two boats loaded with men put off from her. A few minutes later there was a roar and the "Norwegian" vessel sank below the waves.

The men in the boats proved to be German bluejackets, and their capture, though a commonplace occurrence, was the first of a series of revelations which brought to light the treachery of Roger Casement and which resulted in the greatest trial in England's history. The story is dramatically told in Derek WalkerSmith's "Lord Reading and His Cases," writes T.K.K. in the "Literary Digest."

Au Irish Champion.

Roger Casement possessed the fanatical patriotism and the smouldering ambition of a Garibaldi, but he possessed also the romantic idealism of the Shakespearean Brutus. In 1912 he had been knighted for distinguished service in the Congo. He was forty-eight at the time and living on a small pension. It would have been the twilight of a career of an ordinary man. But Casement became interested in the Irish question—the struggle between the Fenians and the Ulstermen. He espoused the cause of the former, who wanted independence.

Though pitifully naive in many respect, Roger Casement saw that Ireland needed outside help and he looked towards Germany. He evolved a fantastic scheme—as gigantic in its proportions as it was absurd in its impracticability. He would head for Germany; he would get a declaration of German sympathy with Irish national aspirations; he would visit prison camps north of the Rhine and organise an Irish Brigade which would land on the Kerry coast and deliver a death-blow at the most vulnerable point of the British Isles. It is not difficult to picture the ecstatic enthusiasm with which the Quixotic knight-errant disguised himself, tricked the detectives who trailed him, and found his way to the Imperial Chancellor —with nothing to support him but his idealism. The German Government gave him the declaration he desired and he set to work on the second half of his pl an —the organisation of the Irish Brigade. What were his chances of success? In Ireland his followers

had been fanatical patriots, but here he was dealing not with politicallyminded separatists, but with professional soldiers, men who had been a part of the first Expeditionary Force, who had felt the impact of the enemy at Mons, and who had by their valour strengthened the morale of the defence throughout the Western Front. Their allegiance had not been lightly given, and they mistrusted the strange Irishman. Only fifty responded favourably.

Complete Undoing.

Then suddenly came the news of the great Irish revolt which was timed to break out on Easter Sunday. Here, surely, was the chance Casement had been waiting for. But fortune was not kindly disposed—or perhaps too kindly disposed towards the wrong persons. A succession of incidents occurring at inopportune moments resulted in Casement's complete undoing. The alert captain of the Bluebell was one such obstacle. Casement was seized and charged with high treason, and his trial was a fitting climax to a strange and thrilling adventure. The case for the prosecution was that the defendant by his efforts to seduce the allegiance of the Irish prisoners and by his descent on the

Irish coast, had committed acts of assistance to the King's enemies in time of war. What defence could possibly be mustered to withstand such an array of fact? The defence's only chance was to urge the quashing of the indictment—to plead that the actions of Casement did not constitute the offence of treason. The odds were overwhelming. The day came for the summing-up of the arguments by the Lord Chief Justice. Step by step he took the jury through the evidence. He was scrupulously fair to Casement, but, under his unbiassed exposition, it became increasingly clear how heavy was the evidence against him. The jury retired and returned to announce that the defendant had been found guilty of high treason. In the words of Lord Birkenhead, Roger Casement, "blinded by hatred" of England, had played a desperate hazard—and had lost.