The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (50 page)

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.