Imparfit Gentil Knight

By Michael Demarest

ROGER CASEMENT by BRIAN INGLIS 448 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

$8.95.

To an extraordinary number of people who had known or met him. Sir Roger Casement seemed the Edwardian era's parfit gentil knight. Handsome, beguiling, dedicated and quixotic, he spent his life, fragile health and meager income tilting not against windmills but against millstones: the brutal burdens loaded on colonialized peoples by their self-styled civilizers, not least upon his beloved Ireland. As far as his abilities were concerned, Casement was the kind of man who in other times and circumstances might have been an explorer, poet, or U.N. Secretary-General. As it turned out, this proud and eventually demented Irish patriot was hanged in London at age 51 as a wartime traitor to the Britain that he condemned as an illegal occupying power.

In a balanced and meticulously researched biography, Dublin-born journalist Brian Inglis traces the Sophoclean confluence of events and experiences that led Casement to fame, obloquy and the gallows as yet another martyr for Irish freedom. How high Casement rates in that mad hierarchy depends on how history will eventually assess the shadowed side of his nature. Casement was a rapacious homosexual, a fact that was never suspected until his arrest in 1916, when Scotland Yard seized his private papers. Its most notable find was the so-called "black diaries" which Casement supporters erroneously denounced as forgeries. The diaries document his obsession with the price and private parts of an incredible array of consorts. (As the saying went in London when the diaries were circulated, "Gomorrah, begorra!") Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, Verlaine, Gide and Proust are not judged today on the basis of their sexual proclivities; nor, argues Inglis, should Casement be.

As a young British consul in Africa, Casement doggedly uncovered and exposed the plight of Congolese natives whom King Leopold of the Belgians had promised to deliver from slavery but instead through torture, amputation and the lash, forced into the production of rubber. As a result of Casement's crusade--obstructed at every step by the "abject pifflers" of the Foreign Office --the Congo Free State, a private monopoly, was pried from ruthless Leopold's personal grasp and placed under the more or less civilized control of the Belgian government in 1908.

Posted as a consul in South America, in 1910 Casement again investigated the exploitation of rubber, and reported that Amazonian Indians were being as cruelly abused as if their masters had studied sadism in the Congo. This time, though, the villain was an English-owned company. Despite foot dragging back home and prevarication by the Peruvian government, it was forced to moderate its practices. In 1911 Casement was knighted for his effort, though he was now openly convinced that empire, left in the hands of commercial entrepreneurs, inevitably debased and destroyed the primitive communities whose land and labor they controlled.

From the Congo to Connemara, the lesson to Casement was writ plain. He had been raised a Protestant in Ulster, and his next cause, after retirement from the foreign service, was to be his native Ireland, the very exemplar of colonial misrule. In 1913 war clouds were lowering and, as Sinn Fein Guru Tom Clarke prophesied, "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity." For years, while a servant of the crown, Casement had nourished a hatred of the English that was to become, in Inglis' word, a "monomania." Now he proclaimed on the eve of World War I that Britain and Russia had ganged up on Germany in a new Holy Alliance to despoil the Old World. "I pray," he wrote, "for the Salvation of Germany night and day--and God Save Ireland now is another form of God Save Germany!"

An Englishman who met Casement in Chicago, during an American tour to raise funds against Britain described him as "a fanatic of the type of Mazzini ... great in the beginning of Italy's risorgimento, and so greatly mistaken in the end." His Irish American host in New York said flatly that Sir Roger had become "mentally unbalanced." Cracked or not, Casement was confident that a victorious Germany would benignly liberate Ireland. He made his way to Berlin, where he soon found that the German government consisted of "swine and cads." His attempt to recruit Irish soldiers captured by the Germans and dragoon them into fighting the British proved a wretched fiasco--and even his hosts showed their distaste for the notion of tampering with soldiers' loyalties. In the days of Verdun and Jutland, there were, after all, 250,000 Irish volunteers fighting on the Allied side. Casement nevertheless persuaded the Germans to ship arms to Ireland.

No Reputable Barrister. The guns were bad--captured Russian Krukas, the worst in Europe--and so was the navigator of the freighter transporting them. Missing his rendezvous off Tralee and surrounded by the Royal Navy, the skipper scuttled his ship, arms and all. Casement, who had been landed from a German U-boat, was ignominiously arrested by a local constable.

Then came the Tower, Brixton Prison and the Old Bailey. Nothing so became Roger Casement as his stride to the scaffold. No reputable barrister would handle his case: the diaries were circulating; the Allies were suffering horrendous losses in France. It was not even seriously questioned whether the English had the right to try an Irish conspirator save as a prisoner of war.

In his final speech from the dock, one of the most eloquent addresses ever delivered in the cause of a free Ireland, Casement declared, "Loyalty is a sentiment, not a law. It rests on love, not restraint. The government of Ireland by England rests on restraint and not on law; and since it demands no love, it can evoke no loyalty." Self-government, he added, is "a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself--than the right to feel the sun, or smell the flowers, or to love our kind." He wrote a beloved cousin from prison, "I die the death I sought, and may God forgive the mistakes and receive the intent." So, indeed, should history.

sbMichael Demarest

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