Valiant Gentlemen

by Sabina Murray

“The closest thing I had to one, at the time. We had been through so much together. You might find it strange, given my politics, that he and I grew so close.” Kelso takes a moment to escape the memory. “None of these men will bear arms against those who they’ve suffered with. Some of the soldiers you are trying to recruit owe their lives to Englishmen. And none of them can bear the lofty talk when they lack food and are treated like animals by the very men you are telling them to trust.”

  Casement nods because he cannot deny what this man has told him. He reaches beneath the desk for one of the copies of Alice’s book. The book sits there on the table between them, The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing, but from the look on Kelso’s face, it would seem that Casement is the subject of the book.

  Kelso gestures for Casement to draw closer. At this distance, he can see a louse crawl quickly back into the forest of Kelso’s hair. “If you come back,” he whispers softly.

  “Louder!” says the guard.

  So he can speak English.

  And in the softest of whispers, “I am begging you, do not—”

  The guard jumps up and hits Kelso in the shoulder with the rifle butt, knocking him to the ground. Kelso looks up and raises his hands, not so scared as careful. He gets up and begins to make his way to the door with the guard smacking him in the back, although more to propel than to injure. “Can I get the book?” says Kelso. “The book, to tell the other men.”

  The guard wearily gestures to the table, watching closely.

  Kelso tracks quickly into his memory. And then he’s speaking in Irish—school Irish with a stiff accent. And then again, in Irish, that rises to shouting as the guard attacks again. Words flying, and Kelso’s Irish is not good, nor his. But he pieces it together as the men shout at him and he makes the shameful walk back to the car. Please. No. Return. Please. Please. Kill. Kill.

  Or, please do not come back because if the Germans still have hope in this Irish Brigade, they will kill us all.

  Munich wears its war heavily. Casement has been once before, so he understands that most often the people are a cheerful lot—the sort of Germans who link arms and sing while drinking beer, the sort of Germans who people liked when people liked Germans. Dancing girls in dirndl skirts, laughing boys with clean teeth, a clear sun, a river of beer—these are his memories of Munich, but that was fifteen years ago. Sitting in this tram, the rattle of it, and the dour-faced woman opposite him, who tracks her eyes to the American pin in his lapel and across his features, then down at her shoes, that is the Munich now. She looks into her purse, digging around, and closes it. This is the third time she’s done that, as if she’s lost something and lives in the expectation that it will magically reappear. If he had any German, he would exchange pleasantries with her, but all he can do is nod as he makes his way out of the tram, onto the street. He thinks he knows where he’s headed, but he’s only been there once, and that was with Adler, who can find this place in whatever state of being.

  It is a shabby tavern and sparsely inhabited, to be expected as the population is already feeling the first grip of poverty. Adler is the youngest man at the bar. He greets Casement with a broad smile, turning on his bar stool. He pats the seat next to him.

  Casement obliges. He must not be too strident, or sanctimonious. “Adler, from the tone of your note, I thought you were being dragged off by the police.”

  “I was worried you would not come.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the last time you said, ‘This is absolutely the last time.’” Adler breaks into laughter as he says this. He raises two fingers to the bartender who sets about preparing two drinks.

  In a week, Adler will be heading back to Norway to meet with Findlay and his cronies. They need to work out what information to feed him. Any attempts at coordinating this with Germans are met with indifference, which is nerve-wracking. The German Foreign Office claims that the information is changing constantly. They are not privy to the latest naval developments, or what is being shipped where, so how can they advise Adler and Casement? Casement knows that he is being lied to and is not sure what to do. If he and Adler just make things up, it’s not going to convince the English that Adler’s information is worthy. They will know that Adler is still loyal to Casement. The whole thing is beyond Casement’s intelligence acumen. Communicating the amount of arms shipped into Lorenço Marques and creating plans to blow up a railroad in Komatipoort are one thing, but coordinating false information on the presence of U-boats in the North Sea for the British Navy is beyond his purview. And why can’t the Germans see the value of this connection? It is because they don’t trust Adler. They don’t want to give him real information. So he will have to make something up about “pipes” being shipped somewhere for some reason, as if he is a man with no allies.

  Whose side is Casement on? Who is he fighting for, or fighting with?

  “You look like you need some fresh air,” says Adler, patting him on the shoulder.

  The bill is, thankfully, less than what Casement had expected.

  “Good, no?” says Adler. “It’s because they won’t let me run a tab anymore.”

  “Maybe it’s time to cut back on your drinking.” But he knows that Adler has taken this recent development as a suggestion to find a new watering hole.

  “Look,” says Adler, stalled on the pavement. “The sun has come out. Let’s walk through the English Gardens.”

  It’s a cold day, but with a warming sun a walk will be pleasant, although Casement knows Adler has suggested this because there’s a beer garden on the other side. A path runs alongside the river and he and Adler gravitate there naturally. Mothers with prams circuit the walkways, but the winter cold has kept the majority of people indoors. Trees bared of leaves scratch at the humorless blue sky. Afternoon is Adler’s best time of day. By evening, the drinking has made him harsh. And after that, he is clumsy, thuggish. Mornings are hard for him. He sits on the edge of the bed, rubbing at his forehead with the heel of his hand, breathing with his mouth open. Every joke has been made a million times. I thought I was drinking the bottle, but I think it was drinking me. I guess the whiskey won that round. But Adler in the afternoon, when the drink has warmed his mood and softened the edges, and loosened his tongue so that his simple philosophy finds its way to conversation . . . What can Casement do to resist that? In private moments, Adler will tousle Casement’s hair as if they’re school chums. He’ll respond to Casement’s black moods with a cajoling Sir Roger. And they will make love, although only at Adler’s instigation. Perhaps that adds a level of excitement.

  “Nice day,” says Adler.

  “Certainly,” says Casement.

  When he was last in Munich, there were young men swimming in the river, splashing and laughing, although this now seems a memory written over for better sunshine, with handsome boys. As they make the top of a rise they can see soldiers drilling on an open, flat expanse that must have once been a football field. These are young soldiers, pink-faced, barely through their teens if that. They are marching in time, many bodies made into one company with the purpose of killing other men.

  “You can look,” says Adler.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Perhaps I am getting too old for you.”

  “You are just fine,” says Casement, “although I am getting too old for me.” He remembers good humor, and sometimes the words present themselves, like a script. This is what Casement would have said six months ago, and this is what his brain produces. Casement does not like soldiers, does not find the virility of war exciting or tonic. Armed and marching expressionless men are gears—or fuel—of the machine of the present that’s grinding everyone, including him, into powder. He has a hard time believing that the past really happened. Was he ever truly in the Amazon among the Indians? Was that really ten years ago? Hard to imagine that, harder still to pursue his life further. There’s an image of h
im on a ship, stiff wind, salt air, and he looks back at England as it vanishes into the promise of Africa. Who was that who sighted into the endless reach of future and did not blink, who sighted back and saw little but a few hard schoolboy years running up to the brick wall that marked his birth? Who was that man?

  Now he is so completely aware of his mortality that he has set aside a package to be given to Ward should he die. This is stored, with other things, at his friend Germain’s Ebury Street apartment in London. In the package, letters, books, souvenirs from the Congo to go into Ward’s Paris studio, photographs of Amazon youths and some purchased while in ­Sicily—young male nudes in classical poses, as if Bacchus and Apollo had been given life, brought to the present. This last gesture of friendship, waiting in a trunk, oppresses him with its clear-sightedness.

  “Looks like you could use a rest,” says Adler.

  He could use a rest. That is true. He is so very tired.

  “How can you be so depressed all the time?”

  “One might make a similar inquiry into your persistent vigor.”

  “People disappoint you,” says Adler. “And no one disappoints me. The Germans disappoint you. And now the Irish disappoint you. The English, even when they behave the way you think they should, disappoint you. And I must disappoint you, although you can guess what I will do every day, every minute.”

  “I can’t expect you to understand,” says Casement, indulgent.

  “But I do. Everything for you is personal. You believe in loyalty, that when you put your trust in people, they will value that.”

  “Adler,” Casement says, stopping on the path, “this is a basic way to be.”

  “Basic for you, but loyalty is a ridiculous thing. What is loyalty? Loyalty says, ‘You know this is bad for you but you must do it because it is good for someone else.’ It’s a stupid thing, made up by someone, so that people doing stupid things can feel good about themselves.”

  “You have thought about this.”

  “And for once, you haven’t.” Adler gives Casement a patient look, holds it long, with the background music of shouted German commands. “What is good for you, Sir Roger? What would be best for your well-being? Do that, and then you’ll cheer up.”

  But he doesn’t know. There is Adler on the path, coaxing him forward. Come on, he gestures with a quick jerk of his head. Casement follows. He does not know what would be best for him, but clings to what is best for Ireland—an Irish Republic that hovers in his mind, an Irish parliament, industry and busy ports, an educated population, a living language, a system of agriculture that feeds the people rather than lines the pockets of the conquerors. It is all so reasonable, so why cast it as a fantasy? People are willing to die to make Ireland free not just because of their bravery and conviction, but because lives so devalued have a hunger for sacrifice.

  February finds him in a sanatorium in Grunewald. His old ailments are there to keep him company, but the nerves are what have undone him. He’s collapsed again and he knows that people are wondering if he’ll ever get out. He is wondering the same thing. Adler has gone to Norway to meet with Findlay, also to expose Findlay’s perfidy. Adler, who does not understand why he expects more of anyone. Has Casement not said that the English are not to be trusted? Isn’t Findlay’s behavior just an example of this? But Adler at least has some sort of intelligence to trade along with express instructions to expose the misconduct of the English legation in Norway. Adler says he’ll do this because it seems that, as long as he’s representing Casement, the English government will see this attack on them as a good way of covering his tracks. Adler is a natural double agent, although he can’t seem to keep the larger goals straight. Casement has been trying to get his letter exposing Findlay in the American papers, but only one will publish it, as it seems that American sentiment is tending towards the support of England. But if the Americans knew the conduct of the English, they would support Germany.

  There is a knock on the door, and a nurse enters bearing newspapers. She speaks in rapid-fire German, her distaste for this English-speaking patient poorly disguised. She throws the papers down on his bedside table. There is a question, pointed and stern, to which he cannot respond. She repeats it as if to amp her frustration and then leaves with strident step, shutting the door loudly behind her.

  The English papers are a week old and bear the usual news. There are fabrications of German slayings of women who have helped the French. And more atrocities in Belgium, pits full of bodies—babies, children, ­mothers—dumped by the advancing German armies. He skims the headlines. In Bukovina, Germans supposedly forced Serbians to assist in their own executions. The punishing temperatures in Galicia have not stalled the intense fighting. And in Sydney, Australia, there was a partial eclipse of the sun. Then he sees his name. Sir Roger Casement. It is there in bold letters. He scans quickly through the matter, of how he “. . . accuses Mister M. Findlay, British Minister of Norway, of conspiring to kidnap him . . .” and of Findlay’s promise to give Adler “. . . Casement’s manservant, who is Norwegian, £5,000 in the event that he captured Casement.”

  This is not his letter as he wrote it, yet there is some satisfaction to see his accusation in print, although buried in a longer piece. At the bottom of the article is some biographical matter and his heart sinks as he discovers, along with England, and therefore Ward, that his pension has been withheld pending further investigation as this known Irish Nationalist is now in Germany negotiating with the Germans for preferential treatment of Ireland.

  Of course there is no going back. He has known this, pushed it to the perimeter of his consciousness because it is an inconvenience. And he pushes it away again, but his hands on the paper, his eyes scanning the list of casualties, he realizes again that he is searching for Charlie Ward, and perhaps for Herbie, although he is not yet old enough to enlist.

  He has heard through Countess Blucher, an Englishwoman married to a German and now in Munich, that Ward had turned the house in Rolleboise into some sort of hospital. Beyond that, he does not know, as this Countess Blucher does not know the Wards well, although she had been entertained by Sarita and Herbert, brought to the country house by mutual friends motoring out from Paris for the day. And this is all he has to go on: a newspaper that he hopes bears no information and an indication that Ward has leapt into the war effort with his usual energy and will not be sympathetic to Casement’s position. This is the same Ward, after all, who went off with Stanley to find Emin Pasha, who throws himself into every endeavor with no thought as to his own well-being, who has great valor, although often for the wrong side. Would not Ward say the same of him?

  He finds himself standing, out of the bed, making his way to the window. A weight of snow lies on everything except for one assertive tree, alone by the fence: a lonely tree that casts a pale blue shadow.

  VIII

  Rolleboise

  May 1915

  The furniture has been moved back into the drawing room, although there is no carpet as the one that once covered the floor had to be stored in the attic when this room served as an infirmary, and was there chewed through by mice. It was a valuable rug, one that is now in Père Fabrice’s cottage, sliced to remove the majority of the damaged bits and roughly seamed against fraying by Père Fabrice’s wife. Ward had felt strangely despondent about the rug, and then realized that he’d actually been feeling sorry for it. Sorry for the rug, that it had fallen from its former glory. He has such an excess of empathy of late.

  In the past, Ward loved spending time in Vernon. People were happy to see him, offered a flower for his lapel, made urgent, welcoming gestures for him to pull up a chair at the café and take a glass for wine. Now, the town is denuded of men, except for the really old ones, and that’s not good for Ward’s mood. He doesn’t want to think of himself as one of the sidewalk gentlemen with splayed knees and long mustaches, who sit and look and look, just hoping that you’ll wa
lk by and interrupt their vision. But as those are the only males around—other than boys in short pants—it’s hard to feel a part of things.

  If he had only been allowed to keep the hospital going. Everyone was made happy by that. Even Sarita had come around to her exile, noting with some comfort that Herbie was so useful as a driver that he might stop agitating about the flying as he felt essential to the war effort. But it was not to be. One of the officer’s wives had shown up unannounced for a visit, and as there was no place to put her up in town, Ward had offered her an upstairs room. Because of that, the Red Cross shut him down. An unauthorized woman, they said, had no business in a hospital. It was improper. Had they seen Mrs. Newcombe? She was so impossible to imagine in any but the most proper way that Ward wondered what had drawn Captain Newcombe to her in the first place. It’s concerning that the organization of shipping ammunition to the Front can fall between the cracks, while the comings and goings of Mrs. Newcombe are tracked with such diligence.

  Rolleboise is not the place for him. He has begged his way into the Ambulance Corps and is himself shipping to the Front. He’ll get there before Charlie. Six months ago, he thought that Charlie might never see combat, but he’s given that up. This war needs to be ended as quickly as possible before it destroys anything else.

  Casement.

  Why would he go to Germany?

  Just a week earlier, Neave from the Foreign Office had arranged a meeting with Ward in Paris. He wanted to know, casually, if he and Casement had been in communication.

  Ward had not heard anything from Casement. He knew he’d gone to New York to discuss Home Rule with the Americans, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure. There had often been times when he and Casement lost track of each other for months here and there, despite Casement’s committed letter-writing. He’d wondered. Sarita had seen Casement in London not too long ago and she thought he was involved in some sort of intelligence work in the North Sea, because he’d mentioned Scotland. Ward knew nothing and struggled, in Neave’s office, to keep his composure. He could see Neave studying his response to the news and he must have looked bad because Neave, an unemotional type, had his face composed in an almost painful sympathy. Neave had filled in the blanks. The conversation was, as assumed, confidential, but Casement was recruiting Irish prisoners of war. Of course the Germans were just stringing him along, but if the Irish started fighting right at home, it would draw troops away from the crucial conflict.