Knight in Quicklime

ROGER CASEMENT, IRISH PATRIOT, ENGLISH TRAITOR (328 pp.)--Rene MacColl --Norton ($5).

If a farce with a tragic ending is the characteristic Irish art form, the life and death of Sir Roger Casement make him a great Irishman. Many of his countrymen believe him to be so and periodically ask the British government to yield custody of his remains, which lie in quicklime within the walls of Pentonville Prison. Casement was hanged for treason in 1916, three months after the Dublin uprising of Easter Week. In the midst of World War I, he had landed from a German submarine on the coast of Kerry, ostensibly to foment rebellion. A boatload of rifles was to be landed after him but the vessel was intercepted by British warships; Casement was spotted by a farm girl and captured by a pair of village policemen.

The Casement affair, one of the century's most sensational treason cases, has now been reconstructed in a fascinating biography by British Journalist Rene MacColl, who tells the story of a brilliant, unsavory and enigmatic would-be hero.

Collector of Injustice. He was a handsome, romantic, cranky figure, that most irritating kind of idealist, a collector of other people's injustices. A poor orphan boy from Ballymena in County Antrim, he joined the British consular service, was stationed in Africa. The Belgian Congo, then being run as a private slave factory by Belgium's King Leopold II, captured his horrified attention. It was a time before Europe knew itself capable of Belsen, and Europe was shocked by Casement's voluminous, angry reports (published in 1904) on torture, floggings and forced labor. Later, he made similar reports for the British Foreign Office about cruel treatment of rubber-plantation workers in Peru. By now, Casement had become a romantic celebrity with something of Byron about him. He was knighted by King George V, and he wrote a fulsome letter of gratitude to Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey about his honor.

Shades of Emmet. Yet Casement was also writing to Irish friends about "Anglo-Britannic swine," about "the Bitch and Harlot of the North Sea." What had happened to Casement? Author MacColl suggests that some snub in the Foreign Office probably set Casement on his devious course, for he was an "oick," i.e., a social outsider. Given the man's pride, ambition, quixotic brilliance and genuine Irish patriotism, this theory is as likely as any other. Yet most of the details of Casement's attempt to win Irish independence were absurd. When he went to Germany (via the U.S.) early in World War I. to recruit an "Irish Brigade" of war prisoners to fight against the British, the men turned up their honest noses at him.

When Casement finally landed in Kerry on his ill-fated expedition, he seems to have been near despair, guessing that the scheduled Easter Rising was foredoomed to failure. He actually hoped to prevent it, but it was too late. Foiled and captured, he had only one role left: to die. He did that in style. During his trial. Casement's main preoccupation was the speech he would make from the dock. It came out very well, almost as well as that of Robert Emmet to whom the Irish in America had often compared him.

Line of Martyrs. His partisans have often called Casement's sentence and execution a "judicial assassination,'' yet there is a dark blot on his martyr's shroud--the Black Diaries, "200 pages of concentrated erotica," found in his lodgings. If authentic, the diaries proved Casement probably the most industrious sodomite since the days of Heliogabalus. According to Casement's supporters, the diaries were forged, possibly by the British, to destroy Casement's image as a patriot-martyr. The diaries were clearly in his handwriting; Casement's defenders contend implausibly that they were in fact written by someone else but copied--for some obscure reason --in Casement's own hand. Biographer MacColl's conclusion: the diaries were Casement's own.

Apart from its inherent drama, the Casement story is compelling today because it raised political passions as strong as those later provoked by a Klaus Fuchs or an Alger Hiss. Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton ringingly defended Casement. Others, including Poet Alfred Noyes, equally ringingly denounced him (this year, at 77, Poet Noyes published an emotional book reversing his earlier stand). It may have been a kind of Irish Faust who disappeared through the trap on the gallows of Pentonville Prison. Yet objective readers of Author MacColl's biography must agree that he was truly and justly hanged for treason. For the rest of the long line of Irish martyrs, Roger Casement must make unfortunate if intriguing company.

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