Publisher's Synopsis
The date was the 21st of March, 1916. It was the usual Wilhelmshaven prize weather, blowing great guns, squalls chasing one another across the sea, grim, blue-gray clouds scudding unceasingly across the sky, while the rain battered on the window-panes and threatened at every fiercer gust to burst them in. I was just in from a spell of outpost duty, and was looking forward to a very comfortable day indoors, when some one hammered at the knocker. It was an orderly, bringing an urgent message from my chief. I looked a second time at the address; but there was no mistake about it. My chief wished to see me at 5 p.m. As a rule, these formal invitations from the great boded no good to the recipient. 'All the officers have had them, sir, ' said the orderly, who perhaps guessed my thoughts. Thank Heaven, then, there was, at any rate, no need to worry as to what crime I had committed. But I could not help wondering what was in the wind.... The long tramp in the streaming rain was well repaid. Our flotilla had had orders to supply a volunteer crew-one officer, five warrant and petty officers, and sixteen men-for special service, an expedition about the goal and purpose of which nothing could for the present, for military reasons, be allowed to become known. The utmost dispatch had been enjoined. On 20 March 1916 Spindler was given instructions by his senior officer to undertake a highly secret and dangerous mission on board a disguised merchant ship and to pick five officers and a crew of 16 to join him on the journey. He was given command of a vessel named Libau, [2] a captured British vessel formerly named "Castro" and informed that it was to be falsely flagged as a Norwegian freighter and carry a cargo of weapons to the West Coast of Ireland along with a passenger, Sir Roger Casement. It was part of a plan to land German arms in Ireland to assist Irish republicans in staging what would become the 1916 Rising. Spindler travelled to Berlin for further orders and met Casement there. However Casement preferred to travel on board a submarine which would accompany the Libau which was to be renamed the Aud, the name of a real Norwegian ship, once it went to sea. Casement was later put ashore at Banna Strand in Co. Kerry from the submarine by means of a small collapsible boat. However Casement was arrested soon afterwards on Good Friday, 21 April 1916, and taken prisoner in the Tower of London on charges of High Treason against the United Kingdom. He was subsequently executed by hanging at Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916.
