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Letter from Robert Monteith (1880-1956) to Roger Casement (1864-1916) from Zossen, Germany. Monteith was the commander of the Irish Brigade, appointed by Casement. Casement had spent seventeen months in Germany attempting to secure German support for an uprising in Ireland and raising an ultimately unsuccessful brigade of Irish soldiers in German prisoner of war camps. Casement had been become disillusioned with German assistance and marginalized from the plans for the Rising. He believed there should be no rising without sufficient German support and when he realised that it was going ahead with only a small supply of German arms, a month after this letter was written, he traveled to Ireland to prevent it from taking place. The Germans supplied a submarine to transport Casement, Monteith and Sergeant Beverly (Daniel Bailey) to Ireland but Casement and Beverly were captured after they landed in Kerry on the eve of the Easter Rising. Casement was hanged for treason in London in August 1916. This letter refers to the acquisition of machine guns for the Irish Brigade. Monteith reports that he was beginning drill with the guns but regrets the delay in receiving them as they had not been issued with formal authority to take them. There is also a handwritten note by Casement about the issuing of the guns.
The data in these XML files was generated based on a data dump from the Magellan database (https://github.com/Maynooth-Center-for-Digital-Humanities/Magellan). Each database record has been converted to a JSON file (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/json). The element section of the JSON file contains the TEI-encoded contents of the letters. The TEI XML has been cleaned and made well-formed using a Python script (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/src).