by Joe Power
Overall, from Glynn’s list, about 15 per cent of the soldiers and sailors of Kilrush died in the war. This is consistent with the average mortality rate among all the belligerent nations during the war. If we take McCarthy’s fatality list of Clare casualties in the Great War as accurate and apply the 15 per cent mortality rate to the 504 names on that list, then we can estimate that about 3,300 Clare-born people enlisted. This is not an unreasonable assumption, if we accept that about 1,200 came from the towns of Ennis and Kilrush alone. On the other hand, if we accept Burnell’s list of over 600 casualties and apply the 15 per cent mortality rate, then it would seem that over 4,000 men of Clare origin enlisted in the war. This is much higher than Fitzpatrick’s estimate. Overall, therefore, it would seem that 3-4 per cent of the county population taken at the census of 1911, had enlisted in the British forces.
The majority of those who enlisted seem to have come from the ‘working classes’. About 80 per cent of those on C.E. Glynn’s list of Kilrush veterans are described as ‘general labourers’. Perhaps their motives for enlistment were mercenary, as many of them may have been unemployed, or in low wage employment, or indeed in abject poverty. The prospect of regular pay was attractive for men who were unemployed or under-employed. Privates would earn a shilling a day, ‘all found’. Furthermore, their wives and families would also benefit. Wives of soldiers would receive 12s and 6d per week, with 5s for the first child, 3s 6d for the second and 2s for each extra child. Pensions for wholly disabled men were between 25s and 40s a week; ‘separation money’ was welcome in towns such as Kilrush. One Kilrush man, Michael ‘Robineen’ Gallagher, who enlisted early in the war said that he joined up because ‘there was nothing in Kilrush only poverty in 1914, I joined for no other reason than to have a job … it was the only way, there was nothing here, England before the 1914 war was no better’.13
Mercenary motives alone cannot explain why men enlisted and the matter was much more complex. Some may have been inspired by a moral duty to fight for the Catholics of Belgium following the many appeals by churchmen and politicians on behalf of Catholic Belgium. Many followed ‘Redmond’s call’, believing that by joining an Irish regiment they would help to secure Home Rule. Some may have joined up for a sense of adventure. Others may have been persuaded by their friends, for example those who joined the ‘Pals Battalion’ – the 7th Dublin Fusiliers. Many left secure employment positions to join up, with the promise that they would, if they survived be re-hired, or get preference for jobs.14
Some, especially those from the Protestant minority of Clare, enlisted from a sense of duty and loyalty to their king and country. The memorial brass plate for Capt. Robert H. Cullinan of Bindon Street, Ennis in the local Church of Ireland church states that he died ‘for king and country’. Addressing the annual synod of the united dioceses of Killaloe and Kilfenora in September 1915, the Rt Revd Dr T. Sterling Berry observed that there were few families who had not given members to serve in the forces. He said that there were about 400 members of the Church from the united dioceses – that is from the dioceses of Killaloe and Kilfenora, who were serving in the army or the navy. This was a very high proportion of that cohort of the population. It suggests that almost all of the adult male population of military age must have joined the services, and only the very young and the elderly remained behind. Nevertheless, he said that there were many lingering at home from an ‘apathetic indifference’.
Dr Berry had warned that ‘conscientious scruples about warfare should not be a cloak for apathy, cowardice or greed’. ‘They should make it clear’, he said, ‘that selfish apathy, unmanly cowardice and worldly-minded greed were sins against God, as well as blots and blemishes on human character.’ Dr Berry paid tribute in 1916 to those who gave their lives in the Great War: ‘We mourn the loss of so many brave sons of our empire, who in obedience to the call of duty counted not their lives dear to them in order to fulfil the task to which their patriotism and loyalty summoned them’.15
Many descendants of the landed gentry of Clare had come from families with a long military tradition. Some of the young men from this background may also have enlisted from a sense of adventure. T.R. Henn from Paradise House, Kildysart wrote: ‘The war … left little mark on my life, except that my brother, my Gore-Hickman cousins – in fact, all the young men among the ‘gentry’ of the west – joined immediately, having no need or compulsion, for the unreasoning adventure of it. By 1916 many of them were dead, among them my first cousin. My brother was three weeks wounded and missing at Suvla Bay with the 7th Munsters’.16
Undoubtedly, many were reluctant to enlist, they belonged to several categories, those who seceded from Redmond’s National Volunteers to form the Irish Volunteers; then there were ‘the shirkers’ and ‘slackers’, and, finally, those who were of farming stock. At the outset, there were, according to Inspector Gelston’s testimony to the Royal Commission on the 1916 Rising, only about 300 or 400 Irish Volunteers in the county in September 1914, who refused to follow ‘Redmond’s call’, with many others sympathising; but this number probably increased sharply after Easter 1916.
Mr Gelston also observed in June 1916 that ‘recruitment was very good in County Clare, especially among the labouring classes and in the towns, but there was no recruiting at all from the farming classes’. Col C.E. Whitton, historian of the 16th Irish, Leinster Regiment, wrote that recruiting in Ireland had been confined largely to two classes, the gentry and the town labourers – ‘the farmers’ sons and the “shop boy” class were conspicuous by their scarcity’.17
As Jeffery, observed, ‘rural prosperity undermined the economic impulse to enlist’.18 Puirseil adds another group who were reluctant to enlist: ‘in effect, it was the Protestants and working class men who joined the colours, while middle class Catholics largely abstained’.19
Nor law nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds.20
Those who fought in the First World War were brave men, who faced death on a daily basis with great courage in what Siegfried Sassoon called ‘the desolation of the trenches’.21 The contemporary accounts all testified to their bravery and gallantry under fire. Maj. Bryan Mahon, Commander of the 29th Brigade at Gallipoli, wrote of them in 1918: ‘Never in history did Irishmen face death with greater courage and endurance than they did at Gallipoli and Serbia in the summer and winter of 1915 … Ireland will not easily forget the deeds of the 10th Irish Division at Gallipoli.’22 However, the sacrifices at Gallipoli seemed all in vain, as Harris observed: ‘To Ireland, Gallipoli means V Beach, the River Clyde collier and the 10th Irish Division … it was a disastrous failure, hopeless bravery, a useless slaughter of brave men … It cost the British empire more than 200,000 dead and it achieved nothing’.23 Commander Guy Nightingale wrote ‘two splendid Irish regiments were wiped out, reduced from more than 2,000 to 778 men’.24
The bravery of the men who fought on the Western Front was also well documented, as Gen. Sir Douglas Haig, commander-in-chief of the British Army wrote, ‘Irish regiments which took part in the capture of Guillemont behaved with the greatest dash and gallantry, and took no small share in the success gained that day.’ Willie Redmond recorded, ‘A captured German officer declared that his people believed that Ginchy could not be taken, but’, he added, ‘you attacked us with devils not men, no one could withstand them!’25
Bryan Cooper had observed in 1918, ‘Ireland will not easily forget the deeds of the 10th Irish Division at Gallipoli.’ However, the sacrifices by the Irish at Gallipoli and on the Western Front have been largely forgotten or ignored by successive Irish generations. As Denman observed, ‘After the armistice the veterans returned to an Ireland little prepared to give them a heroes welcome … the men of 1916 and the War of Independence were regarded as heroes, patriots and martyrs, while the men of the Somme and Gallipoli were ignored and forgotten … the fate of 35,000 dead was largely ignored’.
26
However, while the sacrifices of the men who fought in the war may have been largely ignored, some traces of that terrible conflict are found in the place names of a few scattered locations around the county, where names such as ‘Shellshock’ and the ‘Dardanelles’ are still used. ‘Shellshock’ is an unofficial name for the townland of Ballynote West in Kilrush, where presumably, ex-soldiers suffering from shellshock were housed after the war. The ‘Dardanelles’ is a name used to describe a back lane called The Creggaun in Clare Castle, where ex-soldiers lived. There is also a place called ‘The Dardanelles’ in Newmarket-on-Fergus where some First World War veterans were housed in cottages erected for disabled ex-servicemen. It was located near the Catholic church in the village.
Stephen Gwynn MP, speaking in London to the Irish Literary Society in London shortly after the death of Willie Redmond asked a few pertinent questions about the indifference of Irish society towards the soldiers in 1917: ‘perhaps now in the face of Maj. Redmond’s death, the Irish people will make up their minds what is their attitude towards the troops who are fighting in the name of Ireland. Is Ireland going to be proud of the Irish troops, or is she going to be ashamed of them? Are the Irish soldiers to be set down as West Britons? And were the real heroes those who stayed at home?’
Gwynn wrote after the war; ‘And when the time comes to rejoice over the war’s ending was there anything more tragic than the position of men who had gone out by the thousands for the sake of Ireland to confront the greatest military power ever known in history, who had fought the war and won the war, and who now looked at each other with doubtful eyes’.27
It was indeed to be the tragic fate of the Irishmen who fought and died in the Great War to be largely ignored and forgotten by Irish society. They were eclipsed by the men of 1916 and those who fought in the War of Independence. It is right and proper that the bravery of the men of 1916 and the War of Independence should be honoured and celebrated, but not at the expense of those thousands of brave Clare men who fought in the First World War.
Willie Redmond wrote an article for Irish Life published on 11 May 1917, about a month before he died, asserting that the combatants in the war would not be forgotten. ‘When the war is over, the names of those who fight for all that life makes worthwhile will be remembered with gratitude by generations yet unborn … for the two Irish divisions, the 16th Irish and the 36th Ulster, undivided in their splendid devotion to the cause they believed just, there will ever be gratitude and honour in Ireland, no matter what will be said to the contrary’.28
In a letter to his solicitor Willie Redmond justified his attitude towards the war, ‘If I should die abroad I shall die a true Irish Catholic, humbly hoping for mercy from God, through the intercession of His blessed mother, whose help I have ever implored throughout my life. I should like all my friends to know that in joining the Irish Brigade and in going to France, I sincerely believed, as all Irish soldiers do, that I was doing my best for the welfare of Ireland in every way’.29
Willie Redmond, like tens of thousand of Irishmen who fought in the First World War, genuinely believed that he was fighting for Ireland’s cause. He believed that Home Rule was virtually achieved in 1914 and that Ireland had a duty to fight for the empire and the freedom of small nations such as Belgium in a great struggle for civilisation against the threat from Imperial Germany. While many people in Ireland and Clare may have shared those views, what Jeffery called ‘naïve patriotism’, in 1914, support for those views rapidly evaporated within a couple of years, especially after the 1916 Rising.30
After the Great War ended the survivors returned to an Ireland that was radically different to the country they left when they had enlisted. When they departed for the front line they may have received accolades in the newspapers and been cheered off at railway stations and at ports as heroes and patriots, fighting a gallant cause. However, this was not the case when they returned. The mood of the country had changed and men in British uniforms, perhaps the only clothes they had worn for years, were not welcomed home by cheering crowds as heroes, victorious in the war.
This was in marked contrast to the treatment of the men and women who took part in the 1916 Rising. Immediately after the Rising they were reviled and abused by hostile crowds as they were shipped out as prisoners to England. However, about eight months later, they were welcomed home as patriotic heroes by thousands of supporters.
The Irish Volunteers and Sinn Féin now dominated the political life of the country after the general election of 1918. The ex-soldiers and sailors were now being viewed with suspicion, men who had served with an alien force. They were stigmatised. The returning servicemen were traumatised, demoralised and disillusioned by their wartime experiences, which now seemed all in vain, and they were rejected, or ignored at home. The population in general did not wish to publicly acknowledge their heroic struggles and sacrifices. The British Army was perceived by the majority of the Irish people as being an enemy force, and the Great War veterans were tainted by association with it.
The ex-servicemen who returned to Ireland seemed unable to discuss their traumatic experiences. For about twenty years after the war ended some Great War veterans marched from the British Legion Hall in Ennis to church services on Remembrance Day, but these parades gradually faded away as the number of surviving veterans declined.
Many of the people of Ireland, during the years of the War of Independence and later were not interested in their story. The effect of all this was that there was a great silence about the war in Ireland. It was not publicly discussed and the men who survived it were reluctant to talk about their experiences. Ireland, for the Great War veterans, was not ‘a country fit for heroes’. Perhaps the horrors of war had psychologically damaged them and many probably suffered what we now know as ‘post traumatic stress disorder’. Few wrote their memoirs and many must have suffered in silence.
While one war was ending, some men of Clare, with very different motivations, were preparing to fight a totally different kind of war for Ireland’s cause, this time on Irish soil. The War of Independence was about to commence. The new heroes in the Ireland of the post-war years were the Irish republicans, who had fought the British in the 1916 Rising and in the War of Independence.
As time went on the great silence intensified, especially after de Valera came to power in 1932, when anti-British sentiment increased. During the Economic War and later the Emergency Years, when Ireland was neutral in the Second Word War, the sacrifices of the Great War seemed to be irrelevant and most Irish people preferred to forget that awful conflict and the heroism of the men who fought in it. The sacrifices of the Protestant gentry and the Catholic working class men of urban Ireland were ignored in a republican bourgeois Ireland. Their struggle was air-brushed out of the public consciousness. This was their tragedy. Whatever the motivation, each man’s decision to enlist in the British forces fighting in the Great War was personal and voluntary. Their contribution has been ignored for too long. The brave men who fought in the battles at Etreoux, Guillemont, Ginchy, Gallipoli and indeed many other battles on land, sea and in the air during the Great War deserve to be remembered.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.31
Notes
1. Fanning, Ronan, op cit., p.134.
2. See Jenkins, Philip, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (City?) Harper One, 2014). According to Jenkins, religion is central to an understanding of the war and the war triggered a global religious revolution.
3. Jeffery, op. cit., p31, citing E.E. Lysaght in Russell, G; Riordan, E.J.; Lysaght, E.E., and Malone, A., ‘Four Years of Irish Economics, 1914-1918’, in Studies, 7 June 1918, pp.310-327.
4. Fitzpatrick, D., Politics and Irish life, pp.90-91.
5. Crowe, Des, For the Record, Clare GA
A 1887-2002 (published privately, 2002), pp. 81 and 133; See also O’Reilly, Seamus, Clare GAA, the Club Scene, 1887-2010 (Ennis, privately published, 2010). See the years 1912-1924 in both hurling and football.
6. McCarthy, Daniel, op. cit., Appendix 1, pp 165-174.
7. Burnell, Tom,The Clare War Dead, passim.
8. Fitzpatrick, David, Politics and Irish Life, 1913-21 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977), pp.110, 315.
9. Based on the lists of Clare war dead compiled and published by Browne, Burnell and McCarthy, op. cit.
10. Casey, P., ‘Irish Casualties in the First World War’, in Irish Sword, Vol. XX, 1996-7, Journal of the Military History Society of Ireland, edited by Harman Murtagh, pp.193-205.
11. Glynn Papers, list compiled by Mr Glynn, on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918. H.R. Glynn to Redmond, 8 August 1914; H.R. Glynn to Birrell, 29 August 1914; H.R. Glynn to Vice Admiral at Queenstown, 11 March, 1915; H.R. Glynn to Maj. Ievers, 18 March 1915; Maj. H.H. Ievers to H.R. Glynn, 20 March 1915; H.R. Glynn to Admiralty London, 30 March 1915, and H.R. Glynn to Lloyd George, 1 April 1915.
12. Martin Staunton, ‘Kilrush County Clare and the Royal Munster Fusiliers,’ in The Irish Sword, Vol. XVI, 1984-6, pp 268-271.
13. Paul O’Brien, Provincial Recruitment in the First World War: The Glynn’s of Kilrush Co. Clare, in www. military heritage.ie/. Paul O’Brien, military-trust-article, July 2013, citing an interview that Michael Gallagher had with Sean Dunleavy in the CC, 2 August 1985.
14. SR, 20 March 1915; CJ, 4 November 1915. My late father, Bernard Power, from Clare Castle told me that his brother John was a dental student at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and that the reason he joined the army was that his friends encouraged him to join them in the ‘Pals’ battalion, and perhaps infected by their enthusiasm, he joined the 10th Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Another brother, Timothy, probably enlisted for the same reason, or perhaps was inspired by his brother John to join up for a sense of adventure in the ‘war fever’ atmosphere of 1914 and 1915.