1916
Page 9
The problem with Redmond’s interpretation of events was that his party’s view of the rebels, before the bulk of the executions and before the mass arrests in the provinces, was already ambivalent. The rebels were not universally damned as criminals. Instead, distinctions were made between the mass of the rebels in Dublin and their leaders, and between the Irish Volunteers and the socialist Citizen Army. Moreover, those who were to blame for the Rising were not Irish nationalists, but more traditional enemies – Carson, the UVF, the war office, Dublin Castle, the British government – together with the new bogeymen, Larkinite socialists. The rebellion was condemned not as a crime, but on the pragmatic grounds that it was bound to be defeated. The risk that it would be seen as a general Irish uprising, alienating English opinion and jeopardising home rule, was immediately identified, but in creating this danger the rebels were seen as foolish, not malicious. This latent sympathy for the rebels was quickly expressed by nationalists who, before the Rising, had already been disenchanted with the war, fearful of conscription, resentful of Ireland’s unfavourable treatment relative to ‘England’ and supportive of local ‘political prisoners’.
Before the Rising, the bulk of provincial nationalist opinion lagged well behind John Redmond in his enthusiasm for Ireland’s participation in the war, even though the vast majority of nationalists still pledged loyalty to Redmond as their leader. After the Rising, Redmond’s view of the world came even more adrift from those of his now-diminishing body of followers. Redmond was mistaken in his interpretation of the events of 1916. Ireland was not ‘violently wrenched away from the normal’ by the Rising; instead ‘the normal’, of angry, anglophobic nationalism, had been confirmed.
On 6 May, the Sligo Champion published a detailed eye-witness account of events in Dublin by local man and commercial traveller Matthew Flanagan, who was interviewed by the paper’s editor, James Flynn. Flynn (secretary of the north Sligo UIL executive) would remain loyal to the Irish party throughout the war and, like so many local editors, was never slow to suppress news and views that were politically inconvenient to him. What is remarkable is that the Champion on this occasion devoted several columns to an account, Flanagan’s, which was clearly sympathetic to the rebels. Those rebels seen by Flanagan ‘did all their work with amazingly systematic method’. They paid properly for any premises that they occupied. Damage was considerable, as might be expected when the military began to shell the Volunteers. ‘A great many people who had no connection with the matter were detained.’ Asked by Flynn whether he knew any of the men killed, Flanagan replied: ‘Yes, they were a splendid class of men … they appeared to be respectable citizens.’ Flanagan continued:
Even though these unfortunate men have been errant and foolish, they still claim our earnest consideration and protection. You know, Mr Flynn, blood will ever flow thicker than water.79
THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND
THE RISING: MODE, MOMENT
AND MEMORY
____________
Keith Jeffery
The aim of this paper is to sketch out – to use a fancy word – a ‘holistic’ exploration of what might be termed the ‘parallel narratives’ of the 1916 Rising and the First World War, what I described in Ireland and the Great War as ‘parallel texts’, in which the similarities of experience might be more significant than the differences, great though they were in political (and other) terms.1 But, to be sure, these are unusual parallels, for, unlike the parallel lines we learned about at school, which never meet (that is the point – or lack of it – I suppose) these parallel lines or parallel narratives, intersect, mingle, intertwine, and insinuate themselves in each other.
My contention is that the Rising cannot be understood outwith, or separated from, the broader context of the First World War, that European (and, indeed, global) catastrophe, whose shadow falls across the history of the first quarter of the twentieth century. This is not to say that the Easter Rising is not itself a unique, specifically Irish event, in its conception, implementation and legacy. Of course it is. All historical events are unique and specific, and there is much to be learned from a close exploration of the detail and specifically ‘Irish’ dimension of the Rising.2 Most accounts of 1916 understandably have a primarily local perspective, and there will be much of this, and rightly so, over the anniversary year of 2006. But the issue raises a general problem for all historians, of whatever subject or period, which is how to balance the specific and the general. Too much of the former may provide fascinating ‘micro-history’, and no doubt there is interest in studying the pin-points of paint in a Pointillist picture, but one also needs to stand back to get a sense of the whole picture, the wider perspective, if you like. On the other hand, the danger of being too broad and too general is the loss of the particular, unique character of any historical event, its specificity and its essence. So, a balance must be struck between the general and the particular, the broad and the narrow (perhaps ‘focused’ would be a better word), till we get a complete (or something approaching it) picture of the matter under discussion.
With this in mind, I want to examine the events of 1916 and thereabouts, and their legacy, in the broader context of the First World War. This war, asserted one reluctant participant in Ireland, ‘broke, like a blaze of light’ and all was ‘suddenly turned vital, and invested with reality’.3 Thus we will investigate the ‘vitality’ and ‘reality’ of the time, exploring in turn the themes of mode, moment and memory.
MODE
War, as Karl von Clausewitz famously observed, is ‘nothing but the continuation of policy with the admixture of other means’.4 This oft-quoted (usually wrongly as ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’) aphorism suggests that there is a ‘seamless robe’ of political activity, that war does not spring from nowhere, from some political vacuum, and that the resort to arms can be understood as just one point along a spectrum of possible political activity. For individuals and groups to contemplate political violence, and to accept both the possibility and the potential legitimacy of war, moreover, an environment needs to exist within which violence is an acceptable policy option. This is as much a social matter as it is political, or even philosophical, and some writers have pointed to the progressive militarisation of Europe and European society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as powerfully contributing to the likelihood of war.
By the beginning of the twentieth century every significant power in Europe, apart from the United Kingdom, had embraced compulsory military service, and was able to mobilise mass, conscript armies in defence of perceived national interests. The rise of mass society, underpinned by the staggering changes resulting from industrialisation, urbanisation and steady economic development, and the relentless advance of nationalist ideologies, through which the ‘nation-state’ had come to be seen as the highest form of human political organisation, produced a situation where nationality and democracy had come closely to be identified, with the obligations of one balanced by the rights of the other. Military conscription, thus, became the corollary of universal manhood suffrage. For the ruling classes, moreover, military service appeared to offer a way of controlling and disciplining the turbulent, threatening urban masses of the industrial age.5
But many people willingly embraced military, and militaristic, ideals. Political groups on both the left and right asserted the benefits of military organisation and discipline, and, all across Europe, men were increasingly to be seen in uniform. Even Britain, with its longstanding distrust of standing armies and military power, was affected by the lure of military service, which might help resist the challenges of industrial mass society. Much of this was ‘muscular christianity’, with the Salvation Army and Boys’ Brigade in the vanguard. Sabine Baring-Gould’s stirring hymn hit the spot precisely: ‘Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war … Like a mighty army, moves the Church of God’.6 Robert Baden Powell’s more secular Boy Scout movement was specifically designed to harness and direct the energies of mo
dern (and potentially decadent) British youth into constructive and patriotic military activities.7
Ireland, of course, was not at all immune from this tendency, as David Fitzpatrick has demonstrated with his customary eye for telling detail.8 To the British paramilitary organisations may be added specifically Irish ones, such as Fianna Éireann (founded in Belfast by Bulmer Hobson in 1902), all sustained by the rising tide of militarism in Europe. The apotheosis of militarism (or should that be paramilitarism?) in Ireland came with the unionist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) of 1913 and its nationalist shadow, the Irish Volunteers, established eleven months later. In the early twenty first century it is often asserted that the Irish are ‘good Europeans’, reflecting and embracing the manners and mores of our continental colleagues. So, too, was the case in the early twentieth century. The UVF and the Irish Volunteers were not just sturdy Irish associations, with indigenous origins and embodying purely local political aspirations, but they were part of a European-wide phenomenon, in which many men (and some women) opted to bear arms in proud support of their national political aspirations.
In Ireland and Britain enlistment to such paramilitary organisations was massively outstripped by the ‘rush to the colours’ after the outbreak of the First World War. One of the great conundrums of the history of this period is how to explain the apparently inexplicable situation when extraordinarily large numbers of men across Ireland and Britain volunteered to serve in the armed forces of the United Kingdom. Although recent scholarship has shown that, across Europe, the ‘spirit of 1914’ was not so unwaveringly warlike as has been supposed, the numbers of recruits are extremely impressive and need explanation.9 Over 140,000 Irishmen volunteered to join the armed services during the First World War.10 Of these some 50,000 joined in the first six months, from August 1914 to February 1915, clearly reflecting the greatest intensity of ‘war enthusiasm’. But 90,000 men enlisted in the succeeding forty five months – 10,000 in July to November 1918 alone – and any explanatory model for the extraordinary resilience of Irish recruitment in the context of changing Irish political circumstances will have to come up with something better than an explanation which ascribes it to a kind of patriotic social tsunami which swept men willy-nilly away to the war.
The discussion of recruitment offered in Ireland and the Great War challenges the simplistic assumption that everyone joined up in August 1914 and that they did so in a sort of Pavlovian response to the political bugle-call of deluded and war-inflamed leaders. It seeks to demonstrate that this phenomenon was not at all simple, and that there were multiple motivations for enlistment: social, economic, fraternal, personal, psychological, idiosyncratic, as well as ‘patriotic’. A good Cork example of how an individual might explain why he joined up is Tom Barry, the later IRA commander, who claimed that a simple desire for adventure was a powerful motive. For many at home the war offered excitement and the chance of glorious opportunity. Barry enlisted in June 1915. Seventeen years old, he said he ‘had decided to see what this Great War was like … I went to the war for no other reason than that I wanted to see what war was like, to get a gun, to see new countries and to feel like a grown man’.11 This was nearly a year after the war had started, and, among other things, provides some evidence that the recruiting rush of the early days does not tell the whole story.
Nor does enlistment in the forces of the Crown tell the whole story of Irish military recruitment during the First World War. For if the very many (mostly) young men of 1914 and 1915 rallied to the military call and marched off to war, like Gadarene swine, or lemmings (or whatever suitably dismissive simile you may choose), so too, surely, did the young men of 1916. As the men of Ulster – and the rest – marched towards the Somme – and Gallipoli – to an apocalyptic soldier glory, so too did those Volunteers who seized the GPO on Easter Monday in 1916. And both groups, we may hazard, were swallowed up by the violence they embraced, whatever their motivation.
In Ireland and the Great War it is, moreover, suggested that the reasons for enlisting on the rebel side might be just as multi-faceted as for those who went away to war; that the forces which propelled men like Garrett FitzGerald’s father into the Volunteers and the GPO might not be so very different as those which propelled other young men into the 16th (Irish) division and the trenches of the western front. There has sometimes been an easy assumption that while the latter were simply afflicted by a ‘surge of naïve patriotism’, the former were seized of a much higher calling, a ‘surge of sophisticated patriotism’ (certainly not any sort of ‘narrow nationalism’), one might suppose, responding to a legitimate appeal for ‘national’ service.12 It seems to me, however, that there are secular and even venal motivations for enlistment on both sides; that, for example, adventure, comradeship, political ambition, and so on, might plausibly be advanced as factors for joining the Volunteers as much as, say, the Munster Fusiliers.
This is not to say that patriotic and political motives did not matter. Of course they did, but they do not alone, or in every case, provide a complete explanation for enlistment. The explanation for such a complex phenomenon as joining up lies in combinations of motives, with varying intensity in individual cases. It may also be observed that the reasons offered, both at the time and afterwards, may also vary. Looking back to 1914–18 and 1916, modern commentators have tended (outside Ulster) to downplay the political motivations of those who joined the British army. The prevailing orthodoxy in nationalist Ireland is that no true Irishman could possibly have joined the British army for patriotic and legitimate Irish reasons, or even (horrible thought) for a species of British loyalty. The favoured, ‘secular’, explanation is economic. ‘Taking the King’s shilling’ was just that. It was, as James Connolly asserted at the time, merely ‘economic conscription’.13 On the other hand, the political dimension of enlistment in the rebel cause has generally been amplified. Inevitably this reflected the changing political situation in Ireland where, naturally enough, ‘lower’ reasons were asserted for joining the British side, and ‘higher’ for the Irish.
The historian of enlistment also has to beware of too ready an acceptance of veterans’ explanations for their actions. Their stories about why they joined up – on whatever side – may also be inflected by subsequent, and changing, political circumstance. Tom Barry’s explanation, cited above, was published some thirty years after the event. His story may be true, and very probably is, but let us for a moment speculate that in 1915 an additional reason might have been a faith in John Redmond’s assurance that joining up was a patriotic duty and would be good for Ireland. It seems improbable that, whatever might have been the case in 1915, a distinguished IRA veteran would admit to any such thing a generation later in an utterly changed Ireland. Barry’s explanation makes very good sense for the late 1940s, whether or not it is also true for the actual time of enlistment.
MOMENT
If the prevailing militarism of Europe and Ireland provided the context and mode for mobilisation of all sorts, the actual events of the war, too, powerfully accelerated the possibility of ‘physical force’ action in Ireland. The First World War provided both the opportunity for the Irish republican rising of Easter 1916, as well as a suitably violent model for political action. The split in the Irish Volunteers of September 1914, following Redmond’s commitment in his famous speech at Woodenbridge, Co. Wick-low, of ‘Young Ireland’ (as he put it) to the cause of Britain and ‘gallant little Belgium’, moreover, released the militants from the tedious necessity of having to argue their case with moderate, constitutional nationalists.14
Declaring that since the anti-Redmond Volunteers ‘may be depended upon to act vigorously, courageously, promptly, and unitedly if the opportunity comes’, Pearse believed that ‘we are at the moment in an immensely stronger position than ever before’. Calculating in a characteristically airy fashion that the support of 10–15,000 men might be forthcoming, he asserted with superb confidence that ‘this small, compact, perfectly disciplined, determined
separatist force is infinitely more valuable than the unwieldy, loosely-held-together mixum-gatherum force we had before the split.’15 Pearse, too, was increasingly refreshed and invigorated by the dramatic and heroic events of the western front. ‘The last sixteen months,’ he wrote in December 1915, ‘have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth.’ The crucial motivating factor – and one, of course, which could transform Ireland – was patriotism:
It is patriotism that stirs the people. Belgium defending her soil is heroic, and so is Turkey fighting with her back to Constantinople. It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.16
Although James Connolly scornfully rejected this specific sanguine vision, he thought that Irish working class rebellion, especially against so great an imperial power as England, might precipitate the general toppling of capitalism.17 He had his own battle in mind. ‘Starting thus,’ he wrote at the beginning of the war, ‘Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last war lord.’18
Pearse’s apparently bloodthirsty remarks, and the way he appeared to embrace the slaughter of the war, might be criticised – at the very least – for simply being in terribly bad taste. These days, moreover, outside the armed services (and there usually only in private), or perhaps on some sporting occasions, it is felt inappropriate to celebrate, or commend, or luxuriate in the inspiration, excitement, exhilaration, or even joy, of conflict. But this may well be at a loss to our historical understanding. As I have already tried to demonstrate, Pearse was not speaking in some social or political vacuum. Lots of his contemporaries (in Ireland and elsewhere) were similarly touched by the insane intoxification of violence, and many welcomed the war, from the usual suspects like Rupert Brooke and Laurence Binyon to the Italian radical artists of the Vorticist movement, along with English fellow-travellers like Wyndham Lewis, to folk much nearer home.19 ‘War,’ declared a Belfast Methodist early in the conflict, ‘is a kind of purgatory. It is a painful but salutary remedy for softness, slackness and sensuality.’20 Just a month after the war had started the Church of Ireland primate, Archbishop Crozier of Armagh, affirmed ‘from all seeming ill God will work out good’. ‘Religion,’ he asserted, ‘will become a great factor in human life, and the breaking up of German aggressive militarism will bring a long and lasting peace.’21 Towards the end of 1914 Crozier’s colleague, James Keene, the bishop of Meath, while deploring the human cost of the war, echoed the theme of purification: ‘We believe that this fiery trial will prove to be a purifying discipline. If it leads to a moral and spiritual renewal of our nation the loss will end in gain.’22 In April 1915 the Catholic Bishop Sheehan of Waterford and Lismore affirmed the patriotic necessity of taking part in the conflict. ‘The war,’ he wrote, ‘is not an English war alone or a French or a Belgian war. It is an Irish war to save our country and our people from ruin and misery.’23 In September 1916, while appealing for more priests to come forward to serve as military chaplains, Cardinal Logue, the Catholic primate, wrote of ‘the imperishable glory which Irish Catholic soldiers have won for their country’.24