1916
Page 10
Pearse, thus, was not the only person to perceive some positive benefits from the blood-letting of the battlefields. For him and his ilk, moreover, the fighting at Gallipoli and on the western front made violence more likely at home, not just by the example set, but also through the handy belief that ‘England’s extremity is Ireland’s opportunity’. It followed, too, that England’s enemy might be Ireland’s friend. Sir Roger Casement, among others, sought to secure practical German assistance for Irish republican endeavours, and the planning for the Rising assumed that there would be such help. The Proclamation which Pearse himself read at the start of the Rising recorded the support of ‘gallant allies in Europe’. But, as we know, although a German ship, the Aud , indeed arrived off the west coast of Ireland with a cargo of arms, it was intercepted by the Royal Navy and scuttled on Good Friday. The same day Sir Roger Casement was landed in Co. Kerry from a German submarine – his mission ironically was to try to prevent the planned rising on the grounds that insufficient German assistance was being provided – but he was quickly captured and later executed for treason.
Yet the failure of Berlin to help out was not at all apparent to the authorities (or the general public) at the time, and the Rising was, quite understandably, widely seen as a mainly German-inspired affair. John Redmond denounced the Rising as a ‘German invasion of Ireland, as brutal, as selfish, as cynical as Germany’s invasion of Belgium’.25 The fighting in Dublin was seen as just another part of the Europe-wide battle front. As one soldier, who had seen a comrade die by his side during the attack on the City Hall, said: ‘The only thing which made it possible to bear was the certainty they were fighting Germany as truly as if they were in France.’26 Some soldiers, it is said, even thought they were in France. There is the (possibly apocryphal) story of the British reinforcements landing at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) and discovering to their surprise that the natives spoke English.27 The parallel with the western front extended into the aftermath of the Rising, when the destruction in Dublin was commonly compared to that in Flanders: ‘Ypres on the Liffey’ was a caption in one illustrated souvenir pamphlet.28
The assumption, moreover, that the Rising was part of the wider conflict well suited the self-perceptions of the rebels themselves. They saw themselves (and had to see themselves) as soldiers in a real army, fighting a real war, rather than the subversive criminal gunmen the government would have them be. After the surrender the rebels asserted, but did not receive, the status of prisoners of war, hence (in part) the shock of the executions. So it is that the war, and prevailing assumptions about the war, inevitably suffused the events of Easter 1916 and the attitudes of all the participants concerned. It could not have been otherwise, but it is a point about which we still need to be reminded, since narratives of the Rising too often neglect the essential, wider context. Confining the story to the island of Ireland alone results in limited, insular history, restricted in scope and deficient in its explanatory power.
One further point might be made about the ‘moment’ of Easter 1916, its relation to the ‘mode’ of action, and the way in which the events of that week echo down through the Irish experience of conflict throughout the twentieth century. On the first day of the Easter Rising the following Irishmen (there may well have been more) were killed at the South Dublin Union (a comparatively neglected zone of operations in the historiography of the Rising): John Traynor, William McDowell, James Quinn, John Brennan, Michael Carr, James Duffy and Thomas Treacy – the first three were rebels, the others were serving in the Royal Irish Regiment.29 It was not only men who perished. Nurse Margaret Keogh was also killed that day, caught, perhaps, in crossfire. We could go on matching death for death in each Irish domestic campaign of the century: 1919–21, 1922–3, 1956– 62, 1969–97. But the majority of casualties on whatever side they were aligned (and not forgetting the ‘innocent bystanders’) were Irish people. It might be argued that these successive bursts of violence of Irish against Irish – violence certainly exacerbated by that of 1916 – begin to look like successive bouts of civil war, with all the complexity, intransigence and bitter division so characteristic of that mode of conflict. Terence Denman, writing in his excellent study of the 16th (Irish) division, remarks – and this is a not uncommon assertion – that the First World War ‘prevented the outbreak of a bloody civil war in Ireland’.30 I wonder. Perhaps it did nothing of the sort. Perhaps what it prevented was only the particular type of civil war anticipated and feared in the summer of 1914. It may in fact be that the First World War actually precipitated an Irish civil war which began in earnest in 1916 and which has continued with varying intensity and shifting location for eighty years.31
MEMORY
The study of ‘memory’ and ‘commemoration’ has become quite a growth industry in recent years. This has not by any means just been restricted to Ireland, but it has a peculiar relevance on this island, where ‘history’ and the commemoration of historical events have an applied political dimension, which frequently stimulates lively debate and often robust disagreement.32 This is certainly true of the 1916 Rising and the First World War, not just in this particular anniversary year of 2006, but from the very start.
In the centre of the Irish midlands town of Birr there is a fifty foot-high mid-eighteenth century Doric column, which used to be surmounted with a statue of the duke of Cumberland. It was erected to mark his victory over Catholic Jacobite forces at Culloden in Scotland in 1746, a victory that secured the Protestant monarchy in Britain. Sometime in the late nineteenth century the statue was removed, ostensibly because it was in a dangerous condition, but reputedly after having been damaged by men from a Scottish regiment barracked locally.33 In the early autumn of 1919 this unusual and unexpected memorial – no other monument to Culloden exists beyond the battlefield itself – came under discussion in the town. Looking to put up a war memorial, the Birr ‘Comrades of the Great War’ (an ex-servicemen’s association later subsumed within the British Legion) applied to the Urban Council to use the site for this purpose. Simultaneously, and evidently as a response, the local branch of the Transport Union applied ‘for the site for the erection of a statue to the late James Connolly’, who had been executed as one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising.34 Neither application succeeded, nor has either a Great War memorial or a statue of James Connolly ever been erected in the town.
The vacant space at the top of the Birr column illustrates one theme that emerged in the years after 1918: the mutually challenging commemoration of what might collectively be called Irish war dead. The empty column, which survives to this day, epitomises another Irish response to the painful legacy of 1914–18: a willing, perhaps even a wilful, suppression of the public ‘memory’ of those years. This national ‘amnesia’, however, contrasts sharply with the fervent celebration of the war effort by Irish unionists, especially those in the north of Ireland, for whom the losses sustained by the 36th (Ulster) division at the battle of the Somme in 1916 represented a sealing with blood of the political union with Great Britain, a kind of parallel ‘blood-sacrifice’ (if that is what it was) to that of Easter 1916.35
In Ireland the ‘memory’ and commemoration of the Great War has been inextricably bound up with that of the conflicts at home. This is above all exemplified by the strikingly different place of 1916 in the unionist and nationalist traditions. But even here there are ambiguities. While the Easter Rising serves as an iconic event for Irish republicans, and the first day of the Somme, 1 July, has become a sacred point of reference for Ulster unionists, 1916 also saw the first engagement on the western front of the Redmondite 16th (Irish) division, also in the battle of the Somme, though not until September. The service of the two divisions – one the ‘child’ of the UVF and the other John Redmond’s ‘pets’36 – alongside each other in June 1917 at Messines ridge, in what for that stage of the war was a notably successful attack, has provided another evidently fruitful possibility for commemoration (though the two divisions’ participation at Langemarck t
wo months later in a more conventionally catastrophic battle has not ).37
To those Irish people who served abroad in the Great War, we must add those who rallied to the revolutionary side between 1916 and, say, 1923. Some, indeed, like Tom Barry, fought in different armies (though rarely at the same time) in 1914–18, 1916, 1919–21 and 1922–3. The varying ways in which the service and sacrifice of these different groups of Irish soldiers has been marked and commemorated reflect broader political and social circumstances in Ireland, north and south. To the ‘parallel narratives’ of enlistment explored already, therefore, we can add parallel (and sometimes conflicting) patterns of commemoration.38
The Irish landscape is littered with war memorials of one sort or another.39 Many of these are monuments of a familiar sculptural type, but some are not. Who would have thought, for example, that there is in Cork a public commemoration of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force from 1915 to 1919? It exists in Haig Gardens, a small ‘colony’ of soldiers’ cottages off the Boreenmanna Road, built in the 1920s by the Irish Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Land Trust.40 In independent Ireland many of the more traditional Irish war memorials are celtic crosses – a quintessentially Irish design, fully in keeping with the gaelic patriotic dynamic of the 1916 rebels, or at least most of them.41 The First World War memorials in Bray and Nenagh can be compared with, for example, similar celtic crosses in Oldcastle and Murroe (Co. Limerick), though the latter commemorate the struggle for national independence. Yet at a distance they look rather the same, appropriately enough since it can be argued that each one of them was put up to commemorate men who died for a high patriotic cause. But the nature of the patriotism involved is not always so clear-cut. Among the inscriptions on the Belfast war memorial unveiled in 1929 are the words ‘Pro Deo et Patria’ (‘For God and Nation’). The same words appear on the statue of Archbishop Croke erected by the Gaelic Athletic Association in Thurles in 1922. While it is just possible that the same god may have been referred to, it is less certain that the ‘nation’ was the same in each case. So it is with the rituals surrounding the memorials. Outside Northern Ireland, for at least thirty years after independence, celebrations of Irish military endeavour were frequently accompanied by manifestations of British identity. The Great War celtic cross in Longford was shrouded with a Union Jack just before its unveiling on 27 August 1925, and in the mid-1950s ‘God Save the Queen’ continued to be sung at ceremonies at the Irish National War Memorial in Islandbridge by the river Liffey.42
If we return to Cork, there is another celtic cross close to the university campus: the Royal Munster Fusiliers Boer War memorial sited on Gilabbey rock in Connaught avenue, which was used as the Great War memorial from 1919 until 1925. But this memorial is dedicated to those ‘who lost their lives in the service of the empire’, and it seems very likely that Cork nationalists wishing to commemorate their war dead may have felt uncomfortable doing so at this specific monument. Perhaps reflecting its ‘imperial’ character (as well as its rather isolated location in a residential neighbourhood), the Boer War memorial was also prone to attack. One of several incidents occurred in November 1925 when ‘a very loud explosion’ resulted in ‘only slight damage’.43 Thus a new memorial was erected, closer to the city centre, which significantly eschews any ‘patriotic’ trope, but was dedicated (on St Patrick’s day 1925) by the ‘Cork Independent Ex-Servicemen’s Association’ in ‘memory of their comrades who fell in the Great War fighting for the freedom of small nations’. The location of this monument on the South Mall further illustrates some ambiguities of Irish war memorials generally. Next to the First World War memorial (which now has 1939–45 added), in what has been designated a ‘Peace park’, is a small stone dedicated to those who died in the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Fifty yards away is a massive gothic-style monument erected in 1906 ‘through the efforts of the Cork Young Ireland Society to perpetuate the memory of the gallant men of 1798, 1803, 48 and 67 who fought and died in the wars of Ireland to recover her sovereign independence’. It might be asserted that the scale of these three memorials is in inverse proportion to the cataclysmic nature of the international events commemorated, but their size and location no doubt aptly represent the relative political salience of those events to the majority of Irish people (or, at least, to the people of Cork, which may not be the same thing at all).
There are elements in the erection of the new Great War memorial on the South Mall which emphasised the common experience of nationalist and unionist, Protestant and Catholic, and this reflects the emergence of a belief that shared military experience, and the shared human costs of that experience, might transcend local Irish political and sectarian differences. This theme has strongly emerged in recent years, and in the way Ireland’s involvement with the First World War has been ‘remembered’ and commemorated. But if we look at our more domestic Irish conflicts, the situation has been, and in some cases remains, rather different. In sharp contrast to any notion of common suffering and common experience across the whole community, the northern ‘Troubles’ which flared up from the late 1960s produced an intensified polarisation of society which has helped entrench (a handy military metaphor) political attitudes. One thing largely absent (to our great cost) from what we might call the ‘civil war’ of the past thirty years is any sustained sense that shared military experience on each side of the conflict might have any sort of reconciling potential. And the same can be said of 1916. If we are serious about trying to extract some good from common suffering in 1914–18, then we must also seriously contemplate the possibility that some good might be extracted from an understanding of the common suffering and loss, not just on the battlefields of continental Europe, but also here at home.
Commemoration in Ireland in 2006 seems to be set in a pattern which matches Easter 1916 with the First World War, and specifically the battle of the Somme, as if these are ‘equal and opposite’. They are not. Setting aside the grotesque imbalance of casualties suffered in each set of events – a comparative handful (though no single fatality is casually to be dismissed) on one side as opposed to tens of thousands on the other – the balancing of the Easter Rising and the Somme deftly lets us duck the issue of how to commemorate those Irish soldiers who died during Easter week 1916 fighting against the rebels. Without coming to terms with the experience of Irish fighting Irish in 1916, we can scarcely contemplate any resolution (is that too optimistic a term?) of our more recent conflict.
It has to be admitted, however, that the impulse to enlist Ireland’s First World War experience in a kind of benign military mobilisation, occupying a moral high ground where all sections of the community might find a place, has indeed helped undermine the barriers of mutual communal ignorance that sustain much of the continuing social antagonisms on our island. In Ireland and the Great War I celebrated the achievement, for example, of the ‘Island of Ireland peace tower’, dedicated at Mesen/ Messines in Belgium on 11 November 1998.44 Although criticisms can be made of the whole scheme, its imaginative harnessing of shared memory and shared experience, and the drawing together of the now fairly distant past with the altogether more contentious and hazardous present, provides an opportunity (to paraphrase General Sir Oliver Nugent’s words at the unveiling of the Virginia, Co. Cavan, war memorial) for differing interpretations of what we may believe to be our duty to be accommodated in a creative rather than destructive fashion.45 Ireland’s domestic (and not just recent) past is perhaps so painful that we may require the more remote experience of, for example, the First World War to help us come to terms with it.
While the growing public interest in Ireland’s experience during 1914–18 is illustrated by the official acknowledgement of First World War anniversaries (and the sense that if Easter 1916 is to be commemorated so too should 1 July), it has also stimulated wider cultural developments. Another component of our ‘memory’ of historical events stems from the imaginative transmission and
modulation of those events by creative writers and artists. One recent example, which tellingly explores the history of what we might call ‘Rising-cum-war’, is Sebastian Barry’s Booker prize short-listed novel, A long, long way , which tells the story of Willie Dunne, son of a Dublin policeman, who enlists in the British army in August 1914.46