1916 (14 page)

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.
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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’.
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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.

M
OMENT

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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‘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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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’.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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