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INTRODUCTION

‘Lord Kitchener says “The time has come, and now I call for 300,000 recruits to form new armies”. God save the King’1

(Recruitment poster, 1914)

When Irish Voices from the Great War was first published almost twenty years ago, Ireland was a very different place. The experience of Irish veterans of the 1914–18 war was the subject either of a culpable amnesia or of what Professor David Fitzpatrick has memorably described as ‘aphasia’.2 There was an historiographical, cultural and emotional deficit where Irish participation in World War 1 was concerned. This had, largely, been engendered by the dominant narrative of twentieth-century Irish history, one dictated by the nationalist ‘victors’ of the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21, forces seen, whether justifiably or not, to be antipathetic or antagonistic towards Irish Great War veterans.3 Indifference or outright hostility had led to the rapid atrophying of ‘memory’. Remembrance or commemoration of the Great War, while it featured to some extent in the culture of the Irish Free State in the 1920s, more or less disappeared from view in the 1930s and played virtually no part in the public life of the subsequent Irish Republic.

In the years following legislative independence it was natural that the writing of Irish history would focus on that prevailing narrative. It was not until the 1950s, and the rise of a generation of ‘professional’ historians like Theo Moody, Kevin B. Nowlan and Robin Dudley Edwards,that such writing began to transcend and interrogate that narrative. Academics like R.F. Foster and Joseph Lee led the next generation of historical ‘revisionists’ and, suddenly, there were no shibboleths left unquestioned. Irish Great War studies was one of the principal beneficiaries. Up to the 1990s there was a paucity of secondary/published sources on which to rely and primary sources had largely been ignored. That began to change with the mining of archive material, firstly in the Liddle Collection (Leeds), the Imperial War museum, the British National Archive (then the Public Record Office) in Kew and the National Army Museum. Latterly a significant quantity of material from private sources has come to light in Ireland and this has been augmented by the use of data from the National Library of Ireland and the Irish National Archives.

What has also changed fundamentally is that there is now a plethora of accessible secondary sources and this is regularly made available to a readership with a new-found enthusiasm and appetite for acquainting itself with the knowledge of Irish participation in the Great War. This upsurge of interest has, in part, been stimulated by the journalism of Kevin Myers, the reconciliation work of Paddy Harte and Glen Barr, the scholarship of David Fitzpatrick, John Horne, Fergus Darcy, Jane Leonard and many others, as well as the rescue efforts of Tom Burke and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association and the other Irish regimental associations to have emerged since the 1990s. The role played in the Northern reconciliation process by the exploration of Irish involvement in the Great War, has clearly prompted renewed interest in the subject on both sides of the border. But the increased fascination in this country with all things historical, and the reassessment on the part of modern practitioners of the dark arts of archival research of all received wisdom, means that the forgotten narrative of Ireland and the Great War would have come under scrutiny at some point. What goes around comes around.

Irish Voices from the Great War and its companion volume They Shall Grow Not Old played a small part in the initial upsurge of interest in the Irish experience of World War 1. Both were modest volumes with limited aims. My intention, especially with Irish Voices …, was to make use of a corpus of previously unused material in the Imperial War Museum and National Army Museum in London, supplemented by oral testimony in the RTE Sound Archive. Dozens of Irish veterans had chosen to write about their experiences (almost all were volunteers) and had deposited their memoirs in the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in the 1920s and 1930s. There they remained, largely untapped, until this writer made polite inquiries in 1993 about accessing any memoirs or diaries that the IWM might have in its archive. I was both astonished and excited at what they found for me in their Lambeth Road store-house of memory.

I then set about the task of telling the story of Irish involvement in some of the key engagements of the war, principally the Gallipoli campaign, the Somme offensive, the battle of Messines, 3rd Ypres and the March 1918 German offensive. These were viewed from the perspective of Irish participants, using first-hand accounts from the IWM and other archives, from published memoirs and from testimony contained in the relatively few secondary sources available at the time.

Some of those accounts have been revisited in this new edition based on the surge in scholarship since the book was published in 1995. Mistakes, erroneous assumptions, oversimplifications and generalisations have, I would hope, been removed. Where appropriate, additional material from other primary and newly printed sources has been used. But the volume is fundamentally the same as that which invited readers to examine the testimony of Irish Great War veterans at a time when few were inclined to do so. The corpus of material used then is as valid now as it was in the mid-90s, though it has been supplemented by material from newly-published accounts of the war. Many of the issues raised by historians like David Fitzpatrick, Timothy Bowman, Jane Leonard, John Horne, Catherine Switzer, Donal Hall, Richard Grayson, John Dennehy, Catriona Pennell and many others in their treatment of recruitment, discipline, commemoration, war enthusiasm and memory are beyond the scope of this particular volume, though many were taken up in They Shall Grow Not Old.4

This volume still seeks to do what it was designed to do back in 1995, to deal, specifically and in detail, with a selection of the most important battles and campaigns in which the three Irish Divisions (and other Irish regiments of the old Regular Army) participated. It still relies primarily on the memoirs of Irish veterans housed in the Imperial War Museum, the National Army Museum and the Somme Association Archive as well as on the published diaries and reminiscences of soldiers in Irish regiments as well as audio material from the RTé Sound Archive. Of the latter it must be reiterated that while most of it is highly atmospheric and descriptive some of it is factually inaccurate and unreliable. Most of the interviews were recorded at least half a century after the events described. Insofar as possible I have attempted to eliminate the more egregious lapses of memory or descents into special pleading.

It has been enormously gratifying to witness the effective rehabilitation of the nationalist cohort of Irish Great War veterans in the last decade. The era of aphasia is past. The sacrifice of the men of the 36th Ulster division has long been commemorated, though not always without controversy, in Northern Ireland.5 Only now are we truly beginning to see an acknowledgment in the Republic of Ireland of the men who chose, for a variety of reasons, to heed the call of Redmond, and join the British armed forces. Many of those men, about 24,000, were members of the National Volunteers, formed after the split in the Irish Volunteer movement in September 1914. The ‘anti-war’ cohort within the organisation founded by Eoin MacNeill in 1913, numbering 10–12,000, retained the original name and actively opposed enlistment.

The primary focus of Irish scholarship had been on the subsequent history of the Irish Volunteers, heavily infiltrated by the IRB and morphing into the IRA of the Anglo-Irish war. In some respects the artificial Civil War-based political structure in Ireland,dominated by two centre-right parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, served to accentuate the ‘aphasia’ surrounding the Great War. The Fine Gael party is clearly more representative of the old Redmondite/National Volunteer strand of Irish political activism. Just as W.T. Cosgrave had less difficulty in recognising and commemorating the reality of the sizeable Irish contribution to the Great War than did Eamon de Valera, so did Garret FitzGerald have a less jaundiced attitude to WW1 commemoration in Ireland than did Charles J.Haughey. Not that the issue was ever high on the agenda of either party, nor indeed of the Labour Party, while the dominant nationalist political force in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein, long opposed and discouraged Great War commemoration.6 The latter party has, in recent years, overcome its historic antipathy. Prominent members or supporters of the party like Alex Maskey, Tom Hartley and Danny Morrison have often participated in ‘neutral’ or nationalist commemorations of the dead of the Great War.

The ‘discovery’ of the potential for Northern reconciliation in the battlefields of Flanders and Picardy elevated the issue on those agendas. The defining moment in that process was the presence of President Mary McAleese, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II and the Northern Ireland First Minister, David Trimble, at the dedication of the newly constructed Island of Ireland Peace Park – the brainchild of Paddy Harte and Glen Barr – in Messines (Mesen) in Belgium in November 1998. But the first eye-catching moment in that process came in April 1995, when Sinn Fein chairperson, Tom Hartley and Ulster Unionist MP, Ken Maginnis, attended a ceremony at the Irish War Memorial Park in Islandbridge. The irony was that the occasion was unconnected with WW1. The ceremony was being held to honour the victims of World War Two and the Holocaust.7 But the association with the country’s premier Great War Memorial was inescapable and is what most people remember about the occasion.

The disappearance of the stigma associated with enlistment in the British Army in the Great War, has unfortunately, come too late for the generation of Irishmen who fought in the conflict. Of course their silence was often prompted by factors other than the reluctance of the society to which they returned to hear their stories. But that silence, enforced or voluntary, means that ‘memory’ can only be restored by the diligent work of historians and researchers. This current volume is but a useful starting point for the interested and engaged reader. The enlarged bibliography reflects much of the more recent narrative and analytical work produced on the subject. I would heartily recommend any of the works cited as the next port of call.

BACKGROUND NOTE

The use of military terminology and jargon is unavoidable in an enterprise like this so herewith some background information that may be of assistance in the reading of this book. Some, but not all, is repeated elsewhere in the text.

Before 1914 the small British Regular Army (comprising fewer than 750,000 regular soldiers and reservists worldwide) was composed of regiments which, to all intents and purposes, consisted of a 1st and 2nd battalion of about 1,000 men each. Third and fourth battalions were often attached to the regimental HQ and were used for training purposes. From 1914 to the beginning of 1918 with the creation by the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener of a huge volunteer army (compulsory conscription in England, Scotland and Wales came in 1916) the army battalions were augmented by service battalions of fresh, inexperienced troops. Thus the Royal Irish Fusiliers had its two original battalions, a third and fourth battalion based at home and responsible for training and recruiting, and seven service battalions (5th to 11th) at different times during the course of the war.

Battalions, as a rule, were divided into four companies; these in turn were further subdivided into platoons. Before the officer corps became badly depleted a battalion would normally have been commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel, a company by a Major or Captain and platoons by a full Lieutenant. A Second Lieutenant (also known as a Subaltern) might have commanded a ‘section’ within a platoon though, depending on numbers, command of sections would often fall to a Non-Commissioned Officer (Sergeant Major, Sergeant etc.)

Battalions were banded, in groups of four, into brigades under the command of a Brigadier General. In early 1918, because of the extent of casualties, brigades were reduced to three battalions each. Above brigade level was the division, consisting of three brigades. The 10th (Irish) Division, for example, the first Irish volunteer division to be recruited, was made up of the 29th, 30th and 31st brigades. A division was usually commanded by a Major General. Above that again was the Corps; there were three or four divisions within this unit, which was under the command of a Lieutenant General. Four combined Corps made up an Army, under the command of a General. At the outset of the war, in 1914, the British Expeditionary Force travelling to France, had two Armies. This number had grown to five by 1917.

The first commander of the British Expeditionary Force was Field Marshal Sir John French. He was succeeded in December 1915 by General Sir Douglas Haig, who was elevated to the rank of Field Marshal in 1917. He held his position until the end of hostilities in November 1918. When it became clear that the war was not going to be swift and decisive a general proclamation was issued by the British government calling for 100,000 men to volunteer for three years service. This force, raised by Lord Kitchener, became known as K1 and included the first Irish division, the 10th.Further proclamations followed and the second New Army (K2) included the other nationalist division, the 16th. In the fifth New Army was the Loyalist 36th (Ulster) Division.

The battles and campaigns covered in this book have been selected as the most significant involving Irish troops. Others may argue that important engagements (such as the Battle of Loos) have been left out. Given the space available, however, it was not possible to include everything and I felt it better to devote more time and space to a smaller number of key battles. The period from the arrival of the British Expeditionary Force (the bulk of the Regular Army at the time) until just before the First Battle of Ypres saw the beginning of the destruction of the famous Irish units of the old Regular Army. This process continued with the annihilation of the 1st Dublins and 1st Munsters at Gallipoli in 1915 at the ‘V’ Beach landing.

The numbers of Irishmen involved in the war then grew exponentially with the introduction of the first volunteer unit, the 10th Division, at the Suvla Bay landings in Gallipoli in August 1915. Later that year the 36th (Ulster) Division and the 16th (Irish) Division were introduced to the Western Front. These two divisions were Unionist and Nationalist mirror images, based on the politically oriented militias of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the National Volunteers. Both would suffer appalling casualties at the dismal Battle of the Somme in 1916, the 36th on the 1 July, the opening day of the offensive and the 16th in the September attacks on the tiny French villages of Guillemont and Ginchy.

The 10th Division, unlike the two other Irish divisions, became engaged in hostilities against two of Germany’s allies, the far-flung Ottoman Empire of Turkey and the Bulgarians. After being withdrawn from Turkish territory in Gallipoli the 10th found itself assisting the Serbians against an opportunistic attack by their traditional Bulgarian enemies towards the end of 1915. The division was based in Salonika in neutral Greece. By 1917 it had been moved to Palestine to assist General Allenby in removing the last remnants of the Ottoman Empire from the Holy Land.

Meanwhile the two other Irish Divisions found themselves side by side in the 2nd Army of General Plumer (who ranks alongside Allenby as one of the most capable British commanders of the war) and took part in the successful June 1917 offensive at Messines-Wytschaete in Belgium, a prelude to the long, wearisome and bloody Third Battle of Ypres (often referred to as Passchendeale). Here the 16th and the 36th came under the wing of the Fifth Army, led by an Irishman, General Gough (one of the least competent British commanders). The result was a disastrous erosion of morale and manpower and the continuation of the loss of the ‘Irish’ character of the two divisions as events at home (in the aftermath of the Easter 1916 Rising) reduced recruitment considerably.

Things got worse in 1918 when the Western front was almost lost to a massive German advance in March of that year. Fifth Army, with its numbers greatly depleted, bore the brunt of that assault and the 16th Division ceased to exist as an ‘Irish’ unit even in name. Many of the service battalions that had been recruited during Kitchener’s 1914 initiative were merged or disbanded. What was left of the 36th Division stayed together but the battalions which made up the Nationalist divisions (10th and 16th) were spread throughout the Army, giving rise to accusations of lack of trust in their commitment, post Easter 1916, to the cause for which they had signed up to fight.

When the curtain came down on the Great War, in November 1918, few of the men whose stories are carried right through this book and concluded in the final chapter were still with the same units they had started out with.