Remembered at last

For the German army it was intended to be the 39 Steps. This was not a Teutonic riposte to John Buchan’s jingoistic spy novel – yet to be published in August 1914 – but the grand strategy of a dead general, Alfred von Schlieffen.

The legacy of the late chief of the Imperial German General Staff was a blueprint, devised in the event of war with France, that would take his troops through the small neutral state of Belgium and on to Paris. The German army would take the French capital on M39 (Mobilisation + 39 days). So, logically, M40 was to be Armistice Day, as the French reacted to the taking of their capital by suing for peace.

In fact, the world had to wait until M1559 for the Armistice, and then it was the Germans rather than the French who were obliged to sign it.

In the intervening four years, this country sent more than 200,000 of its men (and a significant number of women) to serve in the British Army in France, Belgium, Turkey, Salonika and a variety of Middle-Eastern destinations. A third were regular soldiers or reservists. The rest were volunteers, motivated either by a sense of duty, the desire to advance their various political causes, or the prospect of three square meals a day and a promise that the state would look after the well-being of their dependents. Half of them never returned to Ireland – 35,000 because they had settled in the neat, well-ordered cemeteries of the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission.

It was the “war to end all wars” that did nothing of the sort, the Great War that was followed, a generation later, by an even greater war.

War’s onset was greeted in Britain, Ireland and the rest of Europe by a certain level of enthusiasm among the continent’s elites and young urban males. Elsewhere, there was merely a stunned and stoic incredulity. Incroyable – “incredible” – was the word journalist Phillip Gibbs heard expressed most frequently in France after the declaration of war. There was a palpable sense of shock and disbelief in Paris and elsewhere.

In Ireland, and among the members of the British political establishment, there was a curious sense of relief. Ireland would probably have been going to war anyway – in our case a nationalist/unionist civil conflict. Instead, the fighting was conducted in khaki and in places that became known as “Wipers” (Ypres) and “Whitesheet” (Wytschaete), far from Churchill’s “dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”.

Unpalatable message

On the continent, the conscript armies of Germany, Russia, France and Austria-Hungary were in the field, even as Britain was coming to terms with the unpalatable message from its new secretary of state for war, Kerry-born Horatio Kitchener: the Royal Navy and the tiny British professional army were not going to be enough to bring to the table.

The war, so the field marshal predicted, was going to last for three years and would require an influx of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to augment the regular army.

Not even this arch pessimist could have predicted that his volunteers would virtually replace the regular army in its entirety. The original soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force – which included elements of more than a dozen Irish infantry and cavalry regiments – had been more or less wiped out by the time the New Army units landed to France in 1915.

Among the casualties were the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers at Le Cateau, the 2nd Munster Fusiliers at Étreux, and the 2nd Royal Irish Regiment at Le Pilly. After disastrous encounters with the enemy during the retreat from Mons in late August 1914, those three battalions could barely have mustered three companies between them.

In the course of those first days of open fighting – more akin to a second Franco-Prussian war – Irish units and soldiers compiled a couple of notable “firsts”. The first shot fired in anger in western Europe by a British soldier, since the Battle of Waterloo, came from the gun of a member of the Royal Irish Dragoon Guards. The first Victoria Cross of the war was won, posthumously, by 25-year-old Sandhurst graduate Maurice Dease from Gaulstown, Co Westmeath. He is buried in St Symphorien cemetery near Mons. The first and last British casualties of the conflict are also buried nearby.

‘Troglodyte world’

There wasn’t much movement as the 2nd Franco-Prussian war settled into the static conflict with which we are more familiar, Paul Fussell’s “troglodyte world”. The wet, filthy, rat-infested trenches of popular memory stretched for 450 miles from the English Channel to the Swiss border. What forward progress there was between January 1915 and March 1918 tended to provoke an equal and opposite reaction from the other side. So nobody strayed too far from where they settled in the winter of 1914.

By way of illustration: this writer has two grand uncles who were killed during the war. Cavanman John Patrick O’Reilly, of the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles, died on September 29th, 1916. Thomas Coonan from Clare, Military Medal winner and machine gunner with the Grenadier Guards, survived until May 1918. They are interred 14.5km apart, but on a north-south axis. Foncquevillers, where Coonan is buried is due north of Authuille, where O’Reilly rests in the Gommecourt Wood Cemetery. There was little lateral progress made in the 19 months that separated their deaths.

Within sight of JP O’Reilly’s grave is the magnificent Thiepval Memorial to the missing, designed by Edwin Lutyens. It contains thousands of Irish names, of soldiers, mostly from the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) divisions who died in the bloodbath of the Somme. O’Reilly, at least, has an identifiable final resting place, and a grave marker. He enlisted in 1914 at the age of 18. He did so at the behest of a Roman Catholic priest who implored the young men of Bailieborough, Co Cavan, to join up and fight for “little Catholic Belgium”. The fortunes of war dictated that O’Reilly would end up in a largely Protestant unit and be posted to Gallipoli, before dying in France. He never got to see any of those Catholic Belgians he had joined up to defend.

One of the myths of this and many other wars fought by British forces, was the, apparently flattering, but ultimately condescending notion of the “Irish fighting spirit”. This particular trope emphasises the aggressive characteristics of the Irish soldier – how he fights like a “demon possessed” when on the offensive. However, the corollary of this stereotype is that the same Irish soldier – presumably because of some inherent flaw in the Irish character – lacks the discipline and expertise to stage a coherent defensive action.

Robert Graves, himself the son of an Irishman, gives expression to this stereotype in his personal chronicle of the war, Goodbye To All That, when he says of Irish units that, “Though they usually reached their objective, [they] too often lost it in the counter-attack; without officers they became useless.”

It is a trope that is often invoked in the many regimental histories of the Irish battalions of the Great War. These began to appear in the 1920s and are, unlike the Graves’ memoir, mostly unreadable. Recourse to the “G” word – “glory” – is far too frequent for all but the most martially-inclined and masochistic of readers.

The implication of these stilted tomes, and the equally turgid memoirs of a plethora of “Blimpish” officers that appeared simultaneously, is that the “fighting Irish” are imbued with animalistic aggression. In military terms, it is on a par with the simianised depictions of the Irish in the 19th century by the likes of Thomas Nast in Harpers and John Tenniel in Punch. If the Irish have acquired a reputation along such lines it is merely a function of the economic and political conditions that forced a disproportionate number of Irishmen to enlist in a variety of armed forces, and the prolonged process of “othering” to which the Irish have been subjected.

While it proves nothing, for the record, 32 Irishmen were among the 628 first World War recipients of the Victoria Cross, the highest honour for gallantry in the British Army. Irish soldiers constituted 2.3 per cent of those eligible for the VC and won 5.1 per cent of those awarded. Conversely, 28 Irishmen are recorded as being among the unfortunate 306 soldiers from the British and Colonial armies who were executed during the Great War, or 9.1 per cent of the total.

Not all the Irishmen who died in this fashion were shot for desertion. Limerick-born Patrick Downey, of the 6th Leinsters, was a 19-year-old volunteer with the 10th (Irish) Division who had shown a disinclination to follow the orders of superior officers.

A Gallipoli survivor, he was stationed in Salonika by late 1915. When he refused an order to fall in for duty and put on his cap he was brought up on charges, along with a number of similarly undisciplined colleagues.

At a court martial presided over by junior officers only (a captain and two lieutenants) the other defendants received relatively light sentences for their misdemeanours. Downey, however, pleaded guilty to what he believed to be an equivalent charge. In fact, the maximum tariff in his case was death by firing squad. He should never have been allowed to enter such a plea, a fact that was recognised in the aftermath of his sentencing.

After the shocking verdict was handed down, it was up to the cmmander of the Salonika force, the Irish Boer War veteran, General Sir Bryan Mahon, to commute the clearly unjustifiable sentence. He chose instead to approve the execution on the basis that, because of widespread indiscipline amongst his troops, “an exemplary punishment [is] highly desirable”.

Guilty of desertion

This was the same General Sir Bryan Mahon who had, himself, been guilty of desertion in the face of the (Turkish) enemy in August 1915. On that occasion, in a fit of pique at not receiving an anticipated promotion, he abandoned his 10th division and took himself off to a distant island. There he nurtured and cultivated his wounded pride. His actions contributed to the decimation of the 7th Dublin Fusiliers on the slopes of Kiretch Tepe Sert overlooking Suvla Bay.

The battalion, which included the famous rugby-playing “Pals” company, recruited at Lansdowne Road in 1914, should have been withdrawn from an indefensible position on the night of August 15th, 1915. But no one was prepared to give such an order in the absence of the divisional commander. The 7th Dublins did not have the option of taking umbrage at Turkish grenades. Mahon un-resigned within a week and his career – whatever about his reputation – did not suffer greatly. Unless, of course, command of the Salonika sideshow was intended as his punishment.

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It is impossible to come to terms with the deaths of nine million soldiers, men who left three million widows and 10 million orphans behind them. It is easier to think in individual terms. In this instance, of one widower and one orphan.

In a small rural cemetery in Kilmainhamwood, Co Meath, a single CWGC gravestone lies over the mortal remains of Lance Sergeant William O’Reilly, 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Fusiliers, who died in an English field hospital in 1917. It is the only war grave in the cemetery with its own simple and distinctive stone. The graveyard is one of 681 in Ireland which contain the bodies of the dead of the Great War, mostly in ones and twos.

William O’Reilly was an Army reservist who was recalled to the ranks in August 1914 when war broke out. He quickly became, like many of the other “Old Contemptibles”, a prisoner of war, housed, at the Kaiser’s pleasure, in Limburg POW camp. Later, Sir Roger Casement became a distinguished prison visitor there as he vainly attempted to raise his ill-fated “Irish Brigade” for use against Britain in Ireland.

Just before being sent to France, O’Reilly discovered he was to become a father for the first time. Tragically, his wife Kate died shortly after giving birth to their daughter Anna. Kate’s sister, Annie Smith, returned from her job as a cook in London to look after the young child. William O’Reilly began corresponding with his sister-in-law on May 8th, 1915. He was clearly distraught at the death of his wife. He wrote that “it drives me mad when I think that I will never see her again or hold her hand in mine”.

Optimistic plans

A month later he began to ask about his daughter and inform his sister-in-law of his optimistic plans to apply for the job of postman in Kingscourt, Co Cavan, the nearest town to Kilmainhamwood. You also suspect that if and when he returned from the war he would propose marriage to Annie Smith.

For four years the two corresponded – only William’s letters survive – and he was clearly getting a sense from his sister-in-law of the development of his little girl. He wrote with the fondness of a parent personally acquainted with the foibles of his small child.

In late 1917, an ailing William O’Reilly was released into Switzerland by his captors and turned up in a hospital in London. He wrote to Annie of his eagerness to see his child, now nearly three years’ old. On October 3rd, an urgent letter from a nurse pleaded with Annie to bring the child to London as soon as possible, William was seriously ill. Inevitably they didn’t make it. By the time Annie Smith got the warning letter Sgt William O’Reilly was already dead.

Just one of nine million.

* * *

A lot has been said and written about the wan welcome afforded returning Irish Great War veterans. They may have got homes but they weren’t treated as heroes. They had, after all, fought against “our gallant allies in Europe”. It is likely that more 1914-18 veterans were murdered by the IRA during the Anglo-Irish war than were accepted into the ranks of that organisation.

The army for which they fought had summarily and brutally executed the leaders of an ill-starred and misguided insurrection. Many of their erstwhile comrades formed the vicious core of an equally repressive paramilitary police force in post-war Ireland. Aphasia – an inability or refusal to speak – was followed by collective amnesia and the service medals were stored in boxes in upstairs cupboards rather than being proudly displayed on domestic sideboards.

The extent of this phenomenon may have been exaggerated and is easily comprehensible. Kevin O’Higgins, vice-president of the Executive Council – tánaiste in effect – neatly encapsulated the prevailing narrative in a Dáil debate in 1927.

Irish Great War Memorial

He was speaking for the government on a motion related to the proposal to create an Irish Great War memorial in Merrion Square, adjacent to Leinster House. O’Higgins had no objection to a memorial, just to its location in such proximity to the seat of power of the new Irish Free State. He pointed out that any visitor to Dublin, “not particularly versed in the history of the country, would be entitled to conclude that the origins of this State were connected to that park and the memorial in that park, were connected with the lives that were lost in the Great War . . . That is not the case. The State has other origins, and because it has other origins I do not wish to see it suggested, in stone or otherwise, that it has that origin.”

In the mid-1960s, when interest in the Great War was being revived in Britain on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, we had other events to commemorate. Memory needs to be jogged regularly. This did not happen in Ireland in the 1960s.

Happily, the same cannot be said of the centenary. If anything, the country is over-compensating for previous omissions. This State may have “other origins” but we have managed, at last, to see past the foundation myth. There are many mansions in our fathers’ house