IT will be a long day in publishing before a book has a title as misleading as A Military History of Ireland, published by Cambridge and edited by Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey. The name suggests one of those dreary volumes full of military lore, tales of gallantry and Irish derring do and betrayal.
Forget the title. It is only of partial relevance. Yes, it is in a way a military history of Ireland, but it is more than that. A book on Mountjoy's baggage train inventory on the route march through Leix no doubt cries out for a return of illiteracy; book burning even.
Cerebral Stupor
For the truth is that few topics spread cerebral stupor amongst the uninitiated more than military history. It can be insufferably recondite; and generally speaking, militaria has all the appeal for those uninterested in soldierly things as an account of a chess game has to those who have trouble mastering Happy Families.
A Military History of Ireland is not a military history. It is a history of Ireland through the military organisations which have existed here and, to a lesser degree, through the military operations which have taken place here and abroad.
But such military operations have normally been pretty much a function of the former, with of course a certain amount of latitude which we must allow the vagaries of chance, of opportunism, of misunderstanding, of sheer stupid human brutality.
The history of Ireland, as a country which has been the seat of so much war, or the seat of so much avoidance of war, can be revealed to an extraordinary degree by an examination of how armies were formed, raised and commanded; and what relationship those armies had with existing political structures.
All societies can be understood through an examination of primary institutions, habits professions. You could, of course, learn a great deal about Ireland from the 15th century to today merely by looking at woodland management, or the growth in beef farming, or the development (or otherwise) of fisheries, the law, land ownership.
The two editors have taken the laryngoscope of military organisation to examine Irish history right deep into the bowels of pre historical Irish war.
It is an endeavour of exhilarating scholarship and erudite charm, as one might expect from the editors; though I would go bail that the words of the preface which run thus - "Academics, for their part herbivorous creatures, with delicate, scholarly sensibilities, were content to keep their distance from the rough and tumble carnivores who dealt in the blood, and thunder of the battlefield - were written by Keith.
Mordant Self Deprecation
Only somebody with his sense of mordant self deprecation would so underestimate the haemalophagous habits of the average history department, where a day which does not end with staff looking like gorged vultures, eyes squinting pinkly through bloodied faces, and gathered around the entrails of an academic from another department, is a day wasted. No matter: let us allow Keith his ruminant fantasies. He is a fastidious man, and might indeed be the cress nibbling historian he claims.
The two editors are twicefold qualified to be editors; by their academic records - Thomas is Professor of Modern Irish History in UCD, and Keith is Reader in History at the University of Ulster; and by their four forebears, who between them were in the IRA, the Irish Army, the Canadian army and the British army, two of them having the bad luck to die in 1918.
There are so many richly enjoyable chapters in this book that it is invidious to pick and choose one above the other - bull was particularly impressed with Katharine Simms's brief essay on Gaelic Warefare in the Middle Ages, not least because it deals with what I regard as one of the most fascinating issues of identity, loyalty - such as it was - and language: the co existence, approximately within the same polity, of entirely different peoples, the Old Anglo Normans and the Gaels, who retained their distinctness for hundreds of years.
And it also examines - though too briefly - the emergence of the still enduring fianna legends, which could, dwell have gained added potency from the need to accentuate identity, loyalty, to invent a unifying myth.
The term military in this context does not mean just organised, full time armies; as it refers at one stage to the fianna, so does it refer in the 18th century to the irregular and informal semi military groups such as the Peep o' Day Boys, the Whiteboys and the Defenders as it does to the formation of militia, volunteers and United Men.
Dying Polity
David W. Miller is not a gentleman whose name means much to me, but I was most taken by his analysis of the emergence of the Volunteers of the late 18th century being the last expression of a dying polity, rather than the emergence of a continuum of passionate Irish identity which was to reach its apogee between 1916-1922.
Which brings us to the North today. A militarised society, by today's standards, stands as an unsuccessful, or at least an unresolved one; by which standards Northern Ireland is extraordinarily unsuccessful. Both the population groups have militarised vast numbers of their men in the course of their struggle, and the British have militarised both locally and applied forces recruited in Britain in the maintenance of order.
This is where I would be inclined to offer my one criticism of this book - the North today is merely covered within the chapter on the British army and Ireland. It would be worth a further examination, though no doubt publishers get restless when their editors tell them that they would like to add even more to an already 565-page book.
Yet the fact is that as many people have served in the Provisional IRA as the British sent to Arnhem; one can despise the nature and intent of that campaign, as I do, yet still acknowledge it as a formidable testimony to "republican" - and military - willpower and determination. Otherwise, A Military History is a quite splendid examination of Irish history through a startling revealing medium.