NO ONE who has stood in a cemetery of soldiers who died in the first or second World Wars could fail to be moved at what they see. Viewed from almost any direction, the rows of simple, white headstones fan out in perfectly straight lines – their neatness and order in stark contrast to the bloody chaos of the battlefield that was. The graveyards, whether in Normandy, Flanders, or parts of north Africa or Asia, are now more often than not places of great quietude. They are places of personal pilgrimage – for comrades who survived battle and, increasingly in the case of the World War cemeteries, for descendants of the dead whose sacrifice was so total.
Yesterday in Dublin, another important milestone was reached in our reconciliation with the totality of our own history. On Armistice Day 2009, four Irishmen who gave their lives while serving in the British army were accorded long overdue and appropriate recognition of their sacrifice. There is something shameful in the fact that, until yesterday, these four men lay in unmarked, paupers’ graves. Martin Carr, who died on July 4th, 1916; Thomas Goff, who died on November 3rd, 1918; and Michael Leo Connolly, who died on February 23rd, 1919, of injuries received in the war, deserved better, no matter what anyone thought at the time of events then taking place on this island, or the pointless slaughter occurring in mainland Europe.
Michael Kavanagh, also buried in an unmarked grave, was in the Royal Artillery, and died on July 28th, 1942. In that very same month, Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz and witnessed the use of the lethal gas Zyklon B, deployed later that month on Jews herded out of the Warsaw ghetto. Michael Kavanagh died helping rid Europe of the Nazis and deserved better than a pauper’s grave in his home country.
At yesterday’s ceremony in Glasnevin Cemetery, at which the Government was represented by Minister of State Martin Mansergh, these four men received headstones from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The remains of 86 other former servicemen and women, all also buried in unmarked paupers’ graves, will be acknowledged similarly before the end of the year, with the full endorsement of the Glasnevin authorities. A further 120 former servicemen and women are buried in family plots. Glasnevin is the resting place of many figures from Irish history – O’Connell, Parnell, de Valera and Collins among them. Men and women who fought in the British army are part of that history too.