irish literature of the first world war

User:finbarroreilly Date:28/06/2006 Time:22:03:01Edition:29/06/2006 Examiner LiveXX-2906 Page:8Color:

8 Irish ExaminerThursday 29.06.2006NEWS

XX1 - V1

IN the small town ofLes Vans, in the mid-dle of the mountain-

ous region of the Ardèche,a statue dominates the mar-ket square. It portrays ayoung man, fatally wound-ed and in the throes ofdeath. The nameplate infront of it says, simply, TheSomme.

In Beaumont Hamel, inPicardy, in the middle of abattlefield, a giant cariboulooks toward Canada andguards the scene where 670men of the NewfoundlandRegiment were cut downon July 1, 1916.

Behind the cathedral inYpres, Belgium, 125 milesnorth of Guillemont, youcan find the Munster Cross.Paid for “by the people ofthe province and Cork, itscapital city.”

And, in the tiny Sommevillage of Sailly-Sallisel, themost heart-rending memo-rial of them all. Unepaysanne kisses the emptygreatcoat of her lost hus-band. Victime de la guerre.Many war memorials arenot great art. But this is.

Meanwhile, in Cork, atthe head of South Mall, thecity’s First World Warmemorial is surrounded andhidden by builders’ hutsand a chain link fence.Even on the 90th anniver-sary of The Somme, it isclosed to the public. Twen-ty yards away, a memorialto the Wars of Indepen-dence heroes is open to all.

A metaphor for the pre-vailing Irish attitude to thesoldiers who fought in theGreat War, this tale of twomonuments tells itsown story — not on-ly to overseas visi-tors, but to thedescendants of thethousands of vol-unteers who leftCork for the bat-tlefields of Franceand Belgium.

Of course, Ire-land has its WarMemorial Gar-dens, close to thePhoenix Park,which were de-signed by Sir Ed-ward Lutyens —architect of thechilling arch atThiepval on The

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSEditorial team: Dermot Ahern, Josephine Fen-ton, Allan Prosser.Grateful thanks to: The Somme HeritageCentre (www.Irishsoldier.org) ; The Imperial War

Museum; Musée Somme, Albert, France(www.musee-somme-1916.org); Historial de laGrande Guerre, Peronne, France (www.histori-al.org) ; staff at the Ulster Tower, Thiepval,France; Tom Burke MBE, chairman, The RoyalDublin Fusiliers Association; John Foley.

Background reading: The Road to the Somme(Philip Orr, The Blackstaff Press); The SommeThen and Now, Flanders Then and Now (JohnGiles, After The Battle Publications); The Irish onthe Somme (Steven Moore, Local Press Limited);Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers (Terence Denman,

Irish Academic Press); To Win A War (John Ter-raine, Macmillan Publishers); First World War(Martin Gilbert, Harper Collins); A Long LongWay (Sebastian Barry, Faber and Faber); Irelandand the Great War (edited by Adrian Gregory andSenia Pašeta, Manchester University Press);

Guillemont (Michael Stedman, Leo Cooper Lon-don); Bandon District Soldiers Who Died In TheGreat War (Bandon War Memorial Committee);With A Machine Gun to Cambrai (George Cop-pard, MacMillan Publishers); Battlefields ofNorthern France (Michael Glover, Michael

Joseph Ltd); The British Soldier on the WesternFront (Richard Holmes, Harper Collins); Somme(Lynn McDonald, London).Further enquiries: If you want to respond tothis series or ask further questions please email:allan.p r o s s e r @e x amine r.ie

It is not too late to celebrate the names unmade...Irish literature by volunteers who fought in the First World War isworth celebrating, writes Josephine FentonIT’S A paradox. What the Irish

soldiers, took to the battlefields,more than any other nation, wastheir language.

And yet, where is the iconic poetryof the First World War to match thosemagic English names of Brooke, Sas-soon and Owen? A visit to the PeacePark in Messines in Belgium, a for-eign field that is forever Ireland, re-veals some lines from To My Daugh-ter Betty, The Gift of God by TomKettle, of The Royal Dublin Fusiliers:

‘Know that we fools …Died not for Flag, nor King,nor Emperor — But for a dream,born in a herdsman’s shed …’

Irish soldiers, South and North, vol-unteering for the British Army, wereoften fighting for the hope of a freecountry. Or, if not, they were fightingto remain part of the British Empire.Or, they were refusing to enlist, in-stead volunteering to resist British rulewithin Ireland and preparing for theEaster Rising.

It was a veritable tornado of volun-teers, that was the truth, writes Sebas-tian Barry in his recent novel A Long,Long Way. He draws attention to thebravery of those who fought againstGermany. While he understands whythose soldiers were ignored in the af-termath of the war, it seems as if hewants to give them back their voices.

There are two connected questionsto explore. Why were the brave sol-diers of the Great War ignored by theIrish writers who were their compa-triots? And why has Irish English, thatmost melodic of English dialects, notbeen employed to celebrate theirheroism and mourn their deaths? Se-bastian Barry’s novel addresses boththese questions.

In A Long, Long Way, shortlistedfor the Man Booker Prize, Barry tellsthe story of The Royal DublinFusilier s.

He writes a lyrically and poetically

about their lives and deaths at theF ron t .

Barry’s main character, WillieDunne, is a timid, undersized,Catholic boy from Dublin. He joinsup, mainly because he is too short tobe a policeman. The British Armyisn’t so fussy.

Others of Willie Dunne’s contin-gent enlist for similar unthinking rea-sons.

But Jesse Kirwan of Cork city knewexactly what he was doing: “some ofus said that we would do what Red-mond said, and fight as Irish soldiers,you know, to save Europe.” It is onlywhen they start shooting the leadersof the Easter Rising, that Kirwanstarts to have his doubts. “An Irish-man can’t fight this war now. Not af-ter those lads being executed”, hestates.

The Irish were fighting the GreatWar. Even non-Irish regiments con-tained large numbers of Irishmen.Some Irish expats, as Michael Longleyexplains in his poem Wounds, were inthe wrong queue and joined the Lon-don Scottish.

The Irish had long been the largestnon-British contingent of the BritishArmy and many soldiers who camefrom far-flung parts of the Empire,such as Australia and America, hadIrish names and Irish forebears.

Barry says, ‘we were used to callingthese men not Irish, against Ireland,even traitors to Ireland, but the musicof their language makes that unprov-able; their old music proves them,their old talk sanctifies them’.

So Barry, at least, has laid aside the

self-censorship which prevents Irishwriters from writing about the FirstWorld War.

But what about other writers? TomKettle was killed in September 1916.

Another poet, Francis Ledwidgefrom Slane, Co Meath, wrote about200 poems, ofwhich fewer thannine deal explicitlywith the Great War.Instead, Ledwidgeuses the voices andsounds of rural Ire-land to lament theloss of life: ‘He shallnot hear the bitterncry, In the wild skywhere he is lain,Nor voices of thesweeter birdsAbove the wailingof the rain.’

Ledwidge waskilled in 1917.

Thomas Mac-Greevy’s poem, DeCivitate Hominum,which records hisobservation of anEnglish plane beingshot down, is dis-tanced not only byits lack of immedia-cy but also by time of composition, inthat it was written ten years after thewar ended.

MacGreevy went to live in Englandand then in Paris, in the great Irishtradition of Synge, Joyce and Beckett,and thus became geographically dis-tanced from his North Kerry origins.

It is as if he blanked out his youth as asoldier and ignored his skill as a poet.

And so we look forward in time forpolitical wounds to heal. SebastianBarry toured Ireland reading from ALong Long Way. He speaks of hiswonder at his audience’s acknowledg-

ment of their neglectof the forgotten sol-diers and says that thelisteners seemed tounderstand, identifywith and salute WillieDunne and hisfr iends.

Michael Longleytakes the lead in therevival of the genre,perhaps? His poems,Wounds and Last Re-quests are studied forthe Leaving Certifi-cate. But then he’sfrom Belfast, andNorthern Ireland hasalways celebrated thedead with memorialsand remembranceday s .

As Donegal-bornplaywright FrankMcGuinness says, “Idiscovered that everytown in the North of

Ireland has a war memorial”. Everytown. I suddenly realised how deeplyWWI had affected every family inUl s t e r.

Longley’s In Memoriam inspired byhis father’s deathbed confessions is anextraordinary poem. It details shrapnelinjuries to the testicles, and ponders

on the fact that he, Michael, mightnot have been conceived. Then, thepoem chronicles how his fathersought girls behind the lines to rekin-dle his sexual function. Longley cele-brates these lost wives who rescued hisfuture genes from no-man’s land.

From Michael Longley’s latest col-lection, Snow Water, comes anotherunusual poem, The Front.

‘I dreamed I was marching up theFront to die.

There were thousands of us whowere going to die.

From the opposite direction, out ofstep, breathless, The dead and wound-ed came, all younger than my son,Among them my father who mighthave been my son.

“What’s it like?” I shouted after thefamily face.

“It’s cushy, mate! Cushy!” my fa-ther-son replied.’

They were so young, for the mostpart, those Irishmen who marchedaway to die. And when the poem isread in conjunction with Longley’s InMemoriam we realise how many un-born sons and daughters followedtheir young fathers-to-be to theirgraves in the filth and mud or the heatand dust of those great battles.

Frank McGuinness, on the otherhand, with an Irish Catholic back-ground wrote Observe the Sons ofUlster Marching Towards the Somme,in 1985. This is a play about eightNorthern Irish Protestants, seven ofwhom die in the heat and dust of themorning of July 1, 1916.

“What I wanted was to write a playwith a big theme, and this was a sub-

ject waiting to be explored. You mustremember that in Ireland when I grewup, almost nothing was taught aboutWorld Wars I or II. To serve in thosewars was regarded as unpatriotic, al-most,” McGuinness said.

Seamus Heaney also writes inmourning for those who died andseem forgotten, in his poem, InMemoriam Francis Ledwidge. Herecognises the difficulties that the Irishhave had with remembering their lostsoldiers: ‘In you, our dead enigma, allthe strains Criss-cross in useless equi-libr ium.’

These lines seem to acknowledgethe ambiguity of Irish feelings, point-ing out the irreconcilable cross-hatch-ing of political ideas stretching frompre-1914 to the present day.

Ledwidge’s poem Soliloquy should,perhaps, have the final word. Thepoem belittles the voice of the poet incomparison with the heart of the sol-die r.

Ledwidge does not reiterate TomKettle’s idea that the Irish soldierswho fought were fools.

Nor does he agree with the secret,bitter words of Christy Moran in ALong Long Way when he describeshis comrades as “these wretched foolsof men come out to fight a war with-out a country to their name, the slavesof England and kings of nothing”.

He seems to say that, even if thedream that they fought for is lost,even if the idea of freedom whichthey died for is lost, even if they areunrecognised and forgotten, the Irishsoldiers of the Great War were greatmen.

‘It is too late now to retrieve a fall-en dream, too late to grieve a nameunmade, but not too late to thank thegods for what is great; a keen-edgedsword, a soldier’s heart, is greater thana poet’s art.

And greater than a poet’s fame a lit-tle grave that has no name.’

Ireland’s Somme heroes deserve to be remembered

In the last part of our series on the battle of The Somme and Irish soldiers in World War I,Allan Prosser looks at how the conflict, and its participants, are remembered in Ireland

Somme, which carries —in depressing mathematicaluniformity — the names of72,000 men who were lost,but never found, in thatterrible battle.

The Lutyens Gardenswere completed in the early1930s, but allowed to fallinto a scandalous state ofdisrepair and had to be res-cued by Garret Fitzgerald’sgovernment, who paid asubsidy for their recovery.

While most Europeancapitals have memorials intheir city centre to honourtheir lost sons, proposals tolocate something on behalfof the Irish dead of theGreat War have never foundfavour. You can celebrateOscar Wilde and MollyMalone but not the humbleprivate who gave his life atPassendale; or Ginchy; orLangemark; or Ronnsoy.

In St Stephen’s Green,there is a bust to the na-tionalist, poet, and UCDprofessor Tom Kettle, butyou will have to look hardto find it.

Tom Kettle is also re-membered in the majorIrish memorial in Europe,the Island of Ireland PeacePark (Páirc Siochánad’Oileán na hÉireann), lo-cated at Messines in Bel-gium.

This was the scene ofperhaps the greatest feat ofarms in the Great War bythe Irish, when the Protes-tant 36th Division and theCatholic 16th Divisioncombined to overcome im-mensely strong German po-sitions on high ground, thusfulfilling the vision of na-

tionalist MP JohnRedmond of “Ulstershaking hands withCo Cork.”

One of the nameson the ThiepvalMemorial on The

Somme is PrivateJames Kelly fromMill Street inMiddleton who

was 15 when heenlisted for the 6thConnaughtRangers. He wasone of sevenmembers of hisbattalion killed byartillery fire asthey advanced to-

wards Ginchy on

Q: What happened tothe soldiers after thewar?A: They returned home toIreland to a country whichwas to be partitioned, andthen divided again by acivil war. Some wereviewed with suspicion andhostility for their wartimerole with the British Armyand at theheight of theBlack and TanTerror it was,perhaps, pru-dent not to ad-vertise a warrecord tooprominently. Itis estimatedthat as many as200 former ser-vicemen were assassinatedas suspected informers bythe IRA between 1919 and1922. William McPhersonof Mallow was shotthrough the chest and amessage pinned to him:“Spies and informers inMallow beware.” Even 65years after The Somme SirNorman Stronge was killedwith his son, and hishome, Tynan Abbey, de-stroyed by fire two daysbefore his 87th birthday.So men such as these sur-vived the war, but not thepeace. Other ex-soldiers,joined the forces of theFree State. Others such asTom Barry and Emmet Dal-ton took their wartime ex-perience into the IRA.

Q: How did the popula-tion of Ireland honourtheir soldiers upon theirreturn?A: Initially there were re-membrance services heldevery year around thecountry, and the 16th Divi-sion Memorial Cross fromGuillemont/Ginchy wastemporarily erected on Col-lege Green, Dublin. Thou-sands of poppies weresold and in 1925 130,000attended a commemora-tion in College Greenwhich was disrupted by aSinn Féin protest.

Q: What happened tothe regiments?A: They marched out ofhistory with the creation ofthe Free State and handedover their colours at Wind-

sor Castle where they re-main today.

Q: How many VCs werewon at the Somme bythe Irish?A: There were 51 VictoriaCrosses awarded duringthe Battle of the Somme ofwhich 10 went to men ofIrish blood.

Q: How can Ifind outabout my rel-atives whoparticipatedin the GreatWa rA: The Com-monwealthWar GravesCommission

(www.cwc.org) is a goodstarting point if you havedetails of where he fell. Ifhis grave was unmarkedhis name may be recordedon the Thiepval Memorialon the Somme, or theMenin Gate in Ypres, Bel-gium. The staff at theSomme Heritage Centre(www.Irishsoldier.org) areextremely helpful. Thereare also associations youcan try: Royal MunsterFusiliers Association, 86High Meadows, Gouldavo-her, Limerick; Royal DublinFusiliers Association, 11Ayrfield Court, Ayrfield,Dublin 13; ConnaughtRangers Association, For-est Row, Boyle, Co.Roscommon. WesternFront Association, Republicof Ireland branch, 49 Killar-ney Heights, Bray, Co.Wicklow.

Q: Were any Irishmenexecuted for desertion?A: During the Great War346 officers and men wereexecuted for a range of of-fences including murderand it is calculated that 26were of Irish blood. Atleast seven were shotduring the Somme offen-sive. This is a controversialarea and in the early partof the 20th century littlewas understood aboutshell shock or battle fa-tigue. Surprising, perhaps,is that the number is solow given that the BritishArmy had nearly five mil-lion men under arms bythe end of 1918.

Sebastian Barry’s Man Book-er-nominated A Long, Long Way:‘a tornado of volunteers’.

QA&

September 8. He hadjoined up with his cousin,Bill Cahill, who had beenwounded five days earlier inthe attack on Guillemont.The two cousins died with-

in hours of each other.Not far from Messines is

the hamlet of Poelkappele.In a military cemetery thereyou may find a grave num-bered 6322 in which is

buried a Private John Con-don, from Wexford. Thismay not be his real name,but what is known abouthim is that he was 14 whenhe died. That he was Irish

is interesting. That he is theyoungest known soldier tobe killed on the WesternFront is truly tragic. Andfor a nation such as Ireland,worth remembering.

The forgotten army

The Somme memorial in Les Vans, in the Ardèche region of France. Below left: une paysanne kisses the emptygreatcoat of her lost husband on the WWI monument in Sailly-Sallisel, France.

Clockwise from left: Cork’s World War Imemorial on South Mall; the Island ofIreland Peace Park at Messines in Belgium;the Munster Cross in Ypres, Belgium, paidfor ‘by the people of the province and Cork,its capital city’.