Irish Voices from the Great War

Myles Dungan

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781908928832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This pioneering study, first published in 1995, retains its rank as one of the most powerful histories ever written about Irish involvement in World War 1. This year, the centenary of the war, sees its timely re-publication as the Irishmen who fought in that war re-enter the national memory after decades of indifference and hostility. The gradual softening of attitudes over the last twenty years amid great historic change on the island of Ireland, is due in no small part to the efforts of historians, such as Myles Dungan, to tell thousands of forgotten stories. Drawing on the diaries, letters, literary works and oral accounts of soldiers, Myles Dungan tells some of the personal stories of what Irishmen, unionist and nationalist, went through during the Great War and how many of them drew closer together during that horror than at any time since. This volume deals with a selection of the most important battles and campaigns in which the three Irish Divisions participated.

1. THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES

‘There’s a woman sobs her heart out,

With her head against the door.

For the man that’s called to leave her,

God have pity on the poor!

But it’s beat, drums, beat,

While the lads march down the street,

And it’s blow, trumpets, blow,

Keep your tears until they go.’1

(Winifred Letts, ‘The Call to Arms in Our Street’)

In the world of paranoid alliances which existed in Europe in 1914 it was not at all illogical that the shot fired by a Serbian nationalist which killed an Austro-Hungarian potentate in modern-day Bosnia should have forestalled a possible Irish civil war. That shot reverberated in Ireland like a loud bang which distracts two men involved in a squabble of their own. It was as if a neighbour’s house was on fire. Both ran to join the chain gang. Neither did so entirely from the purest of motives. They wanted to be seen with buckets in their hands dousing the flames. Both expected the neighbour would reward them once the fire was extinguished.

The Great War had loomed as the country hurried towards war between the supporters of the Union and the advocates of Home Rule. But instead of fighting each other thousands of Irishmen, of Unionist and Nationalist persuasion had joined the British forces and, for very many different and often conflicting reasons, fought the Germans, Turks and Bulgarians in World War One.

It was to take nine months for the uninitiated (and often naive) volunteers of August and September 1914 to begin to be ground through the human ‘sausage machine’ which the Great War quickly became. But there was no shortage of Irish soliders, already in uniform, to meet the Germans in the weeks after they marched into Belgium in early August 1914. These were the men who had chosen (frequently by default) the Army to provide them with a livelihood. Men who did not need to be drip-fed stories of German atrocities, the rape of nuns, the ravaging of ‘Little Catholic Belgium’. These were the Irish soldiers of the Regular Army, often in Irish regiments, which constituted the British Expeditionary Force, despatched to France and thence to Belgium, in August 1914. When war broke out 30,000 Irishmen were serving in the 250,000 strong British regular army, an institution that had long played second fiddle to the ‘Senior Service’, the Royal Navy.2

The men of nine Irish Infantry regiments were represented in that force. The Cavalry regiments, because of the static nature of the fighting, were of little consequence other than in the opening and final days of the war. As casualties mounted many cavalry officers and men were simply drafted into infantry units. Even in the early, mobile stage of the war cavalry was used sparingly enough. John Breen a regular with three years experience in the 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, didn’t see many German cavalry charges after he arrived in France. ‘The Germans had cavalry all right but they didn’t like the shell fire or the rapid fire. They didn’t put many of them up. They’d put them up now and again.’3

Eight units, The Royal Irish Regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers, the Leinster Regiment, the Royal Munster Fusiliers and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, each had two active service battalions in the regular Army, some on overseas, colonial duty; the Irish Guards had a single battalion. Each had its own natural recruiting hinterland, some (Dublins, Munsters, Leinsters, Connaughts) are self-explanatory but, broadly speaking, in the case of the Royal Irish Regiment it was mostly the South East; the Inniskillings drew their men from Donegal, Derry and parts of mid-Ulster; the Rifles from Belfast, Antrim and Down; and the Royal Irish Fusiliers from Armagh, Monaghan and Cavan.

Nine battalions of these famous regiments became members of an elite group, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), relatively few of whose members were to be left unscathed by the conflict. They called themselves ‘The Old Contemptibles’, the pejorative nickname being an ironic comment on the (probably apocryphal) order conveyed to the German First Army by the Kaiser as it cut a swathe through neutral Belgium. Incensed by the intervention of Britain he, allegedly, commanded his invading army to ‘exterminate the treacherous England. Walk over General French’s contemptible little Army.’4 The ‘Tommy’ in the BEF was not impressed, tending anyway to a comic opera view of the German soldier. ‘The field grey, rather baggy uniforms, comic boots, and helmets amused us. Anything strange or foreign was inferior, to the mind of the common soldier.’5 They adopted the ‘Contemptible’ tag as their own and turned it against the Germans.

Field Marshal Sir John French, who had been forced to resign for his pusillanimous approach to the recalcitrant officers of the 1914 Curragh Mutiny, was given charge of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of around 120,000 men who were mustered from the home-based units. (French lasted just over a year before being replaced by the ambitious First Corps Commander General, later Field Marshal, Sir Douglas Haig.) The BEF was quickly despatched to France by the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. Thanks to some stubborn and unexpected Belgian resistance it got there before the Germans did.6 The men were pitched straight into action as the hammer blows of the modified Schlieffen Plan descended on the towns and cities of Flanders and Picardy. Within three months 40,000 Irish soldiers,7 regulars and reservists, hauled in to fill the gaps left by the earliest casualties, would be involved in the fighting on the Western Front. This figure does not include the thousands of Irishmen in English, Scottish and Welsh regular Army units.

Before their departure for France each soldier recieved a personal message from the Secretary of State for War admonishing him to be on his best behaviour and to treat the French with due respect and deference. ‘Be invariably courteous, considerate and kind. Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting as a disgraceful act.’ On the other hand, the French being the French, renowned the world over for moral laxity and ‘fast’ women the innocent ‘Tommy’ was warned to be on guard against ‘temptations’ both in wine and women. ‘You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you must avoid any intimacy.’8 Such avuncular counsel was to be retained by every soldier in his Army Service Pay Book as a written encouragement to good behaviour. This also contained an ominous form which was to be filled out should a soldier wish to make his last will and testament. More importantly it told ‘Tommy’ that he would get higher pay while in the field risking life and limb. This was a source of some small consolation. Contrary to popular mythology few actually believed that the war would ‘be over by Christmas’, though many thought it would end within twelve months.9

John Lucy, a twenty-year-old Corporal, from Cork, had joined the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles, along with his brother, who was a year younger, in January, 1912, shortly after the death of their mother. Studying the men (mostly from Belfast) who formed this battalion Lucy concluded that, on the basis of this representative sample, most of those in the regular army had been driven to the colours by ‘unemployment and the need of food’. There were some exceptions:

There was a taciturn Sergeant from Waterford who was conversant with the intricacies of higher mathematics, and who was very smart and dignified and shunned company. There was an ex-divinity student with literary tastes, who drank much beer and affected an obvious pretence to gentle birth; a national school teacher; a man who had absconded from a colonial bank; a few decent sons of farmers. The remainder of us in our Irish regiment were either scallawags or very minor adventurers.10

Jack Campbell was one of a family of five brothers all of whom served in the forces during the war. Like Lucy, Campbell was an ‘Old Contemptible’ but he had been attached to a Scottish regiment on enlistment. He arrived in France, a raw private, with the 1st Royal Highlanders (The Black Watch) and served with them until 1918. Campbell and Lucy were fortunate in one respect, both were young and fit. Many of the men who made up the BEF were reservists who had been out of khaki for up to seven years. They were to find the going particularly difficult. Often, because of their return to ‘Civvy Street’, they were under the command of much younger men and tended to grouse more about the absence of home comforts.

The troops of the Irish Regular Army battalions left the country without much fuss or ceremony, the dour Kitchener being more inclined to secrecy than to show. There were a few enthusiastic send-offs in some garrison towns but, by and large, they slipped out of Irish or British barracks, sailed for the continent and were soon traversing the paved roads of Northern France.11 (Some – notably the Connaught Rangers – singing a popular marching song It’s a Long Way to Tipperary as they did so.) Edward Byrne, a Waterford man, who had been assigned to the 72nd Battery Royal Field Artillery in 1912 was 23 years old when Gavrilo Princip fired the shots in Sarajevo which precipitated the global confict. He handed in his dress uniform, like all the others in his unit, got on the train from Waterford to Queenstown and sailed to France – on a ship called the Kingstonian. Bad weather forced the vessel to return to Southampton. But not before having to jettison some terrified and unfortunate horses somewhere in mid Channel.

It was a member of one of the Irish regiments who acquired a dubious distinction. At 7.00 a.m on the 22 August, outside Mons, men of the Royal Irish Dragoon Guards spotted a group of four German cavalrymen. Corporal Edward Thomas, of ‘C’ Squadron, from Nenagh, Co.Tipperary, fired immediately and found his target. It is not known whether the bullet killed or wounded the enemy cavalryman. It was the first shot fired in battle by a soldier of the British Army on the continent of Europe for almost a hundred years and the first of the Great War. Thomas later won a Military Medal and, after surviving the war, was discharged in 1923.12

An anonymous Irishman was also the inspiration for one of the first famous recruiting posters. This depicts a British soldier lighting his pipe nonchalantly, while a German cavalry regiment hurtles towards him. The caption reads ‘Half a mo’, Kaiser’. The sketch emanates from a report of an Irish Guardsman who coolly cadged a cigarette from a fellow soldier and lit up with the enemy cavalry approaching.

Had Kitchener, himself the subject of the most famous recruiting poster of them all, been given his way the BEF would have been nowhere near Mons, it would have been deployed much further to the south. The old warlord feared that the small force, by advancing that far north to meet the Germans, would open its account in full retreat.The British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, on the advice of French, overruled him. Kitchener was proven right. Within a matter of days the BEF was retracing its steps, though at much greater speed. But on their pleasant late summer march in mellow August sunlight to Mons the BEF was feted by grateful French villagers giving a hearty welcome to their new saviours and encouraging them, by means of a universal gesture, to cut the throats of the ‘sale Boche’: ‘Their promiscuous kissing, the cut throat gesticulations, useless presents, mad hatred of the “dirty Germans”, and their petty pilfering of our cap-badges, buttons, and numerals, “browned” a good many of us off.’13 Astonishingly requests for mementoes continued with the BEF going in the opposite direction, in full retreat, a few days later. It was too much for one Dublin Fusilier in the 10th Infantry Brigade ‘who was wearily dragging himself along in the ranks of his company, hearing the too familiar cry of “souvenir” turned an angry glance over his shoulder and growled “Here, you can have my blooming pack for a souvenir!”’14 Naturally, the cheers were for ‘Les Anglais’, a misapprehension corrected by John Lucy in the case of the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles. ‘“Nous ne sommes pas Anglais, nous sommes Irlandais.” They liked that and laughed with pleasure, and then shouted: “Vivent les Irlandais,” and we cheered back at them: “Vive la France”.’15

Jack Campbell, who survived the war and died in 1993 at the age of 96, landed at Rouen with the Black Watch and entrained for Mons the following day. ‘It was Sunday evening when we arrived in Mons and as we marched through the town the church bells were ringing, calling the just to prayer, but we weren’t interested in prayer or anything like that because in a matter of hours we’d be engaged with war that would kill thousands and bring hardship and misery to millions all over the world.’16 A few miles outside the town the battalion left the road and formed ‘a kind of front’ in a wheat field. The stalks had already been cut and lay around the field in sheaves, Campbell and his Scottish comrades made comfortable bedding for themselves and settled in to wait and see what would happen. The calm was shattered at five o’clock the following morning when three batteries of field artillery opened up on a small wood a few hundred yards away from the Black Watch. Campbell quickly found out why:

A horde of cavalry came out of there. I didn’t think there was so much cavalry in the world to tell you the truth. They came heading straight for us. We could see they were losing heavily because there were other troops in front of us … They got to about 100 yards from where we were, then they seemed to falter and those that were left galloped back in the direction they came. A short while after that we got the order to fall in. We fell in and that started the retreat from Mons.17

Campbell had watched a German cavalry unit being torn to shreds. He wondered why, after tha...