IRISH VOICES
from
THE GREAT WAR
To Oliver and Sadie Fallon
– two very welcome and adorable grandchildren
IRISH VOICES
from
THE GREAT WAR
MYLES DUNGAN
First published in 2014 by Merrion
an imprint of Irish Academic Press
8 Chapel Lane
Sallins
Co. Kildare
© 2014 Myles Dungan
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
978-1-908928-80-1 (paper)
978-1-908928-81-8 (cloth)
978-1-908928-82-5 (PDF)
978-1-908928-83-2 (epub)
978-1-908928-84-9 (mobi)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Printed in Ireland by SPRINT-print Ltd.
I call
And shorten your way with speed to me
I am love and hate and the terrible mind
Of vicious gods
Fragment from War, an uncompleted poem by Francis Ledwidge
Contents
2.Gallipoli: The V Beach Landings
3.The 10th Division at Suvla Bay
5.1 July 1916: The 36th (Ulster) Division and the Battle of the Somme
6.The 16th (Irish) Division at the Somme
8.1918: From Calamity to Closure
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Conor Graham and Lisa Hyde of Irish Academic/Merrion Press for their faith that a project begun almost twenty years ago was worth reviving in a changed context.
To Martin Harte of the Temple Bar Company for forcing me to pay more attention to the music of the Great War and to Niall O’Flynn, John O’Keeffe, Jonathan Creasy, Sadhbh Burt Fitzgerald and the Brook Singers for making the music real.
To my five children Amber, Rory, Lara, Ross and Gwyneth Owen for their unstinting and unavailing scepticism (as Gwyneth Owen isn’t quite three years old I’m paying this one forward)and to my grandchildren Oliver and Sadie Fallon for being just fabulous.
A number of people are also due my renewed gratitude owing to their contribution to this volume in its first incarnation.
To Kevin Healy, then Director of Radio Programmes, RTé for permission to use material from the Sound Archive, to Kieran Sheedy (from whose work in 1973 the bulk of the taped recollections comes), Joe Little and Jim Fahy for allowing me to use material from programmes they have compiled over the years and to Ian Lee, then of RTé Sound Archives, for patiently winkling out what was there and copying it for me.
ABBREVIATIONS
| ASC | Army Service Corps |
| Bn. | Battalion |
| BEF | British Expeditionary Force |
| DCM | Distinguished Conduct Medal |
| DSO | Distinguished Service Order |
| IWM | Imperial War Museum |
| MC | Military Cross |
| MM | Military Medal |
| RA | Royal Artillery |
| RAMC | Royal Army Medical Corps |
| RAP | Regimental Aid Post |
| RDF | Royal Dublin Fusiliers |
| RIF | Royal Irish Fusiliers |
| RIR | Royal Irish Rifles |
| RMF | Royal Munster Fusiliers |
| UVF | Ulster Volunteer Force |
| VC | Victoria Cross |
INTRODUCTION
‘Lord Kitchener says “The time has come, and now I call for 300,000 recruits to form new armies”. God save the King’1
(Recruitment poster, 1914)
When Irish Voices from the Great War was first published almost twenty years ago, Ireland was a very different place. The experience of Irish veterans of the 1914–18 war was the subject either of a culpable amnesia or of what Professor David Fitzpatrick has memorably described as ‘aphasia’.2 There was an historiographical, cultural and emotional deficit where Irish participation in World War 1 was concerned. This had, largely, been engendered by the dominant narrative of twentieth-century Irish history, one dictated by the nationalist ‘victors’ of the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21, forces seen, whether justifiably or not, to be antipathetic or antagonistic towards Irish Great War veterans.3 Indifference or outright hostility had led to the rapid atrophying of ‘memory’. Remembrance or commemoration of the Great War, while it featured to some extent in the culture of the Irish Free State in the 1920s, more or less disappeared from view in the 1930s and played virtually no part in the public life of the subsequent Irish Republic.
In the years following legislative independence it was natural that the writing of Irish history would focus on that prevailing narrative. It was not until the 1950s, and the rise of a generation of ‘professional’ historians like Theo Moody, Kevin B. Nowlan and Robin Dudley Edwards,that such writing began to transcend and interrogate that narrative. Academics like R.F. Foster and Joseph Lee led the next generation of historical ‘revisionists’ and, suddenly, there