Myles Dungan

Irish Voices from the Great War


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      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

       Acknowledgements

       Abbreviations

       Introduction

       1.The Old Contemptibles

       2.Gallipoli: The V Beach Landings

       3.The 10th Division at Suvla Bay

       4.The Drury Diaries

       5.1 July 1916: The 36th (Ulster) Division and the Battle of the Somme

       6.The 16th (Irish) Division at the Somme

       7.1917

       8.1918: From Calamity to Closure

       Afterword

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       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

ASCArmy Service Corps
Bn.Battalion
BEFBritish Expeditionary Force
DCMDistinguished Conduct Medal
DSODistinguished Service Order
IWMImperial War Museum
MCMilitary Cross
MMMilitary Medal
RARoyal Artillery
RAMCRoyal Army Medical Corps
RAPRegimental Aid Post
RDFRoyal Dublin Fusiliers
RIFRoyal Irish Fusiliers
RIRRoyal Irish Rifles
RMFRoyal Munster Fusiliers
UVFUlster Volunteer Force
VCVictoria 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