ON the first day of Queen Elizabeth’s Irish visit, with synchronicity a group assembled at the grave of Willie Redmond in Flanders Fields. We read part of his last speech in the House of Commons, which was an impassioned plea for reconciliation. It can be said that he sacrificed his life for North-South unity and Anglo-Irish accord.
Though his health had collapsed and he was aged 56, Maj Redmond insisted on going over the top with his men at the battle of Messines Ridge on June 7th, 1917. The 16th (Irish) Division attacked alongside the 36th (Ulster) Division. Wounded by shellfire, he was carried from the field by Ulster troops and died that evening in their division’s field hospital. He was buried in a convent garden at Loker. Despite attempts by the authorities at re-interment in a Commonwealth war cemetery, his body is still there.
According to Willie Redmond’s biographer, Terence Denman, the Easter Rising “shook him terribly and he realised that constitutional nationalism had taken a wrong turn in supporting the war”. Brother of the Irish Party leader, he had been MP for east Clare. The parliamentary vacancy caused by his death was filled by Éamon de Valera.
In 1914 no one knew how to avoid disaster. The European powers blundered into a war which resulted in an estimated nine million soldiers killed, about 20 million maimed, at least three million widows and six million fatherless children. Expectations of a short decisive war proved false, as a deadlocked Western Front was drawn from Switzerland to the sea. Pope Benedict XV appealed in vain for an end to the “revolting human slaughter”.
Today this brooding land contains the dust of 510,000 unidentified British and Commonwealth soldiers. The remains of many were gathered into the official war cemeteries; their headstones state: “known unto God”. The Thiepval Anglo-French memorial (designed by Edwin Lutyens) lists the names of 72,000 missing, including Tom Kettle.
The poet-soldier, Francis Ledwidge, was killed in action on July 31st, 1917. A Welsh-speaking poet died on the same day and is buried also in Artillery Wood cemetery: Ellis Humphrey Evans used the pen name Hedd Wyn (white peace).
Canadian medical officer John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fieldswhile serving at Essex Farm dressing station. In the adjoining cemetery, Gearóid O'Sullivan led us to the grave of his uncle: Patrick O'Sullivan, of Ballyledder, Beaufort, Co Kerry, was killed aged 19. A chaplain wrote to his mother on July 6th, 1916: ". . . you need not be anxious about the safety of his soul . . . He was at holy communion the day before they went to the trenches. May God comfort you in the thought of meeting your dear son in
heaven . . .”
A panel at the Ireland Peace Park near Messines Ridge contains this narrative by Francis Gleeson, chaplain, Royal Munster Fusiliers: “Spent all night trying to console, aid and remove the wounded. It was ghastly to see them lying there in the cold, cheerless outhouses on bare stretchers with no blanket to cover their freezing limbs.” Willie Redmond’s chaplain said he was “absolutely convinced he was dying for Ireland”. The 16th Division memorials at Guillemont and Wytschaete bear the inscription: “Do chum glóire Dé agus onóra na hÉireann.” But the Civil War left Ireland bitter, insecure and drained of generosity: Irishmen
who had served in the British army were treated with condescension.
Two letters from the Western Front to my mother (aged eight in 1915) have survived. “My dear cousin Nancy,” Matt Burke began, “I wish this damn war was over. We are all very tired of the business and life is very uncertain. We have a very anxious time. God is good . . . If I am killed, I will die in a good cause.” (Paradoxically, two years later Thomas Ashe, the first republican prisoner to die on hunger-strike, immortalised the phrase: “I die in a good cause.”)
Burke wrote again on November 5th, 1918. He hoped the influenza epidemic was keeping away from Co Clare. “We are in great glee expecting a finish. Victory in sight. Four terrible years of destruction.” Otto Dix, a German artist and veteran of the first World War, was haunted by the brutality of mechanised warfare long after the guns fell silent. (When the Nazis came to power he was dismissed as a “degenerate artist” from his post at Dresden Academy.) He wrote: “Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, dug-outs,/ Bodies, blood, alcohol, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets,/ Deaths, fire, metal. That’s war. It’s the devil’s work.” Dix overlooked one barbarity – poison gas developed by a Jewish German chemist, Fritz Haber. The still sad music of humanity can be heard too in the Jewish headstones among the lines of iron crosses in Fricourt German cemetery.
As we approach the centenary of the catastrophic Great War, it seems to this diarist that the most appropriate way to remember those brave men is to reflect on the futility of war. Dying aged 25, the poet Wilfred Owen came to represent a generation of young men sacrificed by generals, politicians and war profiteers. Recalling a comrade killed by poison gas, he wrote: “If in some smothering dreams you too could pace/ Behind the wagon that we flung him in,/ And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,/ His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin . . . / My friend, you would not tell with such high zest,/ To children ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”