Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
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Sinn Féin propaganda had declared that an Irishman who joined the British army was ‘a traitor to his country and a felon in his soul’, though this had not stopped 9.1 percent of the regular army of 1914 from being Irish. However, the decision of constitutional nationalists to encourage enlistment sharply divided them from their more extreme brethren, and led to many Irishmen ascending history’s old Calvary, and fighting bravely in the ranks of an army to whose political principles they were firmly opposed.
With the active support of Redmond and his colleagues, Irishmen were enlisted into New Army battalions of Irish regiments. Many professional men who had been officers in the National Volunteers volunteered: indeed, there were so many good potential officers that some were sent off to England to help officer the Tyneside Irish. John Wray, solicitor and son of a nationalist election agent, was given an immediate commission in the Connaught Rangers and brought in 200 of his own volunteers. The 7/Leinsters maintained a cadet company for potential officers, and of the 161 men who had passed through its ranks by December 1915, thirty-five were to be killed in action. Three hundred and fifty rugby players from Dublin, white collar and tie men, paraded at Lansdowne Road rugby ground and then marched through the city to the Curragh, where they joined 7/Royal Dublin Fusiliers, where they became known as ‘Toffs in the Old Toughs’. A full company of Dublin dockers enlisted, and were known as the Larkinites after their union leader James Larkin, no friend of the British government or capitalism. And, as was so often the case that heady summer, there were odd phenomena: six officers and 225 men of the Royal Guernsey Militia, many of them French-speaking, volunteered for 6/Royal Irish, as they had been so impressed by the Royal Irish battalion which had been in garrison on their island. Two divisions were soon formed, 10th (Irish), in 1st New Army, and 16th (Irish), part of the 2nd New Army. Neither was ever wholly Irish, still less wholly nationalist, but there was a solid and unmistakable streak of Irishness running through both formations.
Ulstermen, too, faced a dilemma when war broke out. The Ulster Volunteer Force was 80,000 strong, and many of its units, organised on British military lines, were well armed and well drilled. There were initial doubts about throwing the considerable weight of the UVF behind the British government (against which it might so easily have found itself fighting), but these were soon resolved after discussions between Kitchener and Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader. The formation of what was to become 36th (Ulster) Division began in September 1914, and many of its battalions were firmly based on units of the UVF. Frank Crozier had been forced to leave the army in 1908 after bouncing cheques, which one astute commentator has called ‘a lifelong habit’. In 1914 he was, as he put it, ‘a hired mercenary’ training Carson’s UVF, and was quickly re-commissioned into the British army to be second in command to ‘my Shankhill Road boys’, now transmuted into 9/Royal Irish Rifles. Before the transition was complete he watched a regular battalion of the Norfolks leave for France, seen off by a guard of honour of the UVF’s West Belfast Regiment. ‘Five months previously,’ mused Crozier, ‘these very men of the Norfolks had quitted Belfast for Holyrood, owing to the menace in their midst of the very men who were doing them honour now, and from whom they evidently felt disposed to accept the compliment.’159
The iconography of 36th Division made its origins clear. The divisional sign was the Red Hand of Ulster; some units wore badges which harked back to their UVF origins, and when the division took immortality by storm on 1 July 1916 (the anniversary, in New Style, of the Battle of the Boyne), there were orange sashes in evidence and the old bark of ‘No Surrender!’ in the air. The division scored the only significant success north of the Bapaume road that day, and Ulster Tower, a copy of Helen’s Tower at Clandeboye, near Belfast, where the division did much of its training, stands on the ground it captured at the cost of 5,000 of its officers and men.
Yet we must be careful not to jam 10th and 16th Divisions on the one hand, and 36th on the other, into the obvious political niches. Some Irish regiments (notably the Royal Irish Rifles) had always recruited both Catholics and Protestants, and there was more than a little sense of a deep and common Irishness that expunged more superficial divides. ‘Once we tacitly agreed to let the past be buried,’ observed an officer in 10th Division, ‘we found thousands of points on which we agreed.’ The same music could speak to both. When the pipes of the Royal Irish howled out Brian Bora, that tune ‘traditionally played by some Irish Regiments to lift hearts and square shoulders’, in the assault on Guillemont on 15 September 1916, a man did not have to come from the South to feel his spirits soar. And when a northern-raised battalion of Irish Rifles met a southern battalion on the march with its band playing the old rebel air She’s The Most Distressful Country, there were cheers of approval.160
The apotheosis of the fighting Irish came on 7 June 1917 when 16th and 36th Division attacked side by side in 2nd Army’s great assault on Messines Ridge. John Redmond’s brother, Major Willie Redmond MP, who had last spoken in the House of Commons just a month before to demand immediate Home Rule, was, at fifty-six, too old for front-line service. But he begged to be allowed back to his old battalion, 6/Royal Irish, and was hit as he walked forward with it, and the 36th Division’s stretcher-bearers picked him up. The wound would probably not have killed a younger, fitter man, but it was too much for Willie Redmond. A Roman Catholic chaplain told how:
He received every possible kindness from Ulster soldiers. In fact, an Englishman attached to the Ulster Division expressed some surprise at the extreme care that was taken of the poor Major, though no Irish soldier expected anything else, for, after all, Ulstermen are Irish too.161
Father Willie Doyle of 8/Royal Dublin Fusiliers, killed soon afterwards, enjoyed a reputation which went far beyond those who shared his faith. ‘Father Doyle was a good deal amongst us,’ wrote an Ulsterman.
We couldn’t possibly agree with his religious opinions, but we worshipped him for other things. He didn’t know the meaning of fear, and he didn’t know what bigotry was. He was as ready to risk his life to take a drop of water to a wounded Ulsterman as to assist men of his own faith and regiment. If he risked his life looking after Ulster Protestant soldiers once, he did it a hundred times in the last few days. The Ulstermen felt his loss more keenly than anybody and none were readier to show their marks of respect to the dead hero priest than were our Ulster Presbyterians. Father Doyle was a true Christian in every sense of the word, and a credit to any religious faith …162
The stone tower that now stands in the Irish Peace Park on the southern end of Messines, heavy with Celtic symbolism, gives Protestant and Catholic soldiers the recognition they deserve: a recognition mired too long in politics.
The period between the raising of the 1st New Army in August 1914 and the departure of the first of the New Army divisions to France a year later was marked by shortages of weapons, equipment, accommodation and ammunition, and men remembered the sharp contrast between enthusiastic enlistment and the confusion and boredom that often followed. Even joining was not always easy, as Percy Croney discovered when he reported to the recruiting office in December 1914. ‘I took my place in the queue outside,’ he recalled.
Allowed in eight at a time by a smart sergeant, we stood in a row, stripped to the nude and a medical officer gave us a swift examination. The great majority seemed to be passed fit, and redressing we made our way to tables where soldier clerks sat.
‘What regiment do you wish to join?’
‘7th Essex, please, all my mates are in that.’
‘Sorry, 7th Essex is long ago up to establishment, why not join the R.E.s, much better pay and conditions than the infantry.’
‘No, I want to be a soldier.’
‘What about the Royal Field Artillery then, or the Garrison Artillery, a gunner’s life is good and interesting.’
‘No, I want to join my County regiment.’
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