1916 (13 page)

The position of the Irish party by the end of the summer was, therefore, dire. Its declared constitutional, parliamentary role was discredited. Its key wartime policy, of participating in the war to retain British popular support for Ireland’s demands, appeared lost, but could not be changed. Its Sinn Féiner, pro-German foes were now Irish heroes, while it appeared to be both weak and futile. The
Westmeath Independent
wrote that if no better alternative were found, the Irish cause would descend into ignominy.
⁷⁵
The Leitrim county inspector of the RIC put it simply: ‘Mr. Redmond and his party are not now much thought of.’
⁷⁶

VI

In at least five counties of provincial Ireland, local opinion saw the Easter rebels as fellow nationalist Irishmen much more than as inveterate enemies of John Redmond’s Irish party. They were certainly seen as foolish and misguided and their actions as destructive, but they were more the ‘flesh and blood’ of the Irish party than its ‘irreconcilable enemies’. Following the Rising, after only two to three weeks in which party spokesmen and newspaper editors hurled well-developed, pre-Rising invective against ‘Sinn Féiners’ and ‘pro-Germans’, those who maintained a stance of clear hostility to the rebels, including Redmond himself, found themselves increasingly in the minority. Having initially been traduced as criminals and traitors, the rebels were now mistaken but brave, misguided but patriotic. In essence, they may have been fools, but they were ‘our’ fools.

This shift of language and opinion was undoubtedly accelerated, massively, by events. What Redmond would describe as ‘gross and panicky violence’ by the authorities, the sheer scale of military repression, could not have been better calculated to transform criminals into martyrs and political enemies into friends of Ireland.
⁷⁷
This was then followed by the announcement, negotiation and abandonment of the Lloyd George settlement, a process of confusion and incompetence that both validated the use of revolutionary force and discredited its constitutional alternative.
Redmond believed that it was such events that resulted in ‘all the ordinary factors of our national life’ being ‘violently wrenched away from the normal’.
⁷⁸
For him, rebellion, repression and governmental betrayal had overturned an Irish political scene in which Ireland loyally supported the war effort, the goodwill of the British democracy had been won and home rule was assured.

The problem with Redmond’s interpretation of events was that his party’s view of the rebels, before the bulk of the executions and before the mass arrests in the provinces, was already ambivalent. The rebels were not universally damned as criminals. Instead, distinctions were made between the mass of the rebels in Dublin and their leaders, and between the Irish Volunteers and the socialist Citizen Army. Moreover, those who were to blame for the Rising were not Irish nationalists, but more traditional enemies – Carson, the UVF, the war office, Dublin Castle, the British government – together with the new bogeymen, Larkinite socialists. The rebellion was condemned not as a crime, but on the pragmatic grounds that it was bound to be defeated. The risk that it would be seen as a general Irish uprising, alienating English opinion and jeopardising home rule, was immediately identified, but in creating this danger the rebels were seen as foolish, not malicious. This latent sympathy for the rebels was quickly expressed by nationalists who, before the Rising, had already been disenchanted with the war, fearful of conscription, resentful of Ireland’s unfavourable treatment relative to ‘England’ and supportive of local ‘political prisoners’.

Before the Rising, the bulk of provincial nationalist opinion lagged well behind John Redmond in his enthusiasm for Ireland’s participation in the war, even though the vast majority of nationalists still pledged loyalty to Redmond as their leader. After the Rising, Redmond’s view of the world came even more adrift from those of his now-diminishing body of followers. Redmond was mistaken in his interpretation of the events of 1916. Ireland was not ‘violently wrenched away from the normal’ by the Rising; instead ‘the normal’, of angry, anglophobic nationalism, had been confirmed.

On 6 May, the
Sligo Champion
published a detailed eye-witness account of events in Dublin by local man and commercial traveller Matthew Flanagan, who was interviewed by the paper’s editor, James Flynn. Flynn (secretary of the north Sligo UIL executive) would remain loyal to the Irish party throughout the war and, like so many local editors, was never slow to suppress news and views that were politically inconvenient to him.
What is remarkable is that the
Champion
on this occasion devoted several columns to an account, Flanagan’s, which was clearly sympathetic to the rebels. Those rebels seen by Flanagan ‘did all their work with amazingly systematic method’. They paid properly for any premises that they occupied. Damage was considerable, as might be expected when the military began to shell the Volunteers. ‘A great many people who had no connection with the matter were detained.’ Asked by Flynn whether he knew any of the men killed, Flanagan replied: ‘Yes, they were a splendid class of men … they appeared to be respectable citizens.’ Flanagan continued:

Even though these unfortunate men have been errant and foolish, they still claim our earnest consideration and protection. You know, Mr Flynn, blood will ever flow thicker than water.
⁷⁹

The aim of this paper is to sketch out – to use a fancy word – a ‘holistic’ exploration of what might be termed the ‘parallel narratives’ of the 1916 Rising and the First World War, what I described in
Ireland and the Great War
as ‘parallel texts’, in which the similarities of experience might be more significant than the differences, great though they were in political (and other) terms.
¹
But, to be sure, these are unusual parallels, for, unlike the parallel lines we learned about at school, which never meet (that is the point – or lack of it – I suppose) these parallel lines or parallel narratives, intersect, mingle, intertwine, and insinuate themselves in each other.

My contention is that the Rising
cannot
be understood outwith, or separated from, the broader context of the First World War, that European (and, indeed, global) catastrophe, whose shadow falls across the history of the first quarter of the twentieth century. This is not to say that the Easter Rising is not itself a unique, specifically Irish event, in its conception, implementation and legacy. Of course it is.
All
historical events are unique and specific, and there is much to be learned from a close exploration of the detail and specifically ‘Irish’ dimension of the Rising.
²
Most accounts of 1916 understandably have a primarily local perspective, and there will be much of this, and rightly so, over the anniversary year of 2006. But the issue raises a general problem for all historians, of whatever subject or period, which is how to balance the specific and the general. Too much of the former may provide fascinating ‘micro-history’, and no doubt there is interest in studying the pin-points of paint in a Pointillist picture, but one also needs to stand back to get a sense of the whole picture, the wider perspective, if you like. On the other hand, the danger of being too broad and too general is the loss of the particular, unique character of any historical event, its specificity and its essence. So, a balance must be struck between the general and the particular, the broad and the narrow (perhaps
‘focused’ would be a better word), till we get a complete (or something approaching it) picture of the matter under discussion.

With this in mind, I want to examine the events of 1916 and thereabouts, and their legacy, in the broader context of the First World War. This war, asserted one reluctant participant in Ireland, ‘broke, like a blaze of light’ and all was ‘suddenly turned vital, and invested with reality’.
³
Thus we will investigate the ‘vitality’ and ‘reality’ of the time, exploring in turn the themes of mode, moment and memory.

M
ODE

War, as Karl von Clausewitz famously observed, is ‘nothing but the continuation of policy with the admixture of other means’.
⁴
This oft-quoted (usually wrongly as ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’) aphorism suggests that there is a ‘seamless robe’ of political activity, that war does not spring from nowhere, from some political vacuum, and that the resort to arms can be understood as just one point along a spectrum of possible political activity. For individuals and groups to contemplate political violence, and to accept both the possibility and the potential legitimacy of war, moreover, an environment needs to exist within which violence is an acceptable policy option. This is as much a social matter as it is political, or even philosophical, and some writers have pointed to the progressive militarisation of Europe and European society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as powerfully contributing to the likelihood of war.

By the beginning of the twentieth century every significant power in Europe, apart from the United Kingdom, had embraced compulsory military service, and was able to mobilise mass, conscript armies in defence of perceived national interests. The rise of mass society, underpinned by the staggering changes resulting from industrialisation, urbanisation and steady economic development, and the relentless advance of nationalist ideologies, through which the ‘nation-state’ had come to be seen as the highest form of human political organisation, produced a situation where nationality and democracy had come closely to be identified, with the obligations of one balanced by the rights of the other. Military conscription, thus, became the corollary of universal manhood suffrage. For the ruling classes, moreover, military service appeared to offer a way of controlling and disciplining the turbulent, threatening urban masses of the industrial age.
⁵

But many people willingly embraced military, and militaristic, ideals. Political groups on both the left and right asserted the benefits of military organisation and discipline, and, all across Europe, men were increasingly to be seen in uniform. Even Britain, with its longstanding distrust of standing armies and military power, was affected by the lure of military service, which might help resist the challenges of industrial mass society. Much of this was ‘muscular christianity’, with the Salvation Army and Boys’ Brigade in the vanguard. Sabine Baring-Gould’s stirring hymn hit the spot precisely: ‘Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war … Like a mighty army, moves the Church of God’.
⁶
Robert Baden Powell’s more secular Boy Scout movement was specifically designed to harness and direct the energies of modern (and potentially decadent) British youth into constructive and patriotic military activities.
⁷

Ireland, of course, was not at all immune from this tendency, as David Fitzpatrick has demonstrated with his customary eye for telling detail.
⁸
To the British paramilitary organisations may be added specifically Irish ones, such as Fianna Éireann (founded in Belfast by Bulmer Hobson in 1902), all sustained by the rising tide of militarism in Europe. The apotheosis of militarism (or should that be paramilitarism?) in Ireland came with the unionist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) of 1913 and its nationalist shadow, the Irish Volunteers, established eleven months later. In the early twenty first century it is often asserted that the Irish are ‘good Europeans’, reflecting and embracing the manners and mores of our continental colleagues. So, too, was the case in the early twentieth century. The UVF and the Irish Volunteers were not just sturdy Irish associations, with indigenous origins and embodying purely local political aspirations, but they were part of a European-wide phenomenon, in which many men (and some women) opted to bear arms in proud support of their national political aspirations.

In Ireland and Britain enlistment to such paramilitary organisations was massively outstripped by the ‘rush to the colours’ after the outbreak of the First World War. One of the great conundrums of the history of this period is how to explain the apparently inexplicable situation when extraordinarily large numbers of men across Ireland and Britain volunteered to serve in the armed forces of the United Kingdom. Although recent scholarship has shown that, across Europe, the ‘spirit of 1914’ was not so unwaveringly warlike as has been supposed, the numbers of recruits are extremely impressive and need explanation.
⁹
Over 140,000 Irishmen volunteered to join the armed services during the First World War.
¹⁰
Of
these some 50,000 joined in the first six months, from August 1914 to
February 1915, clearly reflecting the greatest intensity of ‘war enthusiasm’. But 90,000 men enlisted in the succeeding forty five months – 10,000 in July to November 1918 alone – and any explanatory model for the extraordinary resilience of Irish recruitment in the context of changing Irish political circumstances will have to come up with something better than an explanation which ascribes it to a kind of patriotic social tsunami which swept men willy-nilly away to the war.

The discussion of recruitment offered in
Ireland and the Great War
challenges the simplistic assumption that everyone joined up in August 1914 and that they did so in a sort of Pavlovian response to the political bugle-call of deluded and war-inflamed leaders. It seeks to demonstrate that this phenomenon was not at all simple, and that there were multiple motivations for enlistment: social, economic, fraternal, personal, psychological, idiosyncratic, as well as ‘patriotic’. A good Cork example of how an individual might explain why he joined up is Tom Barry, the later IRA commander, who claimed that a simple desire for adventure was a powerful motive. For many at home the war offered excitement and the chance of glorious opportunity. Barry enlisted in June 1915. Seventeen years old, he said he ‘had decided to see what this Great War was like … I went to the war for no other reason than that I wanted to see what war was like, to get a gun, to see new countries and to feel like a grown man’.
¹¹
This was nearly a year after the war had started, and, among other things, provides some evidence that the recruiting rush of the early days does not tell the whole story.