Harry Clarke’s first World War

In Paul Murray's novel Skippy Dies the history teacher Howard Fallon grows frustrated with retelling war stories from a textbook. So he takes his students on a surprise expedition to the Irish National War Memorial Gardens, at Islandbridge in Dublin, where he can make a point about what society remembers and what it has been willing to forget.

Amid the rose gardens Fallon tells the boys the story of the Dublin Pals, professional men recruited together to serve with the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers. The Pals suffered heavy casualties during the Gallipoli campaign of the first World War. After returning to Ireland they suffered again, this time from the public’s resistance to acknowledge their service. At the Dublin war memorial one of Fallon’s students reads the inscription on the Great Stone of Remembrance: “Their name liveth forevermore.” “They got that wrong,” the boy says.

I read Skippy Dies in 2010. Surprised that Dublin had an Irish national war memorial designed by Edwin Lutyens, I conducted some research, turning to Nuala Johnson's excellent Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance.

The day I made my first excursion to Islandbridge was Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 – the day Queen Elizabeth was also visiting the War Memorial Gardens. I arrived to find gardaí at the gates and could go no farther. But I persisted. Finally, visiting Ireland again in 2013, I located someone with a key to the book rooms.

I wasn't sure what to expect inside the southeast book room. With eight volumes of Ireland's Memorial Records 1914-1918 laid end to end in two glass cases, 16 illustrations by the Irish artist Harry Clarke extend the length of the room.

Edwin Lutyens designed special cases for the records, envisioning that the books would lie open, “four books in line on the two side walls of the Book Room with a table in the centre”. I asked the caretaker if people were always asking for the key. He said no, which is why I took this project on. The books are too lovely to be neglected.

Ireland's Memorial Records 1914-1918 were published in 1923; a set has always been located at Islandbridge. Murray doesn't mention the volumes in Skippy Dies, but they would have helped to answer a question asked by another of the fictional students: "Whose name?"

The records list 49,435 Irish people – about the population of Waterford city today – who were killed in action or died of wounds. A hundred sets were sent to libraries and cathedrals throughout Ireland and Allied countries.

Dating from the period of memorialisation after the armistice, Ireland's Memorial Records are distinctive among war memorials as they feature Clarke's elaborate and somewhat fantastical illustrations.

The books are quarto size – about 28cm tall and 23cm wide – and Clarke's black-ink illustrations dominate the four sides of each page. Amid Celtic-inspired design he included ruined houses, graves, trenches, the Gallipoli Peninsula, cavalry, airplanes, tanks and searchlights. Small silhouetted soldiers seem to dance through swirls of poisonous gas, mist and sea foam, suggesting lines from Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est: "As under a green sea", arc lights, shell bursts and "haunting flares" are at their backs.

Clarke’s illustrations are reverent – he includes the Virgin Mary, and several crosses to allude to the Resurrection – as well as Gothic in their insistence that machines of war have destroyed the soldiers and the landscape. The silhouettes hint at the very loss of individuality that the names attempt to imprint on the consciousness.

On the first page of names a ruined chateau, a disabled tank and silhouetted soldiers amid tipping crosses in a mouldering trench recall the droll Gothicism of Isaac Rosenberg's Break of Day in the Trenches, in which men are "Sprawled in the bowels of the earth / The torn fields of France" while "shrieking iron and flame / Hurled through still heavens".

Clarke is recognised for his stained-glass work, such as the 11 windows at the Honan Chapel, at University College Cork. So it may seem surprising that he took on a commission for a first World War memorial book. In fact, other than an appointment in his pocket diary for September 29th, 1919, which reads “Irish Nat Memorials”, there are no sketches, notes or letters that mention the commission.

He completed the drawings in 1922, after which they were electroplated. The design and typesetting were done by George Roberts, who intended to create a finely crafted book on hand-made Irish paper, after the style of the Kelmscott and Doves presses, in England.

Clarke likely received the commission from Laurence Waldron, his friend and patron. Waldron was one of a select group called together in July 1919 by the viceroy, Sir John French, to create a memorial.

At that point the committee decided to raise a private subscription to build a book room that would house a memorial scroll. It was perhaps a utopian effort, one that was meant to unite Irish people through common suffering. It was also an act of atonement for the atrocities of war and wretched conditions under which millions served and died, many thousands under French’s command on the Western Front.

Paul Murray concludes that “no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know”.

In my book I attempt to tell a story about the place, time and people who created the Irish rolls of remembrance.

For this story to live and grow, though, it's important for Ireland's Memorial Records to be in places where people can see them – preferably the full eight volumes that carry the weight of so many names.

Marguerite Helmers is on the English faculty of the University of Wisconsin and author of Harry Clarke's War: Illustrations for Ireland's Memorial Records, 1914-1918, published by Merrion Press