Today has deep resonances for this island. On July 1st, 1916 the Battle of the Somme began. It continued for 141 days – until November 18th – leaving over 300,000 dead. All for an advance of 7.2 kilometres (4.5 miles), or an estimated 40 lives for every yard gained.
Those slaughtered on this day 107 years ago included 3,500 men from this island. Over 2,069 were from the 36th Ulster Division and almost entirely unionist. Of the 503 men from the 2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers engaged in the assault, 325 were casualties.
Due to the comparatively large number of unionists blown to bits by German guns on the day, July 1st, 1916 has entered Orange/loyalist mythology as one of great sacrifice. It probably ranks second only to the Battle of the Boyne in Orange commemorations. That sacrifice is seen by `Ulster’ men and women as a mass martyrdom by their community, a baptism in blood, affirming their British identity.
It was very different south of what would become the border. There the Easter Rising at Dublin’s GPO in 1916, followed by execution of its leaders, meant all changed utterly for those nationalist men from the majority tradition on the island and then in the British army. This despite the fact that those soldiers were encouraged to join up and fight for the freedom of small nations and “little Catholic Belgium” by Irish political and church leaders.
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It was also during Easter 1916 that the 16th Irish Division was subjected to a gas attack in France, killing 550 men.
By July 1916 Irish nationalist soldiers inspired shame at home. Their remains were buried in unmarked graves and remembered only on the Thiepval Memorial in France. For instance, families of 24 Irish Guards killed at the Somme on the first day of the battle refused to give the Commonwealth War Graves Commission any details of the men so they might be commemorated.
[ Thiepval Memorial: the Irish connectionOpens in new window ]
[ ‘For God and Ulster ... No surrender’Opens in new window ]
While unionists killed at the Somme were hailed as martyrs, nationalists slaughtered there were seen as an embarrassment and airbrushed from Irish history. It was a fate shared by a great majority of the estimated 200,000 men from this island who fought in the first World War, at least 35,000 of them killed.
The Somme river, once the Samara – for ‘the summery river’ – is derived from the Celtic root samo- (samhradh!) for ‘summer’.
