Ninety years after the guns fell silent, a new book on Ireland and the first World War details its impact on the people and the politics of the island, writes Shane Hegarty
IN THE parish church in Spiddal, Co Galway there is a stained-glass window that, although arresting, does not appear unusual at first glance. It is a knightly figure reaching heavenwards, with the accompanying words "lux perpetua luceat ei" ("perpetual light shine upon him").
Happening upon it on a visit to the Galway village, Prof John Horne quickly realised its meaning. Here, in a Catholic church in the west of Ireland, was a memorial to the first World War. Specifically, as the Latin inscription explains, it is in memory of George Morris, a lieutenant-colonel in the Irish Guards who died on September 1st, 1914. He was one of the first of 30,000 Irish to die, from an estimated 200,000 volunteers.
There are stained glass memorials, such as that in St Philip's Church of Ireland in Dartry, Dublin (shown left). But this Church of Ireland building is a more stereotypical place to find such a thing. "There are reminders of that war all around us," says Prof Horne, "if we just look for them."
Many of these physical reminders have been overlooked to the point of neglect, such as the Sir Edward Lutyens-designed War Memorial at Islandbridge, Dublin, which "for 40 years was a ghastly ruin". Each year, Horne runs a quick poll of his students at Trinity College Dublin. Few have visited it; most don't even know it is there. Even TCD has an example of the deliberate forgetting that took place in independent Ireland. Its war-memorial library was officially opened by Éamon de Valera. It was almost immediately dubbed the 1937 Reading Room, after the year it was opened, and the name has stuck.
The first World War was, explains Horne, "our war", which is the title of a new book he has edited. Accompanied by a series of lectures on RTÉ radio, the book is a general and fascinating history of the impact of the conflict on Ireland. Essays deal with day-to-day life in the country at the time, the role of women, recruitment, the human cost, and, most obviously, the politics of the war and how it has been treated by the two traditions on the island. However, the war, and its immediate aftermath, had an impact on the country that went beyond the political. It was impossible to ignore the Irish role in the war. The walls were plastered with recruitment posters, which competed for space with nationalist posters.
On Dublin's streets, there was the familiar site of veterans in their blue pyjamas, and the injured and amputees. The cinemas thrived on audiences who wanted the latest news from the front. The newspapers carried extensive lists of the dead and missing. Emigration to the US virtually stopped; marriages and births declined slightly. Irish nurses gave their services. Civilians sent so much clothing to charities that at least one had to announce that "no more socks or woollies are required at the front". At a victory parade in 1919, people watched the military parade from rooftop vantage points. In 1924 - with the Free State recently founded and the Civil War only just ended - great crowds thronged College Green for a remembrance service.
The strength of Our War comes in the richness of its images: the recruitment posters; photos of dazed survivors of the Lusitania; sketches of soldiers at the front. At its heart are the letters and cards from soldiers, such as those from Dubliner Jack Duggan to his fiancée. Filled with everyday detail and a certain giddiness, they end with news of his death at the Dardanelles, on the same day and in the same region as his brother George.
"It gives the reader a great sense of the raw materials historians work from," says Horne. Interviews with veterans have offered historians a retrospective view of events, but "if you want to know about a particular history, you will find it in the original documents, and the letters that give an extraordinary sense of what it was really like".
Published by the Royal Irish Academy, it neatly follows the bestsellng template of Dev, an illustrated history of Éamon de Valera. While Our War is not the first history of Ireland and the first World War, it is arguably the first to be so deliberately targeted at the mainstream reader and their Christmas stockings.
Horne explains that, while the first World War was embraced and integrated into Ulster unionist culture, it did not fit with the "founding myths" of independent Ireland. From the second World War onwards, it became especially disengaged from the Irish experience, as a way of defining Ireland's separation from Britain. Horne, however, argues that Ireland has to examine its part in the war as part of European and international history. However, he also points out that few countries were as affected by the war as Ireland. During the 10-year period 1913-23 Ireland experienced successive upheavals. The green poppy on the book's cover, then, suggests that Ireland does not have to adopt the red poppy, but identify a symbol that emphasises the Irish experience. At a time when other nations are concerned that the passing of the last veterans might bring about a forgetting of the lessons and experiences of the first World War, in Ireland it seems that we are only now beginning to remember.
Our War: Ireland and the Great War(€30 hardback) is edited by John Horne and accompanies RTÉ Radio 1's Thomas Davis Lecture Series, which will be broadcast on Mondays at 10pm from November 10, 2008. There is also an online archive exhibition and a series of public debates. See rte.ie/1918