Eighty-five years ago, the first World War was well under way in Europe, and in Ireland it seemed to everyone as if the rain would never stop.
"The weather has been more than ordinarily vile, even for mid-winter," declared the lea der-writer of The Irish Times on January 13th, 1915. "We can recollect December as a long vista of rain and mud and, up to the present, January of the new year has been very little better."
He - for in those days, I am sure it must have been a he - said: "Two of the dominating factors in the lives of many of us at present are the rain and the war. It is only natural to try to trace them to a common source.
"It would appear not a little ridiculous to accuse Germany of being responsible for the present abominable weather in Dublin, but we believe that the charge can be made with some show of reason."
The writer was referring to one of the most persistent myths throughout the ages - and of course it is a myth - that battles are nearly always accompanied by rain.
Plutarch, writing of Marius and his clash with the Teutons in 102 BC, expressed the view that "extraordinary rains generally fall after great battles, either because some divine power thus washes and cleanses the polluted earth, or because moist and heavy exhalations steaming forth from the blood and corruption thicken the air, which is naturally subject to alterations from the smallest causes".
As technology advanced, this perceived peak in rainfall following hostilities came to be associated with gunfire, explosives and the noise of artillery in battle. Even Napoleon believed that cannon-fire caused rain, being persuaded that the noise jostled minute cloud particles together, allowing them to coalesce and fall. The leader-writer went on to observe that "unusual amounts of rain have fallen both in Flanders and in Poland, where the firing has been heaviest. It may also be pointed out that the south of England, which is nearer to the actual field of battle than Ireland, has suffered from worse floods than any which we have experienced."
However, by contrast, he went on to note: "Unfortunately for a pleasant theory, September and October, the first two months of serious fighting, were unusually dry. If gunfire produces rain, that fact can hardly be explained away."
The Irish Times then, as always, arrived at precisely the correct conclusion: "Perhaps, after all, the bad weather can only be ascribed to the vagaries of unsympathetic Nature."