THE Curragh Military "Camp" is off the main road to Cork, hidden behind trees life there is outside the experience of most people in Ireland. It is a town quite unlike other towns. Nevertheless, it was part of the life of thousands of young men from all parts of Britain and Ireland during the period covered by this book. Lord Strathnairn, Commander in Chief of the Forces in Ireland, said "he had never seen ground so well suited . . . to the masking of bodies of troops and to the instruction of the officers and men of all arms". Con Costello's reference notes and bibliography are formidable and fascinating to anyone who has lived or soldiered in Kildare.
He describes the archaeological features and the plain's unenclosed status since ancient times. There are connections with the Fianna legends and with St Brigid.
The Four Masters record a battle in 777AD, and the Earl of Essex camped there in 1599. Racing has an old history. Three hundred and fifty United Irishmen were killed while surrendering in 1798. The author sets all in context of time and place.
Internal security and "aid to the civil power" (including tithe collection and rent evictions) occupied the British Army for much of the last century. British regimental histories refer with distaste to involvement in "agrarian unrest", but no problems of conscience about "coercion" arose.
The army that built and guarded the Empire was frugally run. Soldiers' pay was 5p a day; officers needed private incomes. Battle experience had taught that weapons, equipment and horses had to be meticulously cared for negligent peacetime habits could not easily be changed in war.
The Curragh, designed for 10,000 troops as the Crimean War started, cost £192,821/l4s/2p. The monetary precision was characteristic.
The arrival of troops at the Curragh had social consequences, desirable and otherwise. "Camp followers (were) part of the military presence throughout the empire." The account of the lives of "unfortunate women", their distress relieved only by their kindness to each other and a hospital provided by the army, makes harrowing reading. They lived in ditches and furze bushes in all weathers and infiltrated the streets and billets of the camp.
Sporting and social opportunities were plentiful. The "Gentry of the Neighbourhood" were officially listed. Punchestown was a high point, then as now. Maud Gonne lived in the Curragh when her father (an interesting man in his own right) served there.
Nothing escapes Con Costello's research military wedding statistics Hector Legge's youthful memories the good relations between officers and men in military Freemason Lodges the private use of military horses to compete with jarvies (abuses of army facilities for private gain seem perennial) Lieut. Lawrence Oates (later to die at the South Pole) Oswald Moseley, also in the Cavalry Chris de Burgh's handsome grandfather, magnificent in his general's uniform what a pop star he would have made.
The account of the "Curragh Incident" is written as the cavalry officers men of their time saw it. Contempt was dominant, as Ian Beckett's admirable The Army and the Curragh Incident shows. Did the Irish Parliamentary Party know General Hubert Gough's contempt for its MPs? To Lieut General Sir Lawrence Parsons, John Redmond's son, William, was "a perfectly poisonous bounder", even in 1915.
Hindsight says that professional study of what barbed wire and machine guns would do to the "knee to knee cavalry charge" not political meddling, was needed. The officers were similarly oblivious to the lessons being drawn by the ordinary people they met so rarely and understood so little.