Writing his "European Diary" from Flanders the other day, our Jamie Smyth said that the Great War was "absurdly titled". Well, no doubt the people who so "absurdly titled" it were not aware of how we might, over time, add to the meaning of the word "great", so that it could also come to mean "excellent" or "marvellous."
They used the word in exactly the same way as Cecil Woodham-Smith when she referred to "The Great Hunger", and others described The Great Fire of London or The Great Plague. No approval attaches.
It's November. Might I suggest you drive out to the country, walk into a field and stand absolutely still there for 10 minutes? That should do it.
And then remember that the men of the Great War would spend two unbroken weeks in the front-line. Two weeks without any heaters or fires or dry feet or proper waterproof clothing: just wool and flannel and hob-nailed leather, with absolutely no exercise by which to stay warm. Two weeks almost without moving, as the wind blew down from the North Sea bearing sleet or snow or rain, or endless, penetrating damp. Two weeks immersed in bitter wet loam and their own cold excrement. Two weeks without sleep. Year after year after year.
We do not do justice to the men of the Great War by visiting our vocabularies and our 21st century standards on them. They were 19th century men, with a largely unquestioning acceptance of what life had in store. Indeed, there is little evidence that they felt it wrong that deserters should be shot.
In as much as they had opinions on anything, they probably sensed that the short straw awaited them all, sooner or later: the best way of coping was by being true to their mates, covering for one another in front of the NCOs and the officers, and sharing whatever spoils came their way.
Lastingly poisonous mythological caricatures, reinforced by Oh What a Lovely War! and Blackadder have colonised the modern popular perception of this period. This portrays decent soldiers, gallant if unimaginative junior officers, and blundering fools as generals: the lions led by donkeys of Ludendorff's famous quote. Except he never said it - after all, why should he? Those lions led by those donkeys soundly beat the German Grand Army and its generals in the field.
Nor was General Haig simply the blundering butcher of myth. He may have made many mistakes - but which general did not, with the dazzling new technologies of tank, aircraft, massed machine-gun, artillery-barrage, artillery-location and field-radio making their military debut? Moreover, this was the first war in history in which generals could neither see the battle nor issue orders directly to their soldiers. They were blind, deaf, dumb. Ah, but were they not skulking in their chateaus deep behind their lines? Well, headquarters necessarily had to be beyond the range of enemy artillery: but skulk hardly does justice to the truth - 100 British generals were killed in action in the Great War.
An equal myth was that British officers were public school toffs. In fact, 100,000 officers of the army of 1918 had been commissioned from the ranks.
One of these was Freddie Plunkett from Tipperary who began the war as a sergeant with the Royal Irish Regiment and ended it as a brigadier general with a DSO and bar, MC DCM and Croix de Guerre. Similar decorations were awarded to Brigadier General Jack Hunt, a Dublin working class Catholic who in 1914 had been a mere drill-sergeant at TCD.
One of the finest Irish soldiers of the time was Alfred Durham Murphy, for the repose of whose soul survivors of his battalion, the 2nd Leinsters, annually gathered for a mass for decades afterwards. More than 20 years ago, I met the last of them, a Redmondite volunteer named Michael Tierney, and when he spoke of his commanding officer of over 50 years before, this ancient gentleman wept.
Alfred Murphy was a phenomenal man: brave, intelligent, resourceful, and ferociously loyal to his men. He was from Ballinamona House near Cashel, Co Tipperary, the scion of a Catholic gentry family. In almost continuous action since the war began, he had been awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order.
In November 1917, now a 27-year-old lieutenant colonel, one of the youngest in the army, he was inspecting a group of his men in the trenches when a large German shell exploded right in the middle of them, instantly killing him and seven enlisted soldiers. One of these was his orderly, William Corcoran, also from Cashel, whom he had known in pre-war days. All eight now lie as they died, side by side, in Roisel Cemetery, in Picardy.
The Murphy family were devastated by the loss, and turned his bedroom into a shrine. His younger brother Eddie became a founder member of the IRA - the Irish Rainfall Association - and thus could be said to have been a founder of the Irish Meteorological Service. An epileptic when the condition was surrounded by much baseless superstition, he never married.
His sister Kathleen was deeply attached to Piers McCan who was elected Sinn Féin MP in 1918, while imprisoned without charge in Gloucester jail. He died of flu shortly afterwards, and she never subsequently married either. Thus a 300-year-old line of Catholic gentry at Ballinamona finally perished, in large part because of the war which ended 87 years ago today, and which the Murphys, in all their sorrow, grief and dolour, would have always called Great.