Post by Waverley on Dec 28, 2008 1:03:05 GMT 1
John Horne asks why the heroic efforts of the two Irish divisions, the 16th (Irish) and the 36th (Ulster), in the bloody events on the Western Front in 1916, have been viewed so differently both at the time and since.

The Somme Battlefield carries a range of monuments that form a mosaic of commemoration, where men from around the globe converged in 1916 to fight in one of the greatest battles of the First World War. But unlike many others, the monuments to the Irishman who fell in the battle commemorate the dead in two sharply different registers. One is the proud Ulster Tower, testifying to the mourning of Northern Ireland in the 1920s for those who died in the battle, and especially for the 36th (Ulster) Division, composed almost exclusively of Northern Protestants, which attacked on July 1st, 1916, the first day. The Tower has remained a symbol of Northern unionism ever since. The other is the humble Celtic stone cross that was erected outside the church of Guillemont to the memory of the 16th (Irish) Division, which recruited mainly among Catholics and nationalists and fought later in the battle (Guillemont fell on September 3rd). This monument is unknown to most people in Ireland.
In part this contrast resulted from Partition after the war and from divergent official attitudes to commemorating the war in the two parts of the country. But it also stemmed from the parallel yet different experiences of the war itself by the two traditions, unionist and nationalist.
Irish military recruitment was voluntary throughout the war. In the first two years, Ireland participated like the rest of the United Kingdom (and the British Dominions) in the extraordinary drive to create an army of millions by volunteering. The government only attempted to introduce conscription in Ireland in 1918, two years after Britain, and popular resistance meant that it failed.
Three quarters of the 210,000 Irishmen who served in the British forces joined up in this way, the remainder having already joined the army before the war began. Overall, this response was less than in Britain. While Ulster, Dublin and the hinterland of Leinster provided more volunteers than the agricultural districts of England, rural areas of southern and western Ireland supplied the least recruits of any part of the United Kingdom. A common explanation is that Irish wartime enlistment continued a tradition of recruitment to the much smaller peacetime British army for economic and social reasons, such as unemployment and poverty. There is some truth in this, but that tradition was waning by 1900. Much of the wartime volunteering was not economically motivated but, as elsewhere, reflected the involvement of communities and groups in the war itself.
This meant that Ireland’s participation was shaped by the Home Rule crisis. In 1914, Ireland stood on the brink of civil war as unionists in the Protestant districts of Ulster armed and prepared for rebellion against the introduction by the Liberal government of Home Rule. As the nationalists in turn took up arms in support of Home Rule, Irish society became uniquely militarized – though not in the sense of preparing for a European war. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), formed under Sir Edward Carson in 1913 to defend the Union, had nearly 100,000 men in 1914, organized on a military basis.
Ironically, war in Europe, which elsewhere meant the suspension of domestic politics, put the Irish conflict back on the political agenda, as recruitment became a test of each side’s legitimacy. The British Establishment was deeply divided over Home Rule, which the Liberal government promoted, but which the Conservative party and much of the army opposed. Partition in some form was inevitable. Home Rule was enacted after the outbreak of war but suspended for the duration. The leadership of both sides in Ireland endorsed volunteering for the British army in support of their opposed ends – Home Rule versus the retention of the Union, at least for Ulster. Unionists and Home Rulers channelled the antagonisms of Irish politics into a different kind of volunteering that boosted Irish recruitment and helped shape the 16th and 36th Divisions.
Their qualities made the political volunteers obvious candidates for soldiers. This was especially the case with the UVF, whose loyalist credentials recommended it to the War Office. As early as August 7th, 1914, the Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener (who was born in County Kerry and detested Irish nationalism) declared: ‘I want the Ulster Volunteers’, and in an unprecedented intrusion of politics into the army, allowed the 36th Division to recruit directly from the parallel structure of the UVF. The Division thus came to reflect the social cohesion of Ulster’s Protestant communities as well as their loyalty to Britain in what was perceived to be a war against German tyranny. Raising the Division cancelled out any loyalist rebellion and rewrote the claim to the Union as a blood sacrifice.
The equation was not so straight-forward for the National Volunteers who had formed in support of Home Rule. A minority refused to acknowledge that Ireland had any part in the Great War – this group would engage in the Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916, two months before the Battle of the Somme, and by the end of the war, as Sinn Féin, it would represent majority opinion outside Ulster. But this was not the dominant view in 1914-15 – far from it. The leading Irish nationalist MPs – John Redmond (leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party), Stephen Gwynn, Joe Devlin for West Belfast, and John Dillon – argued that the introduction of Home Rule gave Ireland a real stake in the war, which they saw as one for liberty and the rights of small nations against a militarist Germany. They envisaged the creation of an ‘Irish Brigade’ that would draw on the National Volunteers just as the 36th Division had absorbed the UVF. But despite Liberal support, the army refused a potentially dissident nationalist unit. The compromise was the 16th Division, in which many National Volunteers, from north and south, became individual members alongside other Catholic Irishmen with no explicitly political affiliations.
One of the most notable of these members was Thomas Kettle, former MP, lawyer, poet, journalist and a professor at the National University in Dublin. Kettle was in Belgium buying arms for the National Volunteers when the Germans invaded. He witnessed German atrocities against Belgian civilians and believed that Ireland could not stand aside from a war in which the very values that justified Irish independence were at stake. ‘Great Britain is right with the conscience of Europe’, he wrote, ‘[and] a reconciled Ireland is ready to march side by side with her to any desperate trial’ – provided Home Rule was secure. Otherwise, Kettle went on: ‘England [would] fight for liberty in Europe and Junkerdom in Ireland.’

Britain was creating a national army and, like other national armies in the early twentieth century, it could not avoid ideas of citizenship, nationhood and political entitlement by different groups in society. Both Irish divisions embodied a vision on the part of their founders and contained officers and men who were politically committed. The 16th Irish Division probably had more past and serving MPs than any other in the British army. As well as Kettle, the 16th included Stephen Gwynn and Willie Redmond, MP, younger brother of John Redmond. While the majority of soldiers were not political activists, this did not mean that in the political atmosphere of Ireland in 1914 they had no sense of the wider significance of enlisting.
The 36th and the 16th divisions both spent eighteen months in training – in Ireland, England and France. Each numbered 10-12,000 men and was composed of three brigades. Each brigade, in turn, was made up of four battalions of around a thousand soldiers, which came from the historic Irish regiments (Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Royal Munster Fusiliers, Royal Irish Rifles, etc). Initially, the 16th Division was given a staunchly unionist commander, Sir Lawrence Parsons, an indication of the army’s nervousness about Irish nationalism. He won the loyalty of the soldiers, however, and his wife, a nationalist, introduced him to the leading Irish Parliamentary Party politicians. Like Sir Edward Carson for the 36th Ulster Division, they became influential mentors. When it left Ireland for England in September 1915, the division was under an Irish Catholic, Major-General W. B. Hickie, who commanded it until early 1918. Before leaving England for France the 36th Ulster Division was reviewed by George V and the 16th Irish Division was inspected by Cardinal Bourne, the Roman Catholic Primate of England.
The small British Expeditionary Force had been virtually annihilated in 1914. As the conflict bogged down in trench warfare, the French bore the cost of trying to renew the offensive in 1915. The British could only participate in a minor way until Kitchener’s new volunteer army had been raised and trained. In the winter of 1915-16, the Allies were at last in a position to plan an offensive on the Somme for the following summer that was designed to break the German front. The two Irish units arrived on the Western Front in early 1916 during the planning of the Somme offensive. The German onslaught on the French at Verdun in the first part of 1916 made the Somme all the more urgent but also ensured that it would be a mainly British operation – though a third of the troops were French.
On July 1st, 1916, after a week-long artillery bombardment, the Allies attacked the positions that the Germans had prepared for nearly eighteen months deep in the chalky soil. The British suffered 58,000 casualties that day – the worst in the country’s history – and of these 20,000 were fatal. However, the battle lasted until mid-November with partial successes and the first tank attack. Breakthrough was never achieved. On a thirty-mile front, the British advance was nowhere more than four miles deep at a cost of 420,000 men, 150,000 of them killed.
The 36th Ulster Division had moved directly to the Somme front in February 1916 and played an important role in the initial attack. The 16th Irish Division was not originally destined for the battle, suggesting that it may not have been viewed as an elite unit, but went north to the Artois region, where it experienced a horrendous baptism of fire with a German gas attack in April. It was only sent to the Somme after the original offensive there had failed. The Ulster Division was placed near the centre of the battlefront, with its back to Thiepval wood, and given the task of attacking successive German positions uphill to the left of enemy-held Thiepval village. On the crest was the Schwaben redoubt, one of several German strong points defended with deep bunkers. It was a daunting prospect.
Nonetheless, the soldiers of the 36th Division had some advantages. The guns had been more successful here than elsewhere in cutting the enemy barbed wire, and a sunken road between the lines allowed the experienced commander, Major-General Nugent, to hide the first wave in no-man’s-land before the attack began, reducing the distance it would have to charge. Morale was high. In one of the outstanding feats of the day, the division took five lines of German trenches and established a foothold on the Schwaben redoubt in hand-to-hand combat. It was, recalled one soldier, ‘like a Belfast riot on top of Mount Vesuvius’. But it was also futile. The 36th Division was exposed on each flank, since the neighbouring divisions had not made the same progress, and against furious counter-attacks, it was forced back until, by the time it was relieved late on July 2nd, it held only the German first line. The cost was typical of the first days of the Somme. Of its 12,000 men, the 36th suffered over 5,000 casualties, 2,000 of them fatal.
The division left for Flanders soon after and took no further part in the battle of the Somme. For two months, the British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, struggled to regain control of the battle, perceiving that local and carefully prepared attacks were the only ones likely to succeed, but failing to grasp that this made breakthrough impossible. A series of piecemeal actions resulted, and in this context the 16th Irish Division arrived in the south of the British zone on September 1st. There, an awkward right angle had been created at Delville Wood, held by the Germans, to one side of which lay Ginchy and Guillemont. Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of the main British army in the battle, had learned that an intense bombardment on a narrow front could open a breach for the infantry, especially if it continued during the attack – the so-called ‘creeping barrage’.
On September 3rd, the 47th Brigade of the 16th Division – Redmond’s ‘Irish Brigade’ – attacked Guillemont. This was part of an operation by five divisions against the Delville Wood complex. The wood stayed in German hands but Guillemont was taken. The hamlet was nothing but rubble, and the German bunkers had been destroyed by artillery. Trenches dug near to the German positions enabled the Irish soldiers to storm the first line before the enemy machine-guns opened fire. The brigade had attacked full of confidence, a battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment being played over the top by its pipers. After several smaller actions, the 16th Division attacked Ginchy on September 9th after another division had failed to take the village. It benefited from a heavy creeping barrage, but resistance was fierce, especially by intact German machine-gun positions against the 47th Brigade. Ginchy fell quite quickly, but the Division faced heavy counter-attacks before it was relieved the following day and transferred (like the 36th Division before it) to Belgium. Tom Kettle was among those killed.
Its success showed that the 16th Division had benefited from the hesitant learning-process of British commanders. Yet its casualties reflected the high rate of loss throughout the battle of the Somme. From September 1st to 10th, of the 11,000 men who started, the 16th suffered 4,300 casualties, over a thousand of them killed. The losses bear comparison with those of the 36th. The 16th Irish won two Victoria Crosses (the 36th Ulster four) and Major-General Hickie recalled that the Division ‘

The Somme Battlefield carries a range of monuments that form a mosaic of commemoration, where men from around the globe converged in 1916 to fight in one of the greatest battles of the First World War. But unlike many others, the monuments to the Irishman who fell in the battle commemorate the dead in two sharply different registers. One is the proud Ulster Tower, testifying to the mourning of Northern Ireland in the 1920s for those who died in the battle, and especially for the 36th (Ulster) Division, composed almost exclusively of Northern Protestants, which attacked on July 1st, 1916, the first day. The Tower has remained a symbol of Northern unionism ever since. The other is the humble Celtic stone cross that was erected outside the church of Guillemont to the memory of the 16th (Irish) Division, which recruited mainly among Catholics and nationalists and fought later in the battle (Guillemont fell on September 3rd). This monument is unknown to most people in Ireland.
In part this contrast resulted from Partition after the war and from divergent official attitudes to commemorating the war in the two parts of the country. But it also stemmed from the parallel yet different experiences of the war itself by the two traditions, unionist and nationalist.
Irish military recruitment was voluntary throughout the war. In the first two years, Ireland participated like the rest of the United Kingdom (and the British Dominions) in the extraordinary drive to create an army of millions by volunteering. The government only attempted to introduce conscription in Ireland in 1918, two years after Britain, and popular resistance meant that it failed.
Three quarters of the 210,000 Irishmen who served in the British forces joined up in this way, the remainder having already joined the army before the war began. Overall, this response was less than in Britain. While Ulster, Dublin and the hinterland of Leinster provided more volunteers than the agricultural districts of England, rural areas of southern and western Ireland supplied the least recruits of any part of the United Kingdom. A common explanation is that Irish wartime enlistment continued a tradition of recruitment to the much smaller peacetime British army for economic and social reasons, such as unemployment and poverty. There is some truth in this, but that tradition was waning by 1900. Much of the wartime volunteering was not economically motivated but, as elsewhere, reflected the involvement of communities and groups in the war itself.
This meant that Ireland’s participation was shaped by the Home Rule crisis. In 1914, Ireland stood on the brink of civil war as unionists in the Protestant districts of Ulster armed and prepared for rebellion against the introduction by the Liberal government of Home Rule. As the nationalists in turn took up arms in support of Home Rule, Irish society became uniquely militarized – though not in the sense of preparing for a European war. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), formed under Sir Edward Carson in 1913 to defend the Union, had nearly 100,000 men in 1914, organized on a military basis.
Ironically, war in Europe, which elsewhere meant the suspension of domestic politics, put the Irish conflict back on the political agenda, as recruitment became a test of each side’s legitimacy. The British Establishment was deeply divided over Home Rule, which the Liberal government promoted, but which the Conservative party and much of the army opposed. Partition in some form was inevitable. Home Rule was enacted after the outbreak of war but suspended for the duration. The leadership of both sides in Ireland endorsed volunteering for the British army in support of their opposed ends – Home Rule versus the retention of the Union, at least for Ulster. Unionists and Home Rulers channelled the antagonisms of Irish politics into a different kind of volunteering that boosted Irish recruitment and helped shape the 16th and 36th Divisions.
Their qualities made the political volunteers obvious candidates for soldiers. This was especially the case with the UVF, whose loyalist credentials recommended it to the War Office. As early as August 7th, 1914, the Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener (who was born in County Kerry and detested Irish nationalism) declared: ‘I want the Ulster Volunteers’, and in an unprecedented intrusion of politics into the army, allowed the 36th Division to recruit directly from the parallel structure of the UVF. The Division thus came to reflect the social cohesion of Ulster’s Protestant communities as well as their loyalty to Britain in what was perceived to be a war against German tyranny. Raising the Division cancelled out any loyalist rebellion and rewrote the claim to the Union as a blood sacrifice.
The equation was not so straight-forward for the National Volunteers who had formed in support of Home Rule. A minority refused to acknowledge that Ireland had any part in the Great War – this group would engage in the Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916, two months before the Battle of the Somme, and by the end of the war, as Sinn Féin, it would represent majority opinion outside Ulster. But this was not the dominant view in 1914-15 – far from it. The leading Irish nationalist MPs – John Redmond (leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party), Stephen Gwynn, Joe Devlin for West Belfast, and John Dillon – argued that the introduction of Home Rule gave Ireland a real stake in the war, which they saw as one for liberty and the rights of small nations against a militarist Germany. They envisaged the creation of an ‘Irish Brigade’ that would draw on the National Volunteers just as the 36th Division had absorbed the UVF. But despite Liberal support, the army refused a potentially dissident nationalist unit. The compromise was the 16th Division, in which many National Volunteers, from north and south, became individual members alongside other Catholic Irishmen with no explicitly political affiliations.
One of the most notable of these members was Thomas Kettle, former MP, lawyer, poet, journalist and a professor at the National University in Dublin. Kettle was in Belgium buying arms for the National Volunteers when the Germans invaded. He witnessed German atrocities against Belgian civilians and believed that Ireland could not stand aside from a war in which the very values that justified Irish independence were at stake. ‘Great Britain is right with the conscience of Europe’, he wrote, ‘[and] a reconciled Ireland is ready to march side by side with her to any desperate trial’ – provided Home Rule was secure. Otherwise, Kettle went on: ‘England [would] fight for liberty in Europe and Junkerdom in Ireland.’

Britain was creating a national army and, like other national armies in the early twentieth century, it could not avoid ideas of citizenship, nationhood and political entitlement by different groups in society. Both Irish divisions embodied a vision on the part of their founders and contained officers and men who were politically committed. The 16th Irish Division probably had more past and serving MPs than any other in the British army. As well as Kettle, the 16th included Stephen Gwynn and Willie Redmond, MP, younger brother of John Redmond. While the majority of soldiers were not political activists, this did not mean that in the political atmosphere of Ireland in 1914 they had no sense of the wider significance of enlisting.
The 36th and the 16th divisions both spent eighteen months in training – in Ireland, England and France. Each numbered 10-12,000 men and was composed of three brigades. Each brigade, in turn, was made up of four battalions of around a thousand soldiers, which came from the historic Irish regiments (Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Royal Munster Fusiliers, Royal Irish Rifles, etc). Initially, the 16th Division was given a staunchly unionist commander, Sir Lawrence Parsons, an indication of the army’s nervousness about Irish nationalism. He won the loyalty of the soldiers, however, and his wife, a nationalist, introduced him to the leading Irish Parliamentary Party politicians. Like Sir Edward Carson for the 36th Ulster Division, they became influential mentors. When it left Ireland for England in September 1915, the division was under an Irish Catholic, Major-General W. B. Hickie, who commanded it until early 1918. Before leaving England for France the 36th Ulster Division was reviewed by George V and the 16th Irish Division was inspected by Cardinal Bourne, the Roman Catholic Primate of England.
The small British Expeditionary Force had been virtually annihilated in 1914. As the conflict bogged down in trench warfare, the French bore the cost of trying to renew the offensive in 1915. The British could only participate in a minor way until Kitchener’s new volunteer army had been raised and trained. In the winter of 1915-16, the Allies were at last in a position to plan an offensive on the Somme for the following summer that was designed to break the German front. The two Irish units arrived on the Western Front in early 1916 during the planning of the Somme offensive. The German onslaught on the French at Verdun in the first part of 1916 made the Somme all the more urgent but also ensured that it would be a mainly British operation – though a third of the troops were French.
On July 1st, 1916, after a week-long artillery bombardment, the Allies attacked the positions that the Germans had prepared for nearly eighteen months deep in the chalky soil. The British suffered 58,000 casualties that day – the worst in the country’s history – and of these 20,000 were fatal. However, the battle lasted until mid-November with partial successes and the first tank attack. Breakthrough was never achieved. On a thirty-mile front, the British advance was nowhere more than four miles deep at a cost of 420,000 men, 150,000 of them killed.
The 36th Ulster Division had moved directly to the Somme front in February 1916 and played an important role in the initial attack. The 16th Irish Division was not originally destined for the battle, suggesting that it may not have been viewed as an elite unit, but went north to the Artois region, where it experienced a horrendous baptism of fire with a German gas attack in April. It was only sent to the Somme after the original offensive there had failed. The Ulster Division was placed near the centre of the battlefront, with its back to Thiepval wood, and given the task of attacking successive German positions uphill to the left of enemy-held Thiepval village. On the crest was the Schwaben redoubt, one of several German strong points defended with deep bunkers. It was a daunting prospect.
Nonetheless, the soldiers of the 36th Division had some advantages. The guns had been more successful here than elsewhere in cutting the enemy barbed wire, and a sunken road between the lines allowed the experienced commander, Major-General Nugent, to hide the first wave in no-man’s-land before the attack began, reducing the distance it would have to charge. Morale was high. In one of the outstanding feats of the day, the division took five lines of German trenches and established a foothold on the Schwaben redoubt in hand-to-hand combat. It was, recalled one soldier, ‘like a Belfast riot on top of Mount Vesuvius’. But it was also futile. The 36th Division was exposed on each flank, since the neighbouring divisions had not made the same progress, and against furious counter-attacks, it was forced back until, by the time it was relieved late on July 2nd, it held only the German first line. The cost was typical of the first days of the Somme. Of its 12,000 men, the 36th suffered over 5,000 casualties, 2,000 of them fatal.
The division left for Flanders soon after and took no further part in the battle of the Somme. For two months, the British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, struggled to regain control of the battle, perceiving that local and carefully prepared attacks were the only ones likely to succeed, but failing to grasp that this made breakthrough impossible. A series of piecemeal actions resulted, and in this context the 16th Irish Division arrived in the south of the British zone on September 1st. There, an awkward right angle had been created at Delville Wood, held by the Germans, to one side of which lay Ginchy and Guillemont. Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of the main British army in the battle, had learned that an intense bombardment on a narrow front could open a breach for the infantry, especially if it continued during the attack – the so-called ‘creeping barrage’.
On September 3rd, the 47th Brigade of the 16th Division – Redmond’s ‘Irish Brigade’ – attacked Guillemont. This was part of an operation by five divisions against the Delville Wood complex. The wood stayed in German hands but Guillemont was taken. The hamlet was nothing but rubble, and the German bunkers had been destroyed by artillery. Trenches dug near to the German positions enabled the Irish soldiers to storm the first line before the enemy machine-guns opened fire. The brigade had attacked full of confidence, a battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment being played over the top by its pipers. After several smaller actions, the 16th Division attacked Ginchy on September 9th after another division had failed to take the village. It benefited from a heavy creeping barrage, but resistance was fierce, especially by intact German machine-gun positions against the 47th Brigade. Ginchy fell quite quickly, but the Division faced heavy counter-attacks before it was relieved the following day and transferred (like the 36th Division before it) to Belgium. Tom Kettle was among those killed.
Its success showed that the 16th Division had benefited from the hesitant learning-process of British commanders. Yet its casualties reflected the high rate of loss throughout the battle of the Somme. From September 1st to 10th, of the 11,000 men who started, the 16th suffered 4,300 casualties, over a thousand of them killed. The losses bear comparison with those of the 36th. The 16th Irish won two Victoria Crosses (the 36th Ulster four) and Major-General Hickie recalled that the Division ‘
the Somme with a very high reputation’.

As with the British army as a whole, the Somme was where the various motives that had led to the creation of the Irish volunteer divisions met the realities of industrialized warfare. Nor were soldiers from the United Kingdom and Empire different in this regard from their French or German counterparts, whose obligatory military service was also underpinned by notions of citizenship and national identity. If we ask how men faced a battlefield dominated by high explosives and machine-gun fire that none had foreseen, confronted their own death or mutilation and coped with the loss of friends, while continuing to attack or counter-attack, many of the explanations are common to all the combatants. They include the cohesion of the small group, the loyalty won by commanders such as Nugent and Hickie, and the coercion of military discipline (at least one man was executed for desertion in the 36th Division before the battle). No less important was the support of family and community. Whole districts of Belfast and the north were devastated as news filtered back of the losses suffered by the 36th Division. While we know less about it, there is no reason to suppose that it was different among the families of the 16th Division.
But every region, community or country also brought its own culture and politics to the experience at the front. In the Irish case, religion clearly played a significant role. Cyril Falls, the official historian of the 36th in the 1920s, recalled the sober Calvinism evident in the readiness with which men read their bibles. Father Willie Doyle, the Catholic chaplain to the 16th Irish Division, testified to the way the men filled the shattered churches behind the front for religious services. For the 36th Division, the culture of unionism (the Orange Order, loyalist songs) and the revolt from which the division had sprung, also served as a frame of reference. The attack on July 1st coincided with the date of the Battle of the Boyne by the old Julian calendar. The 16th Division was likewise sharply attuned to the political situation at home. And it is in this respect that the way in which its service was seen began to diverge from that of the 36th.
News of the Easter Rising had reached the 16th Division before it fought on the Somme. Tom Kettle, whose friend, Thomas MacDonagh, was one of the leaders executed by the British, grasped its implications more quickly than most. In a letter published after his death, he tried to assert the logic of securing Home Rule by military service, demanding: ‘by the seal of the blood given in the last two years […] colonial home rule for Ireland’. But in private he noted with irony:
These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs; and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer.
The nationalist soldiers’ mood was different. Stephen Gwynn writing in 1919 recalled that they had felt betrayed by the Easter Rising:
I shall never forget the men’s indignation. They felt they had been stabbed in the back.
Many held this view in Ireland. But by 1917, the change wrought by the suppression of the Rising had begun to isolate the war effort in nationalist opinion. When Willie Redmond was killed at Messines in June 1917, as the 16th fought alongside the 36th Division, the by-election in his East Clare constituency returned the senior surviving leader of the Rising, Eamon de Valera.
By 1917, the ready support for the war effort in the first half of the conflict had given way to sheer endurance and a longing for peace. What counted was the capacity of each state to remobilize its population for the fight to the finish. In nationalist, as opposed to unionist, Ireland, that remobilization never took place. Some voluntary enlistment continued on a diminished scale, even outside Ulster, but the attempt to impose conscription in 1918 sealed nationalist disengagement from the war.
This led to a contrasting final phase in the history of the two divisions during the war. The German army launched its do-or-die offensive in March 1918. Five successive hammer blows fell on the Allies before the exhausted Germans were slowly forced back and surrendered in November. The first blow was aimed at the British Fifth Army, which included both the 16th and 36th divisions, and which held a huge front covering the former battleground of the Somme. In Britain’s biggest operational disaster of the war, the Fifth Army broke. It ceded numerous prisoners and withdrew to Amiens before the Germans were checked. But from similar performances, different conclusions were drawn about the two Irish divisions by the army command and more generally.
Both formations, which were only fifteen miles apart, sustained the initial German assault on March 21st, the 16th losing twice as many men as the 36th. Indeed, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers suffered the worst losses of any battalion in the Fifth Army that day. Thereafter, both divisions engaged in an epic fighting retreat westward across the Somme, with the 16th Irish Division checking the Germans at Péronne, before being forced back to Hamel. From March 21st, until they were relieved in early April, the 16th and 36th Divisions each lost about 7,200 men out of 8-9,000, many of them taken prisoner. Yet while this ranks as a heroic episode in the official history of the 36th Division, bitter controversy broke out at the highest levels over the performance of the 16th Division. This reflected both the ambivalence attached to being taken prisoner (did this suggest a lack of fighting spirit or heroic resistance to the last?) and the need for scapegoats for the collapse. Suspected Irish betrayal of the war was ideal for this purpose. The men of the 16th were insulted as ‘Sinn Féinners’ and rumours abounded that many had ‘gone over to the Boche’. The 16th ended the war – in marked contrast to the 36th – under a cloud, with a reputation that suffered due to shifting politics in Ireland rather than military events in France.
The difference in the way the two divisions were remembered at an official level thus began during the war itself, but was amplified in the post-war years. It would be wrong to suggest that there was no space in the Free State to acknowledge Ireland’s role in the conflict. Major-General Hickie set up a committee to commemorate two Irish Divisions (the 10th, which had fought at Gallipoli and in the Balkans, and the 16th), including the cross at Guillemont. There were also Armistice Day ceremonies in Dublin.
Yet official approval was ambivalent. In 1929, the state funded the national memorial to the 27,000 Irish war-dead. But instead of occupying a space at the heart of Dublin’s public life in Merrion Square, as first proposed, it was erected at a more remote location, Islandbridge. Anti-treaty republicans contested its legitimacy, and although de Valera concluded the project, the inauguration was postponed on account of the Second World War and Irish neutrality. The Easter Rising and the War of Independence came to provide the official narrative for the new state, not John Redmond’s vision of Home Rule confirmed by the war. Ireland’s involvement in the conflict, and the 16th Division with it, were marginalized as an unofficial memory.
In contrast, Home Rule was achieved where it had least been wanted, in Northern Ireland, and this required a different commemorative legitimacy. Ulster’s sacrifice in the war, and especially the Battle of the Somme, was placed at the centre of official and popular ceremonial. The Ulster Tower took its place among the national monuments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa on the Western Front. And a celebrated painting by James Beadle in 1917 of the 36th Division attacking on July 1st, which the UVF gave to Belfast City Hall, where it still hangs, became a household image, reproduced on numerous Orange Order banners.
No national Irish memorial was ever built on the Western Front. However, an Island of Ireland Peace Tower was erected as part of the peace process in Northern Ireland, by volunteers from both north and south, at Messines in Belgium, and inaugurated in 1998. The symbolism was deliberate. That is where the 16th and 36th Divisions fought together in 1917. In 2006, on the ninetieth anniversary of the Somme, the Irish Republic issued commemorative stamps of Beadle’s painting and of the original wooden Celtic cross erected between Ginchy and Guillemont shortly after the Battle of the Somme by the pioneers of the 16th Division. And for the first time, in July 2006, the government of the Republic organized an official ceremony at Islandbridge commemorating the participation of all Irishmen in the Battle of the Somme, while British and Northern Ireland officials visited the Guillemont cross as well as the Ulster tower. The battlefield of the Somme remains a unique site not only for contemplating the divisions of twentieth-century Ireland but also for enacting the process of reconciliation.
For Further Reading
Terence Denman, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers: the 16th (Irish) Division in the Great War (Irish Academic Press, 1992); Myles Dungan, They Shall Grow Not Old. Irish Soldiers and the Great War, (Four Courts Press, 1997); Cyril Falls, The History of the 36th (Ulster) Division, (McCaw, Stevenson and Orr, 1922; new edition, Constable, 1998) Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) Philip Orr, The Road to the Somme: Men of the Ulster Division tell their Story (Blackstaff Press, 1987); Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme (Yale University Press, 2005).
• John Horne is Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College Dublin and a member of the executive committee of the research centre at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne.

As with the British army as a whole, the Somme was where the various motives that had led to the creation of the Irish volunteer divisions met the realities of industrialized warfare. Nor were soldiers from the United Kingdom and Empire different in this regard from their French or German counterparts, whose obligatory military service was also underpinned by notions of citizenship and national identity. If we ask how men faced a battlefield dominated by high explosives and machine-gun fire that none had foreseen, confronted their own death or mutilation and coped with the loss of friends, while continuing to attack or counter-attack, many of the explanations are common to all the combatants. They include the cohesion of the small group, the loyalty won by commanders such as Nugent and Hickie, and the coercion of military discipline (at least one man was executed for desertion in the 36th Division before the battle). No less important was the support of family and community. Whole districts of Belfast and the north were devastated as news filtered back of the losses suffered by the 36th Division. While we know less about it, there is no reason to suppose that it was different among the families of the 16th Division.
But every region, community or country also brought its own culture and politics to the experience at the front. In the Irish case, religion clearly played a significant role. Cyril Falls, the official historian of the 36th in the 1920s, recalled the sober Calvinism evident in the readiness with which men read their bibles. Father Willie Doyle, the Catholic chaplain to the 16th Irish Division, testified to the way the men filled the shattered churches behind the front for religious services. For the 36th Division, the culture of unionism (the Orange Order, loyalist songs) and the revolt from which the division had sprung, also served as a frame of reference. The attack on July 1st coincided with the date of the Battle of the Boyne by the old Julian calendar. The 16th Division was likewise sharply attuned to the political situation at home. And it is in this respect that the way in which its service was seen began to diverge from that of the 36th.
News of the Easter Rising had reached the 16th Division before it fought on the Somme. Tom Kettle, whose friend, Thomas MacDonagh, was one of the leaders executed by the British, grasped its implications more quickly than most. In a letter published after his death, he tried to assert the logic of securing Home Rule by military service, demanding: ‘by the seal of the blood given in the last two years […] colonial home rule for Ireland’. But in private he noted with irony:
These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs; and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer.
The nationalist soldiers’ mood was different. Stephen Gwynn writing in 1919 recalled that they had felt betrayed by the Easter Rising:
I shall never forget the men’s indignation. They felt they had been stabbed in the back.
Many held this view in Ireland. But by 1917, the change wrought by the suppression of the Rising had begun to isolate the war effort in nationalist opinion. When Willie Redmond was killed at Messines in June 1917, as the 16th fought alongside the 36th Division, the by-election in his East Clare constituency returned the senior surviving leader of the Rising, Eamon de Valera.
By 1917, the ready support for the war effort in the first half of the conflict had given way to sheer endurance and a longing for peace. What counted was the capacity of each state to remobilize its population for the fight to the finish. In nationalist, as opposed to unionist, Ireland, that remobilization never took place. Some voluntary enlistment continued on a diminished scale, even outside Ulster, but the attempt to impose conscription in 1918 sealed nationalist disengagement from the war.
This led to a contrasting final phase in the history of the two divisions during the war. The German army launched its do-or-die offensive in March 1918. Five successive hammer blows fell on the Allies before the exhausted Germans were slowly forced back and surrendered in November. The first blow was aimed at the British Fifth Army, which included both the 16th and 36th divisions, and which held a huge front covering the former battleground of the Somme. In Britain’s biggest operational disaster of the war, the Fifth Army broke. It ceded numerous prisoners and withdrew to Amiens before the Germans were checked. But from similar performances, different conclusions were drawn about the two Irish divisions by the army command and more generally.
Both formations, which were only fifteen miles apart, sustained the initial German assault on March 21st, the 16th losing twice as many men as the 36th. Indeed, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers suffered the worst losses of any battalion in the Fifth Army that day. Thereafter, both divisions engaged in an epic fighting retreat westward across the Somme, with the 16th Irish Division checking the Germans at Péronne, before being forced back to Hamel. From March 21st, until they were relieved in early April, the 16th and 36th Divisions each lost about 7,200 men out of 8-9,000, many of them taken prisoner. Yet while this ranks as a heroic episode in the official history of the 36th Division, bitter controversy broke out at the highest levels over the performance of the 16th Division. This reflected both the ambivalence attached to being taken prisoner (did this suggest a lack of fighting spirit or heroic resistance to the last?) and the need for scapegoats for the collapse. Suspected Irish betrayal of the war was ideal for this purpose. The men of the 16th were insulted as ‘Sinn Féinners’ and rumours abounded that many had ‘gone over to the Boche’. The 16th ended the war – in marked contrast to the 36th – under a cloud, with a reputation that suffered due to shifting politics in Ireland rather than military events in France.
The difference in the way the two divisions were remembered at an official level thus began during the war itself, but was amplified in the post-war years. It would be wrong to suggest that there was no space in the Free State to acknowledge Ireland’s role in the conflict. Major-General Hickie set up a committee to commemorate two Irish Divisions (the 10th, which had fought at Gallipoli and in the Balkans, and the 16th), including the cross at Guillemont. There were also Armistice Day ceremonies in Dublin.
Yet official approval was ambivalent. In 1929, the state funded the national memorial to the 27,000 Irish war-dead. But instead of occupying a space at the heart of Dublin’s public life in Merrion Square, as first proposed, it was erected at a more remote location, Islandbridge. Anti-treaty republicans contested its legitimacy, and although de Valera concluded the project, the inauguration was postponed on account of the Second World War and Irish neutrality. The Easter Rising and the War of Independence came to provide the official narrative for the new state, not John Redmond’s vision of Home Rule confirmed by the war. Ireland’s involvement in the conflict, and the 16th Division with it, were marginalized as an unofficial memory.
In contrast, Home Rule was achieved where it had least been wanted, in Northern Ireland, and this required a different commemorative legitimacy. Ulster’s sacrifice in the war, and especially the Battle of the Somme, was placed at the centre of official and popular ceremonial. The Ulster Tower took its place among the national monuments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa on the Western Front. And a celebrated painting by James Beadle in 1917 of the 36th Division attacking on July 1st, which the UVF gave to Belfast City Hall, where it still hangs, became a household image, reproduced on numerous Orange Order banners.
No national Irish memorial was ever built on the Western Front. However, an Island of Ireland Peace Tower was erected as part of the peace process in Northern Ireland, by volunteers from both north and south, at Messines in Belgium, and inaugurated in 1998. The symbolism was deliberate. That is where the 16th and 36th Divisions fought together in 1917. In 2006, on the ninetieth anniversary of the Somme, the Irish Republic issued commemorative stamps of Beadle’s painting and of the original wooden Celtic cross erected between Ginchy and Guillemont shortly after the Battle of the Somme by the pioneers of the 16th Division. And for the first time, in July 2006, the government of the Republic organized an official ceremony at Islandbridge commemorating the participation of all Irishmen in the Battle of the Somme, while British and Northern Ireland officials visited the Guillemont cross as well as the Ulster tower. The battlefield of the Somme remains a unique site not only for contemplating the divisions of twentieth-century Ireland but also for enacting the process of reconciliation.
For Further Reading
Terence Denman, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers: the 16th (Irish) Division in the Great War (Irish Academic Press, 1992); Myles Dungan, They Shall Grow Not Old. Irish Soldiers and the Great War, (Four Courts Press, 1997); Cyril Falls, The History of the 36th (Ulster) Division, (McCaw, Stevenson and Orr, 1922; new edition, Constable, 1998) Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) Philip Orr, The Road to the Somme: Men of the Ulster Division tell their Story (Blackstaff Press, 1987); Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme (Yale University Press, 2005).
• John Horne is Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College Dublin and a member of the executive committee of the research centre at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne.