An Irish Airman

Major Robert Gregory

On January 23, 1918, an Irish pilot and recipient of the Military Cross was killed when his plane fell from the sky over Padua, Italy.  The airman was Major Robert Gregory, remembered by W.B. Yeats in his poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” Gregory was the only son of Lady Augusta Gregory, playwright and close friend of W.B. Yeats, and it was at Lady Gregory’s urging that Yeats wrote in memory of her son.  

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Recruiting poster,
published in Dublin

I know that I shall meet my fate  

Somewhere among the clouds above;  

Those that I fight I do not hate  

Those that I guard I do not love;  

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,  

No likely end could bring them loss  

Or leave them happier than before.  

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,  

Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight  

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;  

I balanced all, brought all to mind,  

The years to come seemed waste of breath,  

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

            —W.B. Yeats

Yeats’ poem for Gregory presents a solitary pilot, haunted by the vision not only of his death, but also of his past and his future (“ a waste of breath”).  Alone in the clouds, the airman distances himself from both the political turmoil of the Great War and the struggle for Irish independence; he is driven instead by a “lonely impulse of delight.”  What anchors him to this world are local, personal concerns: a small town in Galway and its impoverished people.

Old Kiltartan Church and Graveyard, photo by Tony O'Neill 

Yeats’ poem idealizes Robert Gregory as a man who refuses to be categorized as a war hero, yet the reality of Gregory’s motivations are more complex. Personal diary entries from 1915 suggest that one of the reasons he joined the war was to escape the family turmoil caused by his adulterous affair with another woman.  In 1915 at the age of 34, married and with three young children, Gregory enlisted with the Connaught Rangers, transferring that same year to the British Royal Flying Corps, “at a time when the average life expectancy for new combat pilots had been estimated at only three weeks.”*

Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Robert Gregory
photo by W.E. Bailey, courtesy of Colin Smythe

And for what did Gregory die? Yeats’ poem suggests the Gregory’s life was sacrificed to the wastefulness of war—that no matter how he died, his sacrifice would not significantly alter his country’s future. Official military records in the British National Archives report that Gregory’s death was an accident of friendly fire, that he was “shot down in error by an Italian pilot.”** Lady Gregory provides yet another account; writing to a friend several days after her son’s death, she states that Robert was returning from a flight over enemy territory, “when at a great height they believe he fainted and did not come back to consciousness in this world.”** Most recently, Geoffrey O’Byrne-White, a Gregory descendant and director of the Irish Aviation authority, has argued that Gregory lost consciousness and crashed due to an adverse reaction to the Spanish flu vaccine that he had received on the morning of his last flight. O’Byrne-White argues that “strict wartime censorship suppressed any references to the worsening Spanish flu pandemic or possible faulty inoculations and that this may also explain why Major Gregory’s death was attributed to so-called friendly fire in the records of the Royal Flying Corps.”**

Gregory's grave, Padua, Italy

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” highlights the complexities of the Great War and modern memory: simple narratives of heroism often smooth over contradictory details. Recent editorials in Irish newspapers have argued that despite the 40,000 Irishmen killed in the First World War (compared to 1,400 in the Irish War of Independence and several thousand in the Irish Civil War), “until recently, Irish participation in the Great War was airbrushed out—except in Northern Ireland.”†

Also frequently erased from the history of the war are accounts of the Spanish flu, a disease not created by the war, but weaponized and spread by it, a pandemic that “killed at least eight times more people than the war did, accumulating an estimated eighty million deaths worldwide between 1919 and early 1920.”††

  

Yeats’ poem for Major Robert Gregory is remarkable both for what it reveals and what it obscures. The poem reminds us that Irish history, the Great War, as well as the life and death of Robert Gregory are all complex realities: tangled, disputed, and defying easy interpretation. 

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* James Pethica, “Yeats’s ‘perfect man,’” Dublin Review, vol. 35, Summer 2009, thedublinreview.com/article/yeatss-perfect-man/.

** Ray Burke, “Challenge to official accounts of Gregory death in WWI,” RTÉ, 6 Jan. 2018, http://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2018/0101/930446-robert-gregory. 

† Sean Farrell, “It’s a long way to Tipperary: Two books on Irish participation in WW1,” Irish Independent, 14 Dec. 2014, www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/its-a-long-way-to-tipperary-two-books-on-irish-participation-in-ww1-30824693.html. 

†† Jane Elizabeth Fisher,“Teaching the 1918 Influenza Pandemic as Part of a World War I Curriculum,” Teaching Representations of the First World War, edited by Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee, MLA, 2017, p. 193.

To One Dead

Francis Ledwidge was an Irish nationalist who joined the British Army in October of 1914 to defend Ireland and further the cause of Irish Home Rule. With the 10^th Irish Division, he fought in Gallipoli and was injured in Serbia. Known as “the Poet of the Blackbird,” Ledwidge lived to see only one volume of his poetry published: Songs of the Fields (1915).  

In the spring of 1916, Ledwidge was on leave, passing through Manchester on his way home to Ireland, when he received news of the 1916 Easter Rising and the execution of his friend, fellow poet, and Easter Rising leader, Thomas MacDonagh. Ledwidge extended his stay in Ireland without permission, spoke out in favor of the Easter Rising, and was court-martialed upon his return to the Western Front.

Although he continued to serve with the British Army and was eventually promoted to the rank of lance corporal, the events of the First World War and the Easter Rising intensified Ledwidge’s allegiance to Ireland, and in his writings, the Irish countryside is poignantly imagined as a symbol of hope and of peace.

In early 1917, he wrote to another Irish poet, Katharine Tynan, “If I survive the war, I have great hopes of writing something that will live.  If not, I trust to be remembered in my own land for one or two things which its long sorrow inspired.”* Ledwidge’s second volume of poems, Songs of Peace, was in press when he was killed on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele. 

To One Dead

Ledwidge memorial

A blackbird singing
On a moss-upholstered stone,
Bluebells swinging,
Shadows wildly blown,
A song in the wood,
A ship on the sea.
The song was for you
and the ship was for me.

A blackbird singing
I hear in my troubled mind,
Bluebells swinging
I see in a distant wind.
But sorrow and silence
Are the wood's threnody,
The silence for you
And the sorrow for me. 

--Francis Ledwidge

Much like Ledwidge’s short life, the repressed energy of the poem comes from holding together and balancing contradictory ideas. Set against the swinging movement of the bluebells and the wild blowing of the wind, a blackbird sits on a moss-covered stone and sings in the stillness of a wood.  The bird’s sorrowful song for the dead (the “wood’s threnody”) dies into a silence that echoes with the pain of division.

Vast is the distance between sea and wood, and nothing can bridge the chasm that separates the voice of the poem’s speaker from the poem’s subject – the dead. Even the rhymes of the poem echo the theme of estrangement: the first line of the poem delays in finding its rhyming pair until the second stanza, leaving the rhymed sounds separated by five intervening lines.  Ledwidge’s melancholy poem accepts and wrings patterns of beauty from tragedies of life and of war that cannot be changed.

During the summer of 1917, Ledwidge waited for the publication of his second volume of poetry as his unit prepared for another major battle on the Western Front. In one of his last letters to Katharine Tynan, Ledwidge reminisced about Ireland and home:

“I would give £100 for two days in Ireland with nothing to do but ramble on from one delight to another. I am entitled to a leave now, but I’m afraid there are many before my name in the list. Special leaves are granted, and I have to finish a book for the autumn. But, more particularly, I want to see again my wonderful mother, and to walk by the Boyne to Crewbawn and up through the brown and grey rocks of Crocknaharna. You have no idea of how I suffer with this longing for the swish of the reeds at Slane and the voices I used to hear coming over the low hills of Currabwee. Say a prayer that I may get this leave, and give as a condition my punctual return and sojourn till the war is over. It is midnight now and the glow-worms are out. It is quiet in camp but the far night is loud with our guns bombarding the positions we must soon fight for.”**

On July 31, 1917, Francis Ledwidge and five other men of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were killed by a stray artillery shell that landed behind the lines.  Ledwidge is buried at Artillery Wood Cemetery in Belgium; his grave is only steps away from that of the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, who also died that day. The silence and sorrow can still be felt in the small cemetery outside Ypres. 

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*Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet. Martin Brian and O'Keeffe, 1972, p. 170.

**Ibid, pp. 185-186.

***For other Ledwidge poems, see the posts “It is terrible to be always homesick” and “Soft and slow in wartime.”

Sing me to sleep

“The Tommy is a singing soldier,” wrote Patrick MacGill in the Preface to his 1917 volume of poetry, Soldier Songs. An Irishman serving with the London Irish Rifles, MacGill continued,

The soldiers have songs of their own, songs of the march, the trench, the billet and battle. Their origin is lost; the songs have arisen like old folktales, spontaneous choruses that voice the moods of a moment and of many moments which are monotonously alike. Most of the verse is of no import; the crowd has no sense of poetic values; it is the singing alone which gives expression to the soldier’s soul.

His poem “A Lament” (sometimes titled “A Lament from the Trenches”) is one such whimsical, melancholy expression.

A Lament

(The Ritz-Loos Salient.)

I wish the sea was not so wide

            That parts me from my love;

I wish the things men do below

            Were known to God above.
I wish that I were back again

            In the glens of Donegal,

They’ll call me a coward if I return

            But a hero if I fall.

“Is it better to be a living coward,

            Or thrice a hero dead?”

“It’s better to go to sleep, m’lad,”

The colour-sergeant said.

Loneliness permeates the poem’s first stanza. As in a tale of folklore and magic, a man makes three wishes, and they reveal a soldier who is heartsick, homesick, and abandoned by God.   Separated from his beloved, detached from a distant God, and impossibly remote from the landscape of his childhood, the soldier is alone with the realization that there is no winning his war.  If he returns to his village, he will be labeled a coward; respect and honour can be achieved only with his death.

Caught on the horns of the dilemma, he turns to his commanding officer and asks whether it is better to live as a coward or die as a hero. The colour-sergeant responds with affection, addressing the young man as “m’lad,” but avoiding the unanswerable question. Instead, with calm and good sense that seem almost paternal,* the sergeant urges the young soldier to take one of the few comforts available in the trenches: to sleep.

Close bonds of comradeship caused many of the soldiers of the First World War to reflect, without irony, that their experiences in combat were some of the happiest of their lives. Shortly before his death, Wilfred Owen wrote his mother,

So thick is the smoke in this cellar that I can hardly see by a candle 12 inches away.  And so thick are the inmates that I can hardly write for pokes, nudges, and jolts. On my left, the company commander snores on a bench.  It is a great life….I hope you are as warm as I am, soothed in your room as I am here. I am certain you could not be visited by a band of friends half so find as surround us here.

Edgar Jones, in “The Psychology of Killing: The Combat Experience of British Soldiers during the First World War,” asserts, “The intensity of the soldiers’ experience was often so great that it is difficult to imagine anything in civilian life that came anywhere close to these bonds.” 

In the Preface to Soldier Songs, Patrick MacGill recalls another lyric that “echoed in billets and dug-outs from Le Harve to the Somme.” It is a lullaby of sorts, a gently ironic reminder of the bonds of comradeship that got men through the war.

Sing Me to Sleep

Sing me to sleep where bullets fall,

Let me forget the war and all;

Damp is my dug-out, cold my feet,

Nothing but bully and biscuits to eat.

Over the sandbag helmets you’ll find

Corpses in front and corpses behind.

Chorus.

Far, far from Ypres I long to be

Where German snipers can’t get at me,

Think of me crouching where the worms creep,

Waiting for the sergeant to sing me to sleep.

Sing me to sleep in some old shed,

The rats all running around my head,

Stretched out upon my waterproof,

Dodging the raindrops through the roof,

Dreaming of home and nights in the West,

Somebody’s overseas boots on my chest.

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*For more on the father-son bond in war, see Lieutenant E.A. Mackintosh’s poem “In Memoriam”; it speaks eloquently about the “fifty sons” under his command.

Hallowe'en

Detail "Menin Gate at Midnight by Longstaff (photo Maria Jintes)

In the fall of 1916, a soldier from the Western Front returned to England on leave and recounted an unsettling experience:

Towards the end of September, I stayed in Kent with a recently wounded First Battalion friend. An elder brother had been killed in the Dardanelles, and their mother kept the bedroom exactly as he had left it, with the sheets aired, the linen always freshly laundered, flowers and cigarettes by the bedside. She went around with a vague, bright religious look on her face. The first night I spent there, my friend and I sat up talking about the war until past twelve o’clock. His mother had gone to bed early, after urging us not to get too tired. The talk had excited me, and though I managed to fall asleep an hour later, I was continually awakened by sudden rapping noises, which I tried to disregard but which grew louder and louder. They seemed to come from everywhere. Soon sleep left me and I lay in a cold sweat. At nearly three o’clock, I heard a diabolic yell and a succession of laughing, sobbing shrieks that sent me flying to the door. In the passage I collided with the mother who, to my surprise, was fully dressed. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘One of the maids had hysterics. I’m so sorry you have been disturbed.’ So I went back to bed, but could not sleep again, though the noises had stopped. In the morning I told my friend: ‘I’m leaving this place. It’s worse than France.’ There were thousands of  mothers like her, getting in touch with their dead sons by various spiritualistic means.^[i]

The First World War saw a dramatic surge in spiritualism, and in their desperate wish to communicate with the dead, many of the grieving turned to Ouija boards, mediums, and séances.[ii]  It’s no surprise then that many poems of the First World War are also peopled with ghosts. 

HALLOW-E'EN, 1915

Septembre, Francois Cachoud

Will you come back to us, men of our hearts, tonight

In the misty close of the brief October day?

Will you leave the alien graves where you sleep and steal away

To see the gables and eaves of home grow dark in the evening light?

"O men of the manor and moated hall and farm,

Come back to-night, treading softly over the grass;

The dew of the autumn dusk will not betray where you pass;

The watchful dog may stir in his sleep but he'll raise no hoarse alarm.

Then you will stand, not strangers, but wishful to look

Frank Jenkins, died July 1, 1916

At the kindly lamplight shed from the open door,

And the fire-lit casement where one, having wept you sore,

Sits dreaming alone with her sorrow, not heeding her open book.

Forgotten awhile the weary trenches, the dome

Of pitiless Eastern sky, in this quiet hour

When no sound breaks the hush but the chimes from the old church tower,

And the river's song at the weir, -- ah! then we will welcome you home.

You will come back to us just as the robin sings

Nunc Dimittis from the larch to a sun late set

In purple woodlands; when caught like silver fish in a net

The stars gleam out through the orchard boughs and the church owl flaps his wings.

We have no fear of you, silent shadows, who tread

The leaf-bestrewn paths, the dew-wet lawns. Draw near

To the glowing fire, the empty chair, we shall not fear,

Being but ghosts for the lack of you, ghosts of our well-beloved dead.

            --Winifred M Letts

In Letts’ poem, the silent shadows of the men who have died appear not as frightening ghosts, nor as strangers, but as “men of our hearts” who have returned to the places they have loved. The quiet spirits who come “treading softly” are tenderly welcomed.  They are urged to come out of the darkness and into the “kindly lamplight” of home where they may find shelter and solace under familiar gables and eaves.  The beloved ghosts are invited once again to occupy “the empty chair,” and draw near “the glowing fire.”  

In the magical twilight of Halloween, both the dead and the living wish nothing more than to forget for a while  the pain and sorrow of “the weary trenches.”  In this spellbound time, supernatural grace suffuses the natural world too, as stars gleam “like silver fish caught in a net” and the robin sings “Nunc dimittis” like a choir boy at Evensong: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” And most precious of all, in this world of magical thinking is the assurance, “we will welcome you home.”

The poem discloses the deep bond of kinship between the souls of the war dead and those who, “dreaming alone with…sorrow,” grieve for them at home.  All have been transformed into ghosts, and all are united in the empty, lost futures that stretch before them.  With sad confidence, the voice of the poem can say, “We have no fear of you” – for the horror is to be found in the war, not in its dead. 

#WeAreHere, photo by Rachel Dacre

On July 1, 2016, groups of men dressed as First World War soldiers walked the streets and sidewalks of Great Britain in silence.  Appearing in shopping malls, train stations, and parks, the “ghost soldiers” were largely silent except for occasionally joining together to sing the trench song “We’re Here Because We’re Here.”  The commemorative tribute was inspired “in part from tales told during and after the First World War by people who believed they had seen the ghosts of loved ones they had lost.”[iii]

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[i] Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929.  The soldier he visited was Siegfried Sassoon. 

[ii] To learn more about Spiritualism during the war, see “’A solace to a tortured world…’—The Growing Interest in Spiritualism during and after WW1” by Suzie Grogan, published online at World War I Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings. 

[iii] “Secrets behind #WeAreHere revealed” by Ann Gripper, Rod McPhee, and Nicola Oakley.  The Mirror, 1 July 2016. 

Star Shell

The Star Shell, CRW Nevinson (Tate)

On September 25, 1915, the British at Loos launched their greatest offensive to date of the First World War.  By the time the battle had ended on October 15th, the British had lost over 50,000 men, an estimated 16,000 of them dead or missing.  The Germans called it Leichenfeld von Loos, or “the Corpse Field of Loos,” and a German regimental diary recorded the slaughter: 

Dense masses of the enemy, line after line, came into sight on the ridge, some of their officers even mounted on horseback, and advancing as if carrying out a field-day drill in peacetime.  Our artillery and machine guns riddled their ranks as they came on.  As they crossed the northern front of Bois Hugo, the machine guns positioned there caught them in the flank and whole battalions must have been utterly destroyed.[i]

That Astronomical Annoyance, the Star Shell
Bruce Bairnsfather

A British officer is reputed to have said, “From what I can ascertain, some of the divisions did actually reach the enemy’s trenches, for their bodies can now be seen on the barbed wire.”[ii]

Patrick MacGill was wounded at Loos. An Irish soldier from Donegal, MacGill served with the London Irish Rifles at Loos and wrote of his experiences in The Great Push: an Episode of the Great War (1916).  His poem “The Star Shell” is included in his war novel/memoir.    

The Star Shell

A star-shell holds the sky beyond
Shell-shivered Loos, and drops
In million sparkles on a pond
That lies by Hulluch[iii] copse.

A moment's brightness in the sky,
To vanish at a breath,
And die away, as soldiers die
Upon the wastes of death. 

                        --Patrick MacGill

In MacGill’s poem, the burst of the star shell powerfully “holds the sky,” while the rural village of Loos is a small wreck, “shell-shivered" and splintered beneath the terrorizing grip of an artillery barrage. 

And yet there is beauty even in the ravages of war: the flash of the star shell explodes like fireworks over a pleasure garden, and sprays of light reflected in a local pond shine like diamonds in a world littered with death.

The fleeting burst of the artillery fire mirrors the life of the soldiers who watch the gleaming light in the night skies: both “vanish at a breath.” The glow of the star shell dies as do the men; both flash out in beauty and vibrancy, but in an instant, they are gone and the world is shuttered in darkness and cold.  The French poet Apollinaire wrote similarly of the short-lived “Flowers of the cannonade” in his poem “Post Card.”

Dead at Loos, from The Great War Blog

All too soon, the light of the star shell and the lives of the soldiers are snuffed out “upon the wastes of death” that overlook the field of corpses, in the land of “No Man” that lies between the lines of the mighty armies. 

MacGill also wrote of star shells in his novel/memoir, recounting a night before the battle during which he and his comrades watched a bombardment:

            A momentary lull followed, and a million sparks fluttered earthwards from a galaxy of searching star-shells. "Why are such beautiful lights used in the killing of men?" I asked myself. Above in the quiet the gods were meditating, then, losing patience, they again burst into irrevocable rage, seeking, as it seemed, some obscure and fierce retribution.

            The shells were loosened again; there was no escape from their frightful vitality, they crushed, burrowed, exterminated; obstacles were broken down, and men's lives were flicked out like flies off a window pane…..We crouched under the bomb-shelter, mute, pale, hesitating. Oh! the terrible anxiety of men who wait passively for something to take place and always fearing the worst!"[iv]

And what was the worst?  The death and waste of the Battle of Loos.  MacGill writes, “Men and pieces of men were lying all over the place. A leg, an arm, then again a leg, cut off at the hip. A finely formed leg, the latter, gracefully putteed.”[v]  In the aftermath of the battle, “Nature, vast and terrible, stretched out on all sides; a red star-shell in the misty heavens looked like a lurid wound dripping with blood.”[vi]

Patrick MacGill, the Donegal County Museum

Wandering the battlefield in his search for the wounded and survivors, MacGill came upon a dead body: “The corpse was a mere condensation of shadows with a blurred though definite outline. It was a remainder and a reminder.”[vii]

The thousands of men who died too soon had been reduced to remainders, while at the same time they were enlarged to serve as reminders of the costs of war.  MacGill was one of the casualties of Loos; although wounded, his injury sent him home to “Blighty,” and he survived the war.

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[i] Philip Warner, The Battle of Loos, 48. 

[ii] Rawlinson, quoted in Richard Holmes’ The Little Field-Marshal Sir John French.

[iii] Hulluch is a town near Loos, the scene of heavy fighting throughout the war.

[iv] Patrick MacGill, The Great Push, pages 33-34.

[v] Ibid, 77.

[vi] Ibid, 210. 

[vii] Ibid, 210-211.

December of July

Streatley Mill at Sunset, 1859
George Price Boyce

Summer: the season of fireflies, porch swings, day lilies, and beach strolls.  And yet somewhere even now, a war is raging.

One-hundred years ago, during the summer of 1916, a volunteer nurse in the First World War wrote of the enormous gulf that separated the beauty of summer in the English countryside from the carnage that British troops were experiencing at the battle of the Somme.

 July, 1916

Here in happy England the fields are steeped in quiet,
Saving for larks’ song and drone of bumble bees;
The deep lanes are decked with roses all a-riot,
With bryony and vetch and ferny tapestries.
O here a maid would linger to hear the blackbird fluting,
And here a lad might pause by wind-berippled wheat,
The lovers in the bat’s light would hear the brown owl hooting,

A Copse, Evening, 1918
A.Y. Jackson 

Before the latticed lights of home recalled their lagging feet.

But over there in France, the grass is torn and trodden,
Our pastures grow moon daisies, but theirs are strewn with lead.
The fertile, kindly fields are harassed and blood-sodden,
The sheaves they bear for harvesting will be our garnered dead.

But there the lads of England, in peril of advancing,
Have laid their splendid lives down, ungrudging of the cost;
The record—just their names here—means a moment’s careless glancing,
But who can tell the promise, the fulfilment of our lost?

Here in happy England the Summer pours her treasure
Of grasses, of flowers before our heedless feet.
The swallow-haunted streams meander at their pleasure
Through loosestrife and rushes and plumed meadow-sweet.
Yet how shall we forget them, the young men, the splendid,
Who left this golden heritage, who put the Summer by,
Who kept for us our England inviolate, defended,
But by their passing made for us December of July?
-Winifred Mabel Letts

The poem opens in rural England.  Peace settles over the fields and is broken only by birdsong and “the drone of bumble bees,” while just across the English Channel, the drone is that of incoming shells and aeroplane bombing runs.  Sunken English lanes bloom with roses, a stark contrast to the muddy French trenches littered with bodies of the dead.

The tragedy of the Somme is almost unimaginable, but how much more was it so for those hundreds of miles from the front lines? Awash in the poetry of flowers (“bryony and vetch and ferny tapestries”), those in England who waited for word of their loved ones could barely begin to comprehend the barren, blasted landscape of the Western Front.

Winifred Lett’s poem pays homage to the men who fought on the Somme; they left their “golden heritage,” choosing to “put the Summer by.” For some soldiers, the choice was deliberate and measured; others found themselves caught up in and swept along by the Great War; many were conscripts forced to join the colours. The poem reminds us that each of them surrendered the lush promise of Summer overbrimming with life, exchanging it for the task of keeping England “inviolate.”

The poem strikes a note of deep irony, however, as it comments that with their very sacrifice, the deaths of the men who laid down their "splendid lives" brought to England the bitter chill of December.  The desolation of the battlefields travelled across the English Channel, arriving with the unfathomably long lists of the missing, wounded, and dead of the Somme.  Striking deep into the heart of the summer countryside of rural England, July of 1916 was barren, bleak, and dark.

Winifred Mabel Letts

The Rising and the War

On April 24^th, Easter Monday of 1916, Irish republicans wishing to end British rule in Ireland used armed force to overtake strategic locations in Dublin and to proclaim an independent Ireland. The British Army responded by violently suppressing the Rising, executing its leaders, and imposing martial law.  A brief blog entry cannot provide the full background and context necessary to understand the Easter Rising, but the First World War played a significant role in dividing Irish loyalties.     

Many Irish had volunteered to serve in the British Army, believing that their service would be rewarded by British acceptance of Irish Home Rule.  However, in the aftermath of the Easter Rising and the associated violence and repressive actions of the British Army, Irishmen who had chosen to fight for England and with the British Army were commonly viewed as disloyal to Ireland. 

Speaking to this context of deeply divided loyalties, George William Russell, Irish nationalist, writer, and pacifist (known by the pseudonym Æ), called for reconciliation and unity among the people of Ireland.  In a letter to the Irish Times written in December of 1917, Russell wrote,

“I myself am Anglo-Irish, with the blood of both races in me, and when the rising of Easter Week took place, all that was Irish in me was profoundly stirred, and out of that mood I wrote commemorating the dead.  And then later there rose in memory the faces of others I knew who loved their country, but had died in other battles.  They fought in those because they believed they would serve Ireland, and I felt these were no less my people.  I could hold them also in my heart and pay tribute to them.  Because it was possible for me to do so, I think it is possible for others; and in the hope that the deeds of all may in the future be a matter of pride to the new nation I append here these verses I have written.”

The poem Russell included with his letter was “To the Memory of Some I Knew Who Are Dead and Who Loved Ireland.”  In alternating stanzas, the poem honors both those killed in the Easter Rising and the Irish who died on the battlefields of the First World War.

To the Memory of Some I Knew Who Are Dead and Who Loved Ireland

Kilmainham Gaol, where Easter Rising leaders were executed

Their dream had left me numb and cold,

But yet my spirit rose in pride,

Refashioning in burnished gold

The images of those who died,

Or were shut in the penal cell.

Here's to you, Pearse, your dream, not mine,

But yet the thought for this you fell,

Has turned life's waters into wine. 

You who have died on Eastern hills

Or fields of France as undismayed,

Who lit with interlinked wills

The long heroic barricade,

You, too, in all the dreams you had,

Thought of some thing for Ireland done.

Villers-Bretonneux cemetery, graves of Royal Irish Rgt soldiers

Was it not so, Oh, shining lad,

What lured you, Alan Anderson?

I listened to high talk from you,

Thomas MacDonagh, and it seemed

The words were idle, but they grew

To nobleness by death redeemed.

Life cannot utter words more great

Than life may meet by sacrifice,

High words were equaled by high fate,

You paid the price.  You paid the price.

You who have fought on fields afar,

That other Ireland did you wrong

Who said you shadowed Ireland’s star,

Thomas Kettle

Nor gave you laurel wreath nor song.

You proved by death as true as they,

In mightier conflicts played your part,

Equal your sacrifice may weigh,

Dear Kettle, of the generous heart.

The hope lives on age after age,

Earth with its beauty might be won

For labour as a heritage,

For this has Ireland lost a son.

This hope unto a flame to fan

Men have put life by with a smile,

Here’s to you, Connolly, my man,

Who cast the last torch on the pile.

You, too, had Ireland in your care,

Who watched o’er pits of blood and mire,

From iron roots leap up in air

James Connolly

Wild forests, magical, of fire;

Yet while the Nuts of Death were shed

Your memory would ever stray

To your own isle.  Oh, gallant dead –

This wreath, Will Redmond, on your clay.

Here’s to you, men I never met,

Yet hope to meet behind the veil,

Thronged on some starry parapet,

That looks down on Innisfail,

And see the confluence of dreams

That clashed together in our night,

One river, born from many streams,

Roll in one blaze of blinding light.

                       --Æ

In the first, third, and fifth stanzas, the poem memorializes leaders of the Easter Rising who were executed by the British: Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and James Connolly (readers wishing further biographical information can follow the hyperlinks in the poem).  As Russell’s poem argues, even for those not sharing the dream of the Easter Rising, these men’s willingness to die for an independent Ireland was transformative, turning life’s water into wine and refashioning the men’s deaths into “burnished gold.” As WB Yeats wrote, “a terrible beauty is born.” The executed leaders of the Easter Rising paid the ultimate price, and laying down their lives, they fanned the hopes of Irish independence. 

But that same price was paid by the Irishmen named in the second, fourth, and sixth stanzas of the poem: Alan Anderson, Thomas Kettle, and Willie Redmond (for further biographical information, see the associated links).  Although killed in battle while fighting with the British Army, these men too fought for a dream and gave their all in the blood and mud of the Western Front, dying for their own isle, for their homes, for “Thought of some thing for Ireland done.” 

The poem’s last stanza attempts to reconcile the deep Irish divisions exacerbated by the war.  It imagines the two divided political causes as streams that join in a mighty confluence, mixing the best of each and amalgamating the differences until they form one majestic river that rolls forward in a “blaze of blinding light.” Whether a prophet or naïve optimist, Russell believed that if the people of Ireland were able to put aside their internal differences, they could achieve greatness as a free nation.  In the same letter in which he published his poem for those who had died for Ireland, Russell wrote,  

“And here I come to the purpose of my letter, which is to deprecate the scornful repudiation by Irishmen of other Irishmen, which is so common at present, and which helps to perpetuate our feuds.  We are all one people. We are closer to each other in character than we are to any other race.  The necessary preliminary to political adjustment is moral adjustment, forgiveness, and mutual understanding.”

The centenary of the Easter Rising and the First World War may perhaps prompt the kind of remembrance and reconciliation that Russell dreamed of.  An article written by Rowan McGreevy and published in the Irish Times in April of 2016 reminds us that in the same week in which 488 Irish were killed in Dublin during the Easter Rising, 532 men of the Irish Division were gassed, bayoneted, shelled, and shot in the gas attacks outside Hulluch in northern France. The article also calls us to remember the sacrifice of the hundreds of Germans who died in the attacks at Hulluch. 

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Dublin during the Easter Rising

Perhaps nothing makes the case so strongly, however, for the complexities of Ireland's political situation and the need for peace and reconciliation than one family’s poignant story from that tumultuous time.  Fighting with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and caught up in the gas attacks at Hulluch, Private John Naylor died on April 29th.  That same day, John Naylor's wife, Margaret, was shot and killed during the Easter Rising as she crossed Dublin's Ringsend drawbridge. Their three young orphaned daughters, Maggie, Kitty, and Tessie, survived, bearing the burdens of the past as they grew up into the future of the emerging nation of Ireland.