It's about time we rescued Robert Gregory from mythology - he of "the lonely impulse of delight" of Yeats's great poem, which made him a quixotic, romantic figure. Yet long before he enlisted at the outbreak of the Great War, Gregory had shown himself to be a pretty tough customer indeed.
When the nationalist-Catholic riots over Synge's The Shadow of the Glen erupted, he physically ejected some protesters from the theatre himself. He later wrote: "We have won a complete victory over the organised disturbers - Sinn Féin men to a great extent. It was quite necessary that someone should show fight and we are the only people to have done it."
There was certainly a sectarian element to all this. Lady Gregory herself said: "These RCs haven't the courage of a mouse, and then wonder how it is we go ahead."
Sack of Louvain
When war came in 1914, men of Robert's gentry caste enlisted in large numbers. But he was different: for he was art, not army. Yet Robert Gregory, the artist, couldn't have looked indifferently upon the sack of Louvain and its medieval library.
Robert Gregory, Irishman, must have heard the call to arms by all political parties in Ireland. And Robert Gregory, the father, must have read the stories of the murders of Belgian children by German invaders.
So enlist he did, firstly in the Connaught Rangers, later transferring to the Royal Flying Corps, joining 40 Squadron near Lens in 1916 on patrols over the Ypres and the Somme battlefields. There couldn't have been a more dangerous posting for a pilot, and he was no youngster. A 19-year old instructor that summer reported his disgust at how old he was getting. Robert Gregory had just turned 37.
In February, 1917 Gregory was flying an FE8, a cumbersome beast with a maximum speed of 80 m.p.h. His own account ran: "FE8 met two HA [Hun aircraft\] two miles north east of Arras. FE8 dived on the HA and got within 100 yards and followed down to 4,000 ft, firing one large drum at 100 yards' range. HA dived steeply and was last seen at about 500 ft . . ."
In a later patrol, he flew into a large number of German aircraft. He fired at one, without much effect. He closed to 15 yards and fired 25 rounds directly into the fuselage - in effect, the pilot's body. Let us be frank. His Lewis gun was firing a stream of bullets, travelling at about half-a-mile a second, into the body of a man about 45 feet away. The German aircraft fell out of the skies. No. There is no lonely impulse of delight in any of that.
Early in March 1917, an FE8 patrol of Gregory's 40 squadron was ambushed by Baron Von Richtofen's Red Circus and systematically butchered. All nine FE8s were shot down. Four pilots were killed. Five survived, and Robert Gregory was one of them.
Nor any lonely impulses of delight this time either.
Ruthless purpose
Forty Squadron was re-equipped with more modern fighters, and Robert Gregory promptly got another kill, again finishing his victim off at 15 yards' range. Such ruthless purpose was now central to his modus operandi, but by now this seasoned killer could have been in no doubt about his likely fate. His squadron had already once been wiped out since his arrival, and 1,200 British fighter pilots had been shot down in just over a month. Oh truly, no lonely impulse of delight here.
On August 9th, Gregory led the squadron against hostile balloons, crossing German lines at ground level, to avoid being observed by observers in the balloons, before making a sudden surprise attack from below. It was a stunning coup de main. Five enemy balloons were destroyed. He took part in other such attacks, the squadron later being ordered to shoot and kill the highly trained German balloon crews as they parachuted towards safety.
Where now your lonely impulse of delight? Forty Squadron was a strongly Irish outfit. The most famous pilot of the Great War, Mick Mannock from Cork, later a winner of the VC, was a novice member. So too was George McElroy from Dublin (later to be highly decorated), as were other Irish pilots such as Keen, De Burgh, Mulholland - all of them learning under Gregory's tutelage.
In October, 1917, he left their company to take over command of 66 squadron of the RFC, which he took to Italy. Not long afterwards, his plane fell out of the sky while on patrol, possibly after he fainted because of an allergy to a recent immunisation. Thus died Major Robert Gregory, MC, French Legion of Honour, Commander of the Russian Order of St Andrew and St George, and victor in 19 aerial combats.
Yeats's poems
Yeats wrote several poems in his memory, all of them masterpieces, including one of the most famous poems in English of the 20th century: "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death." This helped to create the irreducible if largely baseless myth of Robert Gregory.
But Yeats wrote no poem about a certain tennis party in Gort in 1921 attended by some British army officers and RIC auxiliaries. The IRA ambushed the guests as they left, killing District Inspector Blake, a former army officer, and two army officers with him.
They then ordered the two women in the car to flee. DI Blake's wife refused, declaring that she would rather stay and die with her husband. The IRA promptly obliged her, shooting her five times and killing her, just as the other woman escaped.
That woman, the sole survivor of the ambush, was Margaret Gregory, Robert's widow. No lonely impulse of delight there either.