An Irishman’s Diary on Ireland and the Battle of the Somme

The Battle of the Somme began on July 1st, 1916, in “heavenly weather”, according to the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, with the larks audible above the gunfire. It ended 4½ months later in a snowstorm.

The biggest and bloodiest battle of the first World War ended where it began in the marshy and shallow valley of the river Ancre.

Astride this river, which is more stream than river, the 36th (Ulster) Division attacked on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. This is desperately difficult terrain for any attacker. It is uphill and overlooked.

It was here that 2,000 men from the division were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Though the 36th will be forever associated with the Somme, it spent two days fighting there, one day attacking and the next extricating the wounded from the battlefield. It never did return to the Somme.

Another Irish formation was involved in the last day of the Somme, which occurred on November 18th, 1916, 141 bloody days later. The 10th battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, known as the Commercials, was formed in February 1916.

War effort

As its title suggests, it was recruited from commercial interests in the city. Dublin was broadly speaking a unionist city before the Easter Rising, and contemporary reports suggest a willingness on the part of the city’s commercial classes to support the British war effort.

The 10th was formed in February 1916. On Easter Monday 1916 the men were training in the Royal Barracks (now Collins Barracks) and were to ship to the Western Front two days later.

Instead, they found themselves fighting their fellow Irishmen on the streets of Dublin.

Men from the 10th marched down the quays to put down the rebellion. No sooner had they turned the corner on to the quays when they were ambushed by an outpost of the Irish Volunteers in the Mendicity Institute across the river Liffey led by Sean Heuston.

The first British officer to die in the Easter Rising was Lieut Gerald Neilan from Ballygalda, Co Roscommon, a Boer War veteran who was attached to the 10th Royal Dublin Fusiliers for training purposes.

By a tragic coincidence, his brother Arthur had sided with the Irish Volunteers and spent his week with the Four Courts garrison, the same garrison that had killed his brother.

An extraordinary account of this ambush appeared in The Irish Times on April 24th, 1984, in an interview with a 10th Royal Dublin Fusiliers' veteran named Andrew Barry. He had been an Irish Volunteer in 1914 and was involved in the gunrunning at Howth. When the split came, he joined the National Volunteers, which sided with John Redmond's support for the war.

To Barry’s horror he found the same Mausers were being used against the battalion during Easter Week 1916.

The 10th was eventually sent to the Western Front and attached to the 63rd Royal Naval Division, a division mostly composed of Royal Navy reservists not needed for sea.

The division attacked Beaumont Hamel beginning on November 13th, 1916. This had been an objective on the terrible first day of the Somme, and two Irish battalions suffered heavy losses in the initial attack, the 1st Inniskilling Fusiliers and the 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the sister battalion of the 10th.

The renewed attack on Beaumont Hamel was the last desperate act of British commanders looking for something to show before operations closed down for the winter.

Thick fog aided the attack by the 10th on the German lines. They crossed no-man’s land without hindrance until they reached the German barbed wire just 20 yards from the enemy trenches.

Many were impaled on the barbed wire and the German machine guns picked them off.

The result was predictable. Half of the men who went over the top were either killed or injured. One hundred were killed.

Barry was hit in the knee by a bullet and lay in agony in a crater for four days. His leg was amputated below the hip.

The attack was distinguished by the highly unorthodox actions of Fr Stephen Thornton, an English Catholic priest attached to the Royal Naval Division. On seeing there were no officers left uninjured, he led 30 Royal Dublin Fusiliers into the enemy trenches.

According to one veteran Jimmy O'Brian, Fr Thornton told the men to take no prisoners. O'Brian is quoted in Myles Dungan's book They Shall Not Grow Old as saying: "Well now boys, you're going into action tomorrow morning and if you take any prisoners your rations will be cut by half. So don't take prisoners. Kill them! If you take prisoners they've got to be fed by your rations. So you'll get half-rations. The answer is – 'don't take prisoners'."

British Empire troops captured both Beaumont Hamel and Beaucourt in the last actions of the Battle of the Somme. Another first-day objective Serre, however, remained in German hands.

‘Muddy grave’

The battle was finally called off on November 18th. By that stage 1.2 million men had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner on both sides. The British lost 420,000 men, most of them volunteers who answered the call of king and country in the heady early days of the war.

The Germans, who fought with tenacity and ingenuity, lost something similar. The Somme was the “muddy grave of the German army”, one officer lamented afterwards.

One hundred years on, the Somme stands for a catastrophic loss of innocence which has never been regained.

“These were the best of the nation’s volunteer manhood,” the military historian Richard Holmes observed, “and the merest glance at its casualty roll shows what the Somme did to the old world of brass bands and cricket fields, pit-head cottages and broad acres”.