Commemorations to mark the Battle of the Somme are an opportunity for Ireland to re-examine its role in the Great War, writes John Horne.
The Easter Rising and the independence of the State have rightly been honoured. But the commemorative season is not over as the government has undertaken to mark the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, which lasted from July 1st to mid-November 1916. The first day of the battle, with its appalling bloodshed, has always been deeply symbolic for unionists. But it seems worth asking what significance the Somme - and by extension the Great War - holds for the Republic.
An exhibition that begins next week at the major museum on the Somme battlefield, the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne, suggests some new ways of thinking about this issue. Opened in 1992, the Historial is anything but a museum of conventional military history. Its approach is cultural, seeking to understand the contemporary experience of the war as a whole, with a focus on Britain, France and Germany. The exhibition, 1916: The Battle of the Somme, an International Arena, uses symbolic objects to show how men from as far apart as Canada, French West Africa, German Poland, Australia and New Zealand came to fight in the battle and were changed by it.
Ireland figures prominently, with two remarkable items that encapsulate the country's contrasting relationships with the war. Shortly after the battle, an English artist, James Beadle, painted a heroic canvas of the 36th (Ulster) Division attacking on July 1st. "A Belfast riot on the top of Mount Vesuvius," was how one survivor described the day. Recruited in part from the Ulster Volunteer Force, the 36th Division was strongly imbued with the unionist cause and its action on July 1st became legendary. In 1918, the UVF presented Beadle's painting to the people of Belfast where it hangs in the City Hall, a symbol of unionist identity reproduced on numerous Orange Order banners.
The generosity of Belfast City Council in lending the painting has been matched by the trustees of the National Irish War Memorial (Islandbridge) and the Office of Public Works, who have contributed a less familiar but equally significant object from Dublin. This is the wooden Celtic cross that was carved from a beam found in a shattered French farmhouse to commemorate the role of the 16th Division, made up mainly of wartime volunteers from the south.
Like most southern opinion, many of the soldiers doubtless backed Home Rule. They included nationalist activists such as Tom Kettle, poet and former MP, who believed that supporting the war would secure a measure already approved by Westminster. On September 5th, 1916, part of the 16th Division successfully attacked the village of Guillemont, while on September 9th the entire division took nearby Ginchy. Overall, the division won two Victoria Crosses and sustained nearly 1,500 dead (including Kettle) and 4,000 wounded out of 11,000 men. The cross was erected after the battle. Replaced in 1926 by a stone cross that is still there, it was housed in the Islandbridge memorial.
The juxtaposition of the cross and the painting highlights familiar points about Ireland's role in the Great War. The involvement of soldiers from all parts of the country was considerable. Yet the Easter Rising became the moral equivalent of the unionist exploits on the Somme, marginalizing the sacrifice of the 16th Division and other soldiers from the south. It became impossible to invest that sacrifice in Home Rule or even, owing to the War of Independence, in the new state. Growing official amnesia about the war in independent Ireland contrasted with its commemoration in Northern Ireland, where it helped legitimize a unionist version of Home Rule.
Yet to leave the matter there is to remain at the stage reached by the Irish Peace Tower inaugurated at Messines in the Belgian sector of the western front in 1998. This consists of using the Great War symbolically to reverse divisions in Irish history, rehabilitating the men of the 16th Division and promoting north-south reconciliation. The war itself, in which the enemy for the Irish was the Germans, not unionists or Home Rulers, is absent from such thinking. Irishmen certainly killed far more Germans than fellow Irishmen in the entire period 1914-1923. It is time to move on and consider Ireland's war in a wider context.
How this might be done is part of a cultural history of the war. Firstly, the conflict introduced the world to industrialised warfare. The violence was unprecedented though, sadly, far from unique in the subsequent 90 years. Soldiers wrestled with an unfamiliar battlefield, victims but also perpetrators of violence. Irishmen from north and south thus participated in a defining experience of the 20th century.
Second, the violence was not just physical but also cultural. The enemy was dehumanised and the transformation of the world was sought in different ways (national, socialist, democratic, fascist) that alone seemed capable of making the war serve some purpose. Violence spilled over from the battlefield to politics and ideology, and in this sense the Rising and subsequent conflict in Ireland were no less part of the war than the Bolshevik Revolution or fascism in Italy.
Third, the war shifted the tectonic plates of the European state system in a manner unparalleled since the French Revolution. To portray it as simply about imperialism or nationalism is to ignore the complexity of that process. It involved the bid by Germany to establish European hegemony. It also fostered the emergence of nation-states. The national project that emerged in the Free State repudiated the war effort of the nation it was leaving. But other new nation-states (Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) grounded their legitimacy in the war itself.
Finally, the experience of mass death made memory a major preoccupation of the societies concerned. How that memory was expressed and dealt with, how private mourning related to the public memory of the war, was an unsettling and sometimes explosive issue. In inter-war France it fed a deep-seated pacifism, whereas in Germany it was exploited by the nationalist right and helped bring the Nazis to power.
Public marginalisation of the memory of the war in the Free State, followed by the absence of the south from the second World War, made it particularly difficult for survivors and society at large to negotiate the meaning of the experience. But renewed interest in the Great War in the Republic as in many other countries indicates that the need to understand this seminal episode in 20th century history is not over.
• John Horne is professor of modern European history in Trinity College Dublin and an executive member of the research centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre (www.historial.org). The 16th Division memorial at Ginchy will be re-dedicated on Saturday, September 9th.