Field Of Bones E-Book

Philip Orr

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 543

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

During August and September 1915 almost three thousand young volunteer Irish soldiers died on the killing fields of Gallipoli on the Turkish Aegean. A division of Kitchener's Army, at Suvla Bay they fell to gunshot-wounds and shellfire, while thirst, sunstroke and dysentery reduced their chances of survival. Hundreds were burned alive in raging bush-fires. In post-war Ireland political revolution led to the removal of Gallipoli from memory. One popular ballad told the volunteers, 'you fought for the wrong country; you died for the wrong cause, when the greatest war was at home'. Here, in heart-breaking detail, built from letters, diaries and archival sources, is the story of the 10th Irish Division, many of whom still lie today in Suvla Bay's deserted field of bones.

Leseprobe

for Jon, Elly, Tim and Simon

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

PREFACE: A NOTE ON FORM AND METHODOLOGY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1THE QUEST 1915–2006

2VOLUNTEERS AUGUST 1914–APRIL 1915

3VOYAGERS APRIL–AUGUST 1915

4INVADERS AUGUST 1915

5WARRIORS AUGUST 1915

6CASUALTIES AUGUST–OCTOBER 1915

7VICTIMS AUGUST 1915–NOVEMBER 1918

8GHOSTS NOVEMBER 1918–AUGUST 2006

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES

INDEX

Copyright

PREFACE: A NOTE ON FORM AND METHODOLOGY

As I tried to understand the 10th Irish Division’s experience of the Great War of 1914–1918, and the subsequent neglect of this significant piece of modern Irish history, I set myself four main objectives.

Firstly, I wanted to uncover those historical sources in which the story of Irish volunteer soldiers at Gallipoli might once more come to light. This meant searching for official military accounts of the campaigns fought by the division, especially within the British National Archive. There were plentiful newspaper archives to examine, both in Ireland and Britain and also unofficial diaries, photographs, maps, letters, scrapbooks and journals, in archives within Irish regimental museums and the Imperial War Museum in London. I aspired to find the few short personal accounts by veterans – or their friends – printed in limited editions, during or just after the war years. In due course I hoped to interview some of those Irishmen and women whose fathers and grandfathers fought with the 10th Division and who might still recall the impact on their families of the Dardanelles tragedy.

Second, I decided to focus not so much on intricate details of army strategy or the military ‘hardware’ of the battle as on the experiences of the men themselves. I sought the telling anecdotes and the honest, vivid descriptions to convey the psychological intensity of soldiering and the excruciating physical hardship and damage of the battlefield. If at all possible, I wished to discover what Irishness meant, as inspiration and consolation, to these men who found themselves as beleaguered Great War volunteers on the other side of Europe from their island home. I knew that this would assist with the power and focus of the emerging narrative.

Thirdly, it seemed important to indicate why the 10th Irish Division was so swiftly forgotten. Two chapters are devoted to the ‘afterlife’ of the Gallipoli story: one devoted to the experience of the survivors of Gallipoli throughout the rest of the Great War, particularly in light of revolutionary developments in Ireland during the war years; the other to study the way in which this battle disappeared from Irish national memory after 1918 while, by contrast, surviving and indeed thriving in the cultural life of two other Gallipoli combatant nations, Turkey and Australia.

Finally, it was important to choose the right literary form. The picture that sprang to mind was of the British Graves Registration Unit making its first search of the Gallipoli battlefields after the Armistice. The workers were confronted with the chaotic fragments of a battle fought three years earlier: broken bones and personal possessions scattered across a scarred landscape. Their task was to gather these remains, make sense of the human ‘debris’ and begin to assemble a dignified memorial story in the new military cemeteries of the peninsula. It was a job that foreshadowed my own, as I put together a heart-breaking bricolage of human detail, gathered from far and wide throughout the archives. To that end, I decided that the sub-headings in my chapters should be phrases ‘gathered’ from the nearby ‘landscape’ of the text, each one a fragment lifted from its narrative context and placed as a marker for further understanding of that part of an unfolding story of military chaos and confusion.

All effective historical narratives need a unifying form, despite an attempt to acknowledge the fragmentation of original material. In Field of Bones, I employed the time-honoured form of the quest, for two reasons: primarily to refer to my own search for the hidden story of the 10th Division, but also because the Irish volunteer soldiers of 1915 saw themselves as embarking on a significant journey of discovery and challenge. Some sought to prove their manhood on the field of battle, others to rediscover the martial glory spoken of by Homer and by Virgil. All were saturated in the regimental ethos of the period, which paid its homage to the legendary prowess of the Irishman at war. To understand that quest became my own.

Terminology

By 1915, the British Army consisted of several corps, which were divided into four or five divisions. A division contained approximately 17,000 men and was dominated by its three infantry brigades, each one containing four battalions. Within each battalion, four or five companies existed and each company was made up of a number of platoons. The smallest unit of all was the section, containing merely eight to ten men.

At the top of officer hierarchy, the army was commanded by the field marshal. In charge of corps and divisions and brigades were various species of general, whilst a battalion was headed by a lieutenant colonel, and a company was headed by a major, with a captain as his second in command. In charge of the platoons were the most junior officers – the lieutenants.

Amongst the rank and file, an ambitious and able private might hope to rise to lance-corporal (one stripe), then corporal (two stripes) and then sergeant (three stripes). The much-feared sergeant-majors were the men in charge of military discipline amongst the rank and file and the quarter master sergeants had a key role in looking after their supplies and ammunition.

Infantry battalions within each brigade were recruited from a number of regional regiments, each with their own ethos, regalia and history, such as the Connaught Rangers or the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Each unit within a division had an official war-diary – a record that the military historian often draws upon, in addition to the personal diaries kept by the men.

It is important to note that the word ‘casualties’ is not synonymous with ‘fatalities’ – an army’s casualty list commonly included the injured, the sick and those who had ‘gone missing’ as well as the dead.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To former colleagues and friends at Down High School, I offer my thanks for their support during the writing of this book. Brian Wilson was an invaluable companion and photographer during our research trip to Gallipoli, David Park offered creative suggestions about the way in which the text might be shaped, and Ken Dawson’s rich historical insight was a constant source of help. Other academic staff who contributed in various ways included Ed Mitchell, David Donnan, Nigel Martin and Martin Coffey. A mention must also be given to James, Shane and Ross in the ICT department, who helped me complete several complicated tasks involving retrieval and the processing of visual material.

Staff at the Down County Museum deserve credit for their support of this project. Mike King, Madeleine Allen and Linda McKenna were of particular assistance. Elsewhere, Jane Leonard at the Ulster Museum and Craig McGuckian at the Somme Heritage Centre offered valuable help. The staff at three regimental museums all contributed with archival material and expert insight – the Royal Inniskilling Fusilier Museum in Enniskillen, the Royal Irish Fusilier Museum in Armagh and the Royal Ulster Rifles Museum in Belfast. The Local Studies staff of the Linenhall Library in Belfast and the staff in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland offered assistance. Staff at Killyleagh and Downpatrick libraries were also generously helpful. A particular word of thanks is due to Joe O’Leary junior and Paddy Hand, who assisted with my researches and who did so much to keep their fathers’ Gallipoli memories alive long after other veterans had been forgotten.

Among the journalists whose help I wish to acknowledge are Paul Clarke of UTV, Stephen Walker of BBC Northern Ireland and Kevin Myers, formerly of The Irish Times, while among the academics who offered generous insight and advice, professors David Livingstone and Keith Jeffery of Queens University Belfast, Dr Timothy Bowman of University College London and Professor Joe Lee of the University of New York merit particular mention.

Among the friends, acquaintances and interviewees who pointed me in the direction of some historical material or submitted occasional valuable critiques and intelligent support, I include Michael Longley, Jack Duffin, Roy Perry, Chris Clotworthy, John Fairleigh, Tom Egginton, Sam Neill, Charles Cooper, Anne McDermott, Martin Staunton and Sean and Hazel Armstrong. Not to be forgotten are the courteous staff at the Hotel Kum on the Gallipoli peninsula — including our superb taxi driver and guide, Annal, who made the trip to Turkey so very worthwhile.

The staff of the Irish National Museum, the Irish National Library, the Irish National Gallery, the Leopardstown Hospital Trust and The Royal British Legion all offered splendid assistance and I would particularly wish to acknowledge the help provided by Tom Burke of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association. Mike Lee was of great help to me during the latter stages of my research, and I was inspired by his work on the topic of the 10th Division at Gallipoli over many years. I would also like to acknowledge in particular the work of Sinead O’Hanlon who acted as my researcher and photographer during the latter stages of the project. Her meticulous and imaginative approach to the task was of infinite value.

In London, I have been indebted to the staff at the Imperial War Museum, the British Library, the National Army Museum and The National Archive. In Cumbria, the help of my sister Rosemary, my brother-in-law Paul and our mutual friend Phyllis Kelly were all of value in tracking down the story of John Hargrave.

It would be a failure in me not to acknowledge the men on whose experience I drew, the veterans who were actually ‘there’ at Suvla and at Anzac. Some of their names do not appear because their job was to write official diaries and documents or because they were the unofficial, often anonymous photographers of the Gallipoli campaign. Other key witnesses, combatants and scribes in the 10th Division regularly appear in the narrative and many of their personal details may be found within this text. However I must conclude by acknowledging all those who have done so much in recent years to open up the story of the Irish in the Great War. I see myself as part of a growing and dedicated team of people in Ireland who have been striving to recover these memories for the attention of future generations. I salute the tenacity, hard work, skill and devotion shown by all who have been in any way involved in this powerful project.

I

THE QUEST

1915–2006

When Turkish people were being resettled in the new, trouble-torn republic of the 1920s, some families came to the isolated and beautiful northern reaches of the peninsula in European Turkey, which had been known to British Great War soldiers as Gallipoli. They renamed these northern shores ‘Kemikli Burnu’, the bone-strewn headland. The pitiful pieces of debris that they found there were the partially buried remains of thousands of British and Turkish troops who had perished during the ill-fated military landings at Suvla Bay, which began in August 1915.1

Earlier in that summer, the gigantic Cunard passenger liner, the Mauretania, had made its way southwards through the Irish Sea, en route for the Straits of Gibraltar. Its sister-ship, the Lusitania, was tragically torpedoed in May, whereas the Mauretania had been converted for use as a troop carrier in the Great War. It was the winner of the Blue Riband prize for the fastest-ever crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, but now its hull had been painted in the colours of naval camouflage for a zig-zag voyage through the Mediterranean waters, beneath which German submarines were lurking. The Mauretania was heading towards Turkey, where a new phase of the campaign to gain possession of the Dardanelles Straits was about to open. Among the British troops on board were men of the 10th (Irish) Division.

In the wake of the Mauretania came many more Irish soldiers in smaller steamers, which had been converted from their peacetime roles to the task of ferrying infantry reinforcements towards the Gallipoli Peninsula on the northern shores of the Dardanelles. The 10th Division was 17,000 strong and thus one of the biggest bodies of soldiers ever to leave Irish shores, with men from every county in Ireland as well as every kind of political allegiance. It was in the vanguard of Lord Kitchener’s famous New Army of volunteer soldiers and contained some of its earliest recruits. Among the many Irishmen who, down through history, have chosen the life of a soldier, the men of the 10th Division have claim to a special place.

The division left Irish shores buoyed up by a sense of patriotism and destiny. Although wartime Ireland was a volatile place where British rule was a contested issue, in the spring of 1915 the infantry battalions, which made up the biggest part of the division, had marched through the gates of their training camps and headed for Dublin. There, as a single unit, the troops had paraded from their barracks to the quayside through cheering crowds. Regimental bands played Irish airs, and the Union Jack and the flag of St Patrick fluttered from high windows. Three months later, after completing their training in the south of England, they packed their kitbags, put on the wide-brimmed helmets they would need for war in the East and marched to the docks once more.

Few people in the crowd who had watched them march through Dublin or who saw them walk up the gangway to the decks of the Mauretania in Liverpool dockyard that summer fully understood that the 10th Division was travelling to a war of brutality, ferocity and deep waste, where Lord Kitchener’s young volunteer armies would be mown down by machine-gun fire on the Western Front and where, already, on the far-off beaches and cliff-paths of Gallipoli, troops from the empire had perished.

Even fewer observers in the crowd could have predicted that in leaving these shores, the 10th (Irish) Division would, in a sense, sail right out of history. Within the space of a few decades its name would be forgotten, its exploits publicly unacknowledged, and the motivations, experiences and final destiny of its soldiers enfolded in an enduring silence. Along with the millions of other men who returned from the battlefields of Europe in 1918, demobilized Irishmen came home to a world that had been irrevocably changed. The Irish now stood on the brink of a political revolution that would sweep away much of the structure of British governance on the island. As a result, Ireland’s British ex-servicemen, on returning from the trenches of Ypres and the Somme, found themselves in a difficult position. No less difficult would be the position of those who had travelled to the earlier and more distant battlefield of Gallipoli and who had, against all odds, managed to survive until the Armistice.

Within a few years a new Irish Free State existed, endeavouring to create a national identity without the emblems and traditions of Britishness. The long history of Irish service in the British army would be an unwanted story. The voyage of the 10th Division to the Dardanelles and the sufferings of the Irish at Gallipoli would appear in popular culture only as an occasional mention in the national folk-song repertoire, where its significance would be summed up in the lines from one later patriotic ballad –

You fought for the wrong country

you died for the wrong cause …

when the greatest war was at home.2

Years later a prosperous and self-confident Irish nation would feel able to reinvestigate the history of its bitter-sweet relationship with Britain and, as a result, to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of Irish soldiers who fought in the British army throughout history. However, the story of the men who sailed for Gallipoli in the summer months of 1915 would, despite the appetite for rediscovery, remain profoundly buried. Even in an era when many Irish men and women recognized that it was no shame to have ancestors buried under the Union Jack on the Western Front, few made the long journey to the graveyards of Kemikli Burnu. Hundreds of Irish names remained unread in the Gallipoli cemeteries, on memorial stones inscribed with testimonies to what had once been an unquenched sorrow for dead fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.

The last resting place of the 10th Division’s dead could not be in a more beautiful location nor in a part of the world more steeped in myth and history. From the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, where in 1915, land-mines, bullets and artillery shells destroyed two rival armies, it is possible to look across the sea to the site of the ancient city of Troy where the heroes of that great Homeric epic, The Iliad, engaged in a war with spears, chariots, shields and swords. The northern stretch of Gallipoli is now a quiet place of isolated farmsteads, tomato-fields and neatly tended military cemeteries, many of which lie within earshot of a blue sea that rolls ashore onto deserted strands.

After ninety years of oblivion, a detailed history of the 10th Division might be thought of as irrecoverable. I wanted to find out whether, from a range of deeply neglected narratives, the story of the Irish volunteer soldiers of Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove could be retold in both military and human detail and to ask why, of all Ireland’s Great War experiences, this should have been one of the most deeply buried.

There are difficulties for any storyteller who aims to reconstruct a battle fought so many years ago. This division that sailed to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean was made up of many units. From some parts of that division virtually no narratives survive, whilst the archives of others of its battalions offer the historian a rich array of poignant detail. The story of the Irish at Suvla and Anzac relies inevitably on those educated and confident enough to maintain a detailed written account of their experiences and, after the war, the cultural, economic or personal support needed to publish or place in archives their story of survival.

So, although any military history is partial – shaped not just by authorial intentions but by what old soldiers want to remember or what they decide to forget – the story of the 10th Division is, for cultural reasons, particularly so. It is dominated by the experiences of officers rather than the ‘ordinary foot-soldiers’ who filled the ranks, dependent on the testimonies of Irish Protestant and English members of the division rather than the many thousands of Irish Catholic troops and reliant on the voices of men who returned in 1918 to a unionist rather than a nationalist cultural environment. The reader’s task is to discover within the story that does emerge, the lives of the thousands of men who were unable or unwilling to recount the Gallipoli memories that few in a post-war Irish Free State seemed to want to hear.

The army division that is my subject was not an entirely Irish body of men. Neither was the Irish experience of Gallipoli limited to this particular unit. Other Irish troops died at the Dardanelles, with Australasian units, with ‘regular’ battalions of the British army, and with naval units who were conducting operations in the eastern Mediterranean. The book does not presume to tell their story yet they too are part of a fractured national narrative.

Few nations deliver a rigorously honest and coherent narrative about their wars. The veterans of Suvla are merely a few in the global throng who, when wars end, are easily forgotten because they have fought ‘for the wrong cause’.

As an author, the impulse to begin this story had its origins in a visit that I made one day to an empty, rain-soaked townland in the Irish midlands, when a local farmer referred to the road on which I stood as ‘the Dardanelles’. For the first time, questions about Ireland and Gallipoli presented themselves to me for answering. Why was the name of a Great War battle – so often thought of as an Australian tragedy – inscribed upon this stretch of quiet Irish landscape? Did young men, born in places such as this, sail off to the farthest edge of Europe and find themselves an unremembered resting-place in a Turkish field of bones?

And if a story worth recovering should emerge, what way might it be told?

The quest began.

A soldier’s bones, Rhododendron Ridge, Gallipoli, 2005.

KEITH JEFFERY

Churchill’s Gallipoli strategy, 1915.

JOHN BOYE

The Dardanelles Straits, the gateway to Constantinople.

BOYD

The Gallipoli Peninsula

MITCHELL

Notes

1. R. Ayliffe et al, The Rough Guide to Turkey, 5th edn (Rough Guides 2003), p.241.

2. From the song ‘Gallipoli’ by Pete St. John.

II

VOLUNTEERS

AUGUST 1914–APRIL 1915

Recruitment area number 10

The relationship between the Irish people and the British army had always been a complicated one. Britain’s dominance over its nearest neighbour had been achieved by military conquest and in 1914 Ireland was still garrisoned by thousands of British troops in camps and barracks across the island. Yet Ireland had also been a recruiting ground for Britain’s armed forces as its power expanded across the globe. In the 1830s Ireland had provided over 40 per cent of Britain’s fighting men, a figure much reduced by the turn of the twentieth century, although thirteen British soldiers in every hundred were still Irish. Famous generals such as the Duke of Wellington had had family origins in the ranks of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry, whilst numerous Irish regiments had played a role in recruiting foot-soldiers for the empire. The Royal Irish Regiment had been in existence since the seventeenth century, the famous ‘Royal Inniskillings’ had played a key role in the British victory at Waterloo, and some regiments, such as the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, had originated during the expansion of imperial power in India.

However, the military traditions of the Irish were many and varied. Ancient Irish mythology enshrined tales of flamboyant heroes such as Cuchulain and warrior bands such as the Red Branch Knights, their glory and prowess enthusiastically rediscovered by Ireland’s Celtic Revival movement and by its band of conspiratorial separatists.

The Irish had not only fought for the British empire but against it. There was a strong tradition of Irish service in the national armies of Europe and in the seventeenth century Irish brigades known as ‘the Wild Geese’ had given the support of 30,000 Irish soldiers to the French. Service in the armies of Europe was not merely motivated by an Irish opposition to British hegemony. Opportunities for work, travel and adventure presented themselves to the young males of a poor island nation. Irishmen served in the armies of Russia, Bavaria, Spain, Portugal and Holland as well as France. Others travelled farther afield and fought in the national armies of the new states that were emerging in both North and South America.1

Now, in the second decade of the twentieth century, Britain’s Liberal government had determined on a course that sought to meet the desire of most Irishmen for greater political independence. John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party had long been seeking Dublin-based ‘Home Rule’ within the Empire. However, such aims ran contrary to the aspirations of most of Ireland’s Protestant minority. They deemed their power and prosperity to be dependent on full retention of the union with Britain. Old sectarian tensions, particularly in the north of the island, began to raise their head and rival paramilitary militias dedicated either to the union or to Home Rule, were arming themselves with smuggled rifles. The British army in Ireland found itself uneasily poised between rival factions, though with its own leadership innately sympathetic to the unionist cause. In this volatile context news of a looming European war came to Ireland in the summer of 1914.

Given Ireland’s military history it is not then a surprise that 30,000 Irishmen in 1914 were already serving in the regular army and that many were sent towards the front line when war was declared, while thousands more were in the army reserve, eligible to be called up on the commencement of hostilities. Neither is it surprising that when the British realized they needed a vast volunteer army to take on the might of the German infantry, they planned for at least one division to be filled with Irish civilian volunteers.2

So in August 1914, as the British Secretary of State for war, Lord Kitchener, created a structure capable of holding this volunteer army, the new infantry divisions started to be numbered according to the traditional recruiting areas throughout the British Isles. The authorities hoped that recruitment area number 10, the island of Ireland, would provide Britain with some of the enthusiastic and able citizen soldiers so urgently needed. As a special honour, this new military unit would be given the full ceremonial title of the 10th (Irish) Division. It would be the first time that so substantial and well equipped a body of men had entered a war bearing the title ‘Irish’.3

The train moved out amid cheers and fog-signals

The story of the the 10th (Irish) Division begins with men such as H.F.N. Jourdain. In 1914 he was already an officer with the Irish regiment the Connaught Rangers, in charge of its regimental barracks in Renvyle in County Galway on the rugged Atlantic coast. Like other officers, he had been alerted by his seniors to the likelihood of a European war as diplomatic relations between the great powers deteriorated throughout July in the aftermath of the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand. Jourdain, as he waited eagerly to hear of further developments, moved with his wife from their nearby lodgings into the spartan accommodation at Renvyle Barracks to be at hand for discussions with his staff and for immediate action if required. There, in early August, he received the news that would transform him from a ‘peace-time’ to a ‘wartime’ soldier. He would later recall:

We all remained in barracks although the Galway races were on. After a cup of tea, I walked with two other officers and my wife outside the walls, down to Cromwell’s Fort to get a breath of fresh air. It was a warm, calm evening, a veritable calm before the storm. I talked to one of them, saying that now after years of work we could get all the machinery in motion by one word, ‘mobilize’. As I spoke, I looked at the barracks gate and there was an orderly running towards me with a telegram. I said ‘And here it is!’ It was exactly 6.53pm …

Soon, Jourdain was touring the length and breadth of the western province of Connaught, in search of Irish recruits for Britain’s war with Germany.4

Within hours of the outbreak of war, ‘reserve’ men such as John McIlwaine were rejoining their old Irish regiments. He had been a soldier as a younger man in Africa and India but he left the regular forces to work as a sorting clerk and telegraphist with the postal services in Newcastle-on-Tyne in the northeast of England. He had retained his place on the military reserve and was thus eligible to be ‘called up’ in event of war. When the declaration of hostilities eventually came on that warm day in early August, McIlwaine went at once to his local reserve army depot. Within hours he had said farewell to his wife and was on his way to Galway to rejoin the Connaught Rangers. Crossing England by train, he could see crowds of ‘reserve men’ like himself, thronging the station platforms. Then sailing across the Irish Sea to Dublin, he boarded a mail-train for Galway, meeting men he had last seen in far-flung parts of the British empire. On arrival he could still recognize, after years of absence, the smell of the turf smoke and the sound of noisy crowds, busy on a market day.5

Movement of regular, reserve and territorial troops along the railway lines and roads of Ireland was the most visible sign that war had arrived. Yet newspapers such as Belfast’s The Irish News still advertised all the comfortable merchandise of peace-time holiday-making and summer travel, including leather suitcases, ladies’ hat-cases, croquet goods and tennis racquets, while at Irish coastal resorts such as Newcastle, in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains, holidaymakers still walked on the strand or played summer sports, although, as a journalist in the local paper phrased it, ‘the numbers on the links or playing tennis in the annual tournament are reduced and daily the papers are scanned’.6

By now, both local and national papers in Ireland began to carry recruiting notices and this would be followed before long by a government poster campaign. At Downpatrick, in County Down, posters invited men between the ages of eighteen and thirty to come to the barracks, situated in the former eighteenth century gaol in the Mall, if they were ‘desirous of serving in His Majesty’s Army’. They would then be welcomed into the very building where, days earlier, the reserve unit of the local regiment, the Royal Irish Rifles, had mobilized before marching through the crowded streets to the railway station. Then the train had moved out amidst cheers and the celebratory thunder of the locomotive’s fog signals, en route to the city of Belfast where the men would become full-time soldiers.

While a miscellany of citizens from south-eastern County Down made its way through the barracks gates to join the infantry, the nearby Down Hunt Hotel welcomed recruits of a higher social status to join the North Irish Horse, a local cavalry regiment, the advertisements for which carefully warned that ‘none but good horsemen need apply’.7

As the first County Down recruits into the New Army joined up, civil conflict brewed in the northern province of Ulster. Protestants there were in a narrow majority and felt wary of a prospective, Catholic-dominated Dublin parliament. Members of the self-styled ‘Ulster Volunteer Force’, led by Sir Edward Carson, and their nationalist rivals, the ‘Irish National Volunteers’, drilled and marched each night in the streets and country lanes where they had their respective pockets of support. Each organization wore uniforms emblazoned with the distinctive regalia of nationalism and unionism. Together, the rival volunteer bodies claimed a membership measured in hundreds of thousands. Until the conflict over Home Rule was resolved and a way cleared for thousands of these young men to enter the army without sacrificing their political principles and the quasi-military comradeship they already possessed, the first stream of Irish recruitment would never become a flood.8

In the metropolitan splendour of central Dublin, recruitment notices also filled the papers. This was the capital city that in 1914 was hosting a great summer ‘Civic Exhibition’ in the Linenhall buildings, an exhibition that proudly boasted a display of the latest in Irish architecture, town planning, commercial development, and agricultural modernization. Yet Dublin was also a city of poverty and political disaffection – poverty that, for some, was an incentive to join the army, with its regular wage and opportunity for adventure.

Within recent weeks, events on the streets of Dublin had not been conducive to support for the British military establishment. Men of the King’s Own Scottish Borderer regiment, which currently acted as a garrison army in the city, had killed a number of civilians on the Dublin thoroughfare of Bachelor’s Walk, firing on a crowd in the aftermath of the arrival of an arms shipment for the Irish National Volunteers. Elsewhere in Dublin the Marxist James Connolly and the radical educationalist and Gaelic scholar, Patrick Pearse, were already seeking to garner support for the militant, separatist cause by preaching a gospel of ardent opposition to the war.9

On 21 August 1914 the 10th (Irish) Division began its official life as a part of the famous ‘first 100,000’ of Kitchener’s Army. At its head was General Bryan Mahon, a 52-year-old member of an Anglo-Irish family, described by those who knew him as a confirmed chain-smoker but an agile man with bronzed complexion and slim build. He had served at Khartoum in the Sudan with Gordon and was later responsible for the celebrated relief of Mafeking during the wars in South Africa. This Anglo-Irish military hero was to be seen, during the early days of the 10th Division’s training, astride a magnificent chestnut steed with a cigarette in his mouth, gazing at his new soldiers.

The core of the division would be the three infantry brigades, numbered 29th, 30th and 31st in the British army’s register. They came under the command of brigadiers R.J. Cooper, L.J. Nicholl and F.F. Hill. Cooper was a former Irish Guard, Nicholl had served on India’s North-West Frontier, and more recently Hill had commanded troops in Belfast when a confrontation with the Ulster Volunteer Force loomed. Each brigade was, in customary infantry fashion, composed of four battalions, up to 1000 strong. Each battalion drew on the regimental mechanism that served to govern recruiting on a local basis throughout the British Isles, taking on a name and a number allotted to them by such historic Irish regiments as the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the Leinster Regiment, the Royal Irish Regiment, the Connaught Rangers and the Royal Irish Rifles. A number of the key men in each battalion were army veterans with experience of service throughout the empire, and it was their specific job to help train the new recruits.

Other elements in a typical infantry division were also assembled, including artillery, engineer, medical, veterinary and supply corps units. In due course the Royal Irish Regiment battalion became a ‘pioneer’ unit, charged with such back-breaking duties as digging trenches and building military roads. Their place as a group of infantrymen would be taken by a battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, who, although possessing an English name, had a long connection to Irish soldiering and already contained men from the Irish midlands. Pride in the regimental traditions of each battalion in the 10th would be much encouraged. New recruits to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers were quickly aware of their regiments’ two enduring nicknames: ‘the Blue-caps’, recalling distinctive headgear worn marching across the sun-scorched landscape of India and ‘the Toughs’, due to the legendary resilience and assertiveness of Dublin’s infantrymen.10

Patriotic commitment and a sense of adventure

Although an elegant building on the capital’s western outskirts was the British army’s centre of command, it was in other parts of the city that work was done to entice young men to support the war-effort. Frank Browning, President of the Irish Rugby Football Union, sent a circular to his players, just a few days after war was declared. Within a short space of time, he had established a 300-strong ‘Volunteer Corps’, which drilled at the Lansdowne Road rugby ground for several evenings each week. During these sessions Browning would encourage his men to enlist. Most of his volunteers came from a middle-class Protestant background and they included trainee doctors, barristers, clerks, stockbrokers, insurance agents and art students. Many of them lived in Dublin while pursuing their respective careers, and came originally from other parts of Ireland, including Donegal town or Londonderry in the north and Tralee or Kinsale in the south. At Lansdowne Road men from Portadown and Ballymena, where unionism held sway, drilled alongside men from Castlebar, Skibbereen and Limerick – where the Catholic majority endorsed the politics of John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party.

Among the rugby-playing volunteers was Charles Frederick Ball, from Loughborough in the English midlands, who had come to Ireland in order to be the assistant keeper at Dublin’s Royal Botanic Gardens and the editor of a journal called Irish Gardening. Engaged to a local girl, he hoped to marry her in December but he could not let that stand in the way of his sense of patriotic commitment.

Other Englishmen in the group included Reginald Ford, originally from Devon, now a Dublin schoolmaster. The rugby players also included some men from Irish nationalist families including Michael Fitzgibbon, son of John Fitzgibbon, the Redmondite MP for County Roscommon, who was a promising law student. Several had been educated at well-known Irish Catholic schools such as Clongowes Wood College and Presentation College, Glasthule. They now expressed a desire to ‘join up’ alongside men of a very different religious background including sons of Protestant clerics such as Cecil Murray and Frank Laird. Within a few days the diverse, talented troupe of Lansdowne Road rugby footballers were able to enlist in the newly formed 10th Division of Kitchener’s Army.11

However, these first weeks of the war also drew men towards the recruiting stations who possessed rather different social backgrounds. They came from the less prosperous streets of Dublin or of Ireland’s provincial towns. Bartholomew Hand, a working-class Catholic boy from County Wicklow, had been a gardener on the famous and beautiful estate at Powerscourt, in Enniskerry. He joined up without his parents’ knowledge or permission, searching for adventure. He was drafted into an Inniskilling Fusilier battalion of the 10th Division, which had so far suffered from poor recruitment figures in its rural Ulster hinterland.12 Joe O’Leary, a young Catholic from the eastern seaside town of Skerries, joined the forces from similar motives, taking the train to Dublin city centre one evening and going straight to Grafton Street recruiting office. On the following day, after a medical, he received a payment of two shillings and ninepence and was asked to turn up at Amiens Street railway station. There he boarded a train to Armagh, where he joined a battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, who recruited in yet another northern regimental area still having trouble filling its ranks.13

Prosperous, middle-class Catholic families also sent men into the division and often offered a deep family commitment to the war-effort. The Martin family of Monkstown, having built a timber-merchant business in recent years, were rich enough to own a house with five acres of gardens, including a summerhouse and tennis court. When the war came, brothers Charlie and Tommy joined up and were posted as trainee junior officers to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Their sister Marie became a volunteer nurse and eventually served on a hospital ship.

For some young men, the lure of a regular wage, a family tradition of soldiering or a flight from some personal problem rapidly overcame any possible distaste for a life in the British army. John and Philip Willis rushed to join the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, in the later words of one of John’s sons, ‘to get away from Dublin and get regular meals’. The Willis family had once been prosperous and had lived in a comfortable suburb, in a house next door to the dynamic Irish nationalist, Constance Markievicz. However, their father, a man of brutal temperament and dissolute habits, soon lost all the money that he had earned and the family sank deep into poverty. Now the brothers felt they had an opportunity to better themselves in the 10th Division, where John would soon train as a signaller.14

The tendency for siblings to join up was particularly strong among the commercial middle-class Protestant families of the greater Dublin area. The Findlaters owned a large food and drinks business in Dublin. The oldest, Alex, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps while two younger brothers, Herbert and Charles, were recruited to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. The Lee family were also prosperous business-owners in the south County Dublin area. Once again, three males in a single family joined the forces on the outbreak of war. Ernest, a well-qualified surgeon, applied to join the Medical Corps and Joseph and Tennyson joined the 10th Division as trainee officers in a battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers. Joseph was a well-known lawyer and, despite his youth, a writer of sophisticated legal textbooks. Tennyson was a director in the family business, his name acquired because of his mother’s deep love for the Victorian poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.15

Kitchener’s Army particularly attracted men of sporting and athletic prowess. J.C. Parke from Clones, County Monaghan, joined a battalion of the Leinster Regiment. He had represented his country in America and Australia as a member of the British Davis Cup lawn-tennis team but he had also captained Ireland in rugby as a first class ‘centre three quarter’.16 Ernest Coldwell, who joined the Dublin Fusiliers, had won the British ‘Graceful Diving’ championship in London in pre-war years while Joseph Brady, who entered the same battalion, was a professional billiards player and undefeated Irish snooker champion since 1908.

The legal fraternity was well represented in the Dublin Fusiliers and included well-known barristers such as Poole Hickman and the young and gifted Reid Professor of Law at Trinity College, Ernest Julien.17

However, participation in a legally contentious labour dispute before the war certainly did not deter some men from a very different social background from also entering the division. A substantial number of unemployed dockers entered one particular company of the Dublin Fusiliers. They were known as the ‘Larkinites’ in reference to their involvement in the huge transport workers’ strike organized by union leader James Larkin. Having struggled to regain employment after their dismissal from the docks, some had already gained work in the regular army, prior to August 1914. Others now followed and found themselves in the same battalion as young men from Dublin’s sophisticated bourgeoisie.18

The British army stood between Ireland and an enemy

By mid-September the Lansdowne Road volunteer corps had entered over one hundred men into D Company of the 7th battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Others would join at a later date. They were known far and wide as ‘the footballers’ and aimed to model themselves on the units of ‘Pals’, popular in England because they brought in cohesive peer-groups of friends and colleagues from social classes that would not normally have considered soldiering.

On the other side of the country, H.F.N. Jourdain was now in charge of a newly formed battalion of the Connaught Rangers and was busy registering volunteer soldiers in County Galway. English by birth, he had spent many years in ‘the Rangers’ and as a widely travelled and knowledgeable soldier had acquired the nickname ‘Savvy’. As he toured the county, he thought he could detect a degree of enthusiasm. Putting up green-coloured recruiting posters in country towns, he was often cheered by a small crowd. On returning to Renvyle he found himself busily dealing with a range of new recruits. One letter he received asked for the advance price of a fare to get to Renvyle. It concluded, ‘Excuse the writing but I am in a hurry – God save the King, Yours John Cooney.’ Another would-be recruit said, ‘I deserted from the battalion five years ago; will you have me back now?’ Among the old soldiers who tried to come back to the regiment in Renvyle was a sergeant who had marched to Khandahar with Lord Roberts in 1879. Thirty-five years later he wished to be back in uniform.19

Meanwhile, back in Dublin by 14 September, a young man called Noel Drury had joined Trinity College Officer Training Corps and had started drilling each afternoon and evening. Drury’s family owned a local paper mill, in the running of which he might have been expected to play a future part. Now, despite his lack of military experience, he applied for a commission as an officer and before long was notified to join the 5th Connaught Rangers, which Jourdain had been assembling in County Galway. He put some rudimentary items of kit together, paid his remaining bills and before taking his train to the west, enjoyed what he would later describe in his diary as ‘a nice little ceremony at home’ when he was ‘presented with a beautiful sword, suitably engraved, and a belt, by the work people’.20

Into a battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers came a different kind of recruit. Francis Ledwidge, a 27-year-old from near the town of Slane in County Meath, was a Catholic from a background humbler than Noel Drury’s. Alternately farm labourer, road worker and copper miner, in the months leading up to the war, he had become a member of the Irish National Volunteers, a trade union representative and an acquaintance of nationalist leaders Patrick Pearse and Professor Thomas McDonagh. As a young writer of some merit but little means, he had come under the patronage of the literary aristocrat, Lord Dunsany, who at the outbreak of hostilities had joined the new 5th Inniskilling battalion. Ledwidge decided that he too would join and ‘test his mettle’ as a soldier, despite his intensely nationalist sympathies. Ledwidge’s reasons for ‘joining up’ included a mix of high-minded principles and romantic discontents. He would later say, ‘I joined the British army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilization.’ He did not want Irish nationalists to be accused of accepting the protection of the British empire against German tyranny while doing nothing themselves to contribute to Germany’s defeat.

Yet Ledwidge was also distressed by rejection from a local girl called Ellie, with whom he was in love. In June 1914 he had written a poem declaring his hunger for departure and adventure, now that she had spurned him:

I’m wild for wandering to the far-off places

Since one forsook me whom I held most dear …21

A future chronicler of the 10th Division, Captain Bryan Cooper, noted the great diversity among the men. He observed that many young subaltern officers were drawn from Trinity College, while experienced captains came from the district inspectorship of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Old colonial army officers had also returned to ‘the colours’ and youthful recruits had been drawn from both Protestant and Catholic working-class background, ‘taking their tone’ from some older soldiers in the ranks, to whom they were often related. Cooper estimated that by the time recruiting for the division was complete, 90 per cent of the officers and 70 per cent of the ordinary men in the ranks were either Irish or of Irish extraction.

Bryan Cooper himself came from a landed family in County Sligo, had been to Eton and was a sophisticated man who wrote poetry and enjoyed reading. Keeping up the military traditions of his family, he trained for the army in pre-war years, then became involved in politics and for a brief period was the Westminster MP for south County Dublin. Back at Markree in the winter of 1913–14 he played war-games on the floorboards of an empty room in the family mansion, its surface covered in white scrawls to indicate contours, railway lines and rivers, with tin soldiers representing rival armies. In 1914 came Cooper’s chance to re-enlist and to play war-games for real.22

The Dublin ‘Pals’ were now a part the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and known to some of their less well-heeled fellow-soldiers as ‘the Toffs in the Toughs’. On 16 September a substantial number marched off from the Trinity College Officer Training Corps H.Q. towards the railway station, en route for a barracks at the Curragh in County Kildare, a few miles to the west of the capital. As the men stepped down Dame Street and along the quays by the river Liffey, it seemed as if there were hands waving handkerchiefs at every window. A short time later, they were making a home out of a bare hut in an army barracks and learning to drill and route-march on long, sunny autumn mornings, looking forward all the while to their first military pay on 25 September.23

Among the other sections of the 10th Division assembling throughout the island during that autumn were three units of the field ambulance brigade. Among them was John Hargrave, a young man from a Quaker background who had spent much of his youth in the small village of Hawkshead on the southern edge of the scenic Lake District in England. On a clear day, from the nearby fells he would have seen the mountains of Mourne outlined beyond the Irish Sea on the western horizon.

However, late summer of 1914 found Hargrave in the Marylebone area of London, working as a journalist for a scouting magazine. There, among naked, unfit-looking men with tattoo-covered arms, he told the local recruiting officer of his Quaker pacifist background and of his suitability for the noncombatant medical corps. Within minutes he was enrolled and a few days later he was sent to Ireland on a foul-smelling cattle-boat bound for Waterford. From there he travelled on to the 10th Division’s field ambulance brigade depot in Limerick, at the mouth of the Shannon. He considered the town dismal and disfigured by slum housing but soon the men of the field ambulance were performing extensive manoeuvres on the nearby mountains of Clare, despite the lack of a proper army uniform and genuine military or medical equipment.24

Another Englishman posted to Limerick, Private William Knott, a Londoner whose strong Salvation Army convictions had guided him towards field ambulance services, soon felt that Englishmen in an army uniform met with little favour in local eyes.25

The finest lot of fellows I have ever known

Despite Bryan Cooper’s final statistics about the composition of the division and Jourdain’s optimism about enlistment in Connaught, Irishmen were still not flocking to the doors of the recruiting stations in the late summer of 1914. Compared with most other parts of the British Isles, recruiting was proceeding badly. Reports in The Irish Times in mid-September indicated that the 10th Division was only ‘half-full’ and that it would have to seek English reinforcements. Towards the end of August, after three weeks of recruiting, only the Royal Irish Rifles battalion had come close to gathering in the 900 or more soldiers needed for a viable unit. It had had the advantage of recruiting in Belfast, where life in the army was of appeal to the many young men in that city who found themselves in dead-end, low-skill jobs. The Connaught Ranger battalion had been moderately successful, with half its ranks filled already. However, the two Irish Fusilier and two Inniskilling Fusilier battalions could scarcely muster more than 300 men in total, despite the energetic efforts of persuasive recruiting agents such as Bryan Cooper, who was reported to be talking each evening to the men in the marketplaces of County Sligo, accompanied by an eloquent priest, Father Doyle, who would soon become one of the 10th Division’s Catholic chaplains. However, some officers were more wary than Cooper of trying to recruit for the British army in parts of a countryside made volatile by the recent Home Rule crisis.26

Recruitment officers thought they could discern factors that prevented men from ‘joining up’ and had nothing to do with the problems of contemporary politics. One of these factors was shared with another New Army division, the 12th. Out of all the six divisions that made up the ranks of the ‘first 100,000’of the New Army, the 10th and 12th had the gravest recruiting problems. The 12th Division was endeavouring to recruit in East Anglia, a predominantly rural catchment area with a heavy involvement of young men in farm labour. What was more, this was the worst time of year to recruit in a rural region, given the busy autumnal focus on ‘getting in the harvest’.

But in Ireland, since the catastrophic ‘famine years’ of the mid-nineteenth century, emigration had deprived rural communities of thousands of their best and fittest young men. Some of the potential volunteer Irish soldiers had long since emigrated to America, to find new lives for themselves in California and New Jersey.27

Reinforcements from England were soon drafted in. During September, the division’s Leinster Regiment battalion was strengthened by 600 men from Bristol. Captain Godfrey Drage went in the same month from his Royal Munster Fusilier base in County Kerry to a depot in Yorkshire where he searched for men to help fill up the ranks of his own regiment. Drage was from an Anglo-Welsh family and on 5 August he drove in his 22-hp Ford motor car to Oxford’s Cowley Barracks to offer himself for war service. With his own extensive pre-war army experience he found himself installed as an officer at the Royal Munster Fusiliers’ depot on the southern Irish coastline at Tralee, in charge of what he would later describe as the ‘finest lot of fellows I have ever known’.

However, it was clear that Munster would not yield the quota of at least 1800 recruits needed for two New Army battalions in the early weeks of the war, so he travelled to the depot at Pontefract in northern England to begin recruiting. There Drage confidently made a phonecall ordering two trains to carry troops from Pontefract to the Welsh port of Holyhead, then planned for a crossing on the ferry from Holyhead to Kingstown, just south of Dublin, and ‘wired’ Kingstown harbour to arrange for several hundred hot breakfasts for his men.

In Pontefract Barracks he made these men strip to the waist and then walked down the ranks, feeling each man’s biceps. He took miners without further ado because of their wiry physique. The disgruntled adjutant of a local Yorkshire regiment soon curtailed Drage’s recruitment drive but not before the Munster Fusiliers were enriched by a substantial number of fit and able Yorkshiremen. Sent by train to County Kildare, these men were marched to the Curragh camp from the railway station, across the bare, wet plain ‘in shabby clothes and soaked to the skin … accompanied by eleven Dublin corner-boys’ who had spontaneously joined the English soldiers as they had passed through Dublin.28

These English drafts were undoubtedly needed. Given the troubled political circumstances, men were a great deal more reluctant to commit themselves to a Kitchener division in Ireland than in Britain during the opening weeks of the war. On 3 September, the biggest single day for recruitment in 1914, when some 33,000 British citizens joined the army, 2151 men joined in Manchester but only 114 in Dublin. A set of figures published in early November showed that while recruitment in southern Scotland stood at a remarkable 237 per 10,000 of the population and the figures for London and the Home Counties showed a respectable 170 per 10,000, in Ireland 127 per 10,000 signed up in the area that comprised Ulster, Dublin, Wicklow and Kildare and a meagre 32 per 10,000 joined in what were referred to by the authorities as the ‘agricultural’ districts of Munster. Nonetheless, by the late autumn of 1914 a substantial wave of fresh Irish recruits was gained and certain influences had been at work allowing this to happen.

Political compromise had been reached on the ‘Home Rule issue’ whereby the legislation would be ‘officially’ placed on the statute books but not implemented until after the war was over, with the door still left open – as northern unionists understood it – for the exclusion of Ulster from the ultimate settlement. Sir Edward Carson and John Redmond now felt free to advocate the enlistment of their respective volunteer militias in Kitchener’s Army. Indeed large-scale military service might well be a chance to gain Britain’s favour and render a positive constitutional outcome more likely when the war was over.

As a result, on 3 September, the 36th (Ulster) Division had been formed, its battalion nomenclature reflecting the regional structure of the Ulster Volunteer Force, whilst on 11 September, a 16th Division had also been authorized as yet another body of men to be ‘raised’ in Ireland. On 20 September John Redmond spoke at Woodenbridge in County Wicklow stating it would be a disgrace if nationalist Irishmen ‘shrunk from the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry and courage which has distinguished our race through its history’. Soon it became clear that the 16th Division might stand as equivalent to the 36th, and offer a military ‘home’ for young nationalists.

The 10th also benefited from these political and military developments throughout September, as numerous young men for whom Carson and Redmond were political mentors, now felt free to join. An analysis of the casualty figures from the first few months of engagement with the enemy shows that despite early difficulties with enlistment, Cooper’s statistics were not far off the mark. Two-thirds of the men who died or were wounded with the division at Gallipoli were domiciled in Ireland.29

The motives for ‘joining up’ were undoubtedly mixed. Some men were anti-German, spurred by the British propaganda that characterized the German invasion of little, Catholic Belgium as a violation of the rights of small nations everywhere. Some simply thought that war would be an adventure. Others were glad of a new and different kind of ‘work’, whilst some were happy to follow their fellows, friends, neighbours or social betters into the army. Some, imbued with a vague sense of moral duty, thought that it was simply ‘the right thing to do’.

Like ordinary soldiers everywhere, the men of the 10th Division could be confused about the war in which they fought: one old soldier in the Leinster Regiment was heard saying that he was off to fight the French! However, like all volunteer soldiers in the ranks of Kitchener’s Army, the men in the 10th began their careers stark naked, stripped of all clothing in the recruiting station and inspected by a doctor for ailments such as varicose veins and bad eyesight. Like all the soldiers in the ‘first 100,000’ it took these men a long time to receive a full uniform and to be issued with their Lee Enfield rifles as opposed to the ‘dummy’ version.30 And their first army pay would have given rise to a variety of feelings. Basic pay in the ranks was a shilling a day, not a lot in an era when a skilled tradesman could earn thirty shillings a week in civilian life. However, for many soldiers there were extra perks including separation allowances for families. A married soldier from an unskilled background might have received a weekly family allowance of twenty-two shillings if he had a wife at home with four children.

Many of the men who joined the British army in the autumn of 1914 could not read or write. With illiteracy rates for Ireland as high as 12 per cent in the pre-war years, and with recruitment procedure attracting many of the unskilled and poverty-stricken, it is likely that nearly a quarter of the men in some battalions were illiterate.31

Men followed the music down the winding roads

Within a short time of arriving in Galway to join the Connaught Rangers, Noel Drury was told to transfer to another battalion, the 6th battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. On arriving at his new billet, at the Curragh, he met a fellow- officer who was sent out to get him a suitable servant, who turned out to be a private called Costelloe from Cork whom Drury regarded as ‘a decent chap’. Drury was placed in charge of No.10 platoon of C Company and soon he met the company’s Sergeant Major, an old soldier called Murphy who had been lately in charge of gym and sports at a school near London. Murphy was particularly responsible for achieving the kind of discipline needed in this new and inexperienced band of soldiers. Drury was also delighted to find that the officer’s mess at the Curragh was a reasonably comfortable place, with a piano on which some of the more musical among the men soon played a tune.

The 6th Dublin Fusiliers’ sister battalion was encamped at the same barracks. Many of its former rugby players would later recall how they made their first route marches through the Irish countryside, encountering in November the first snows of the winter. The marches were a key part of training and toughening the men and also a means of encouraging military pride in regimental display. The troops were led by Irish pipers drawn from the ranks of Trinity College Officer Training Corps. The marchers were frequently accompanied by the regimental mascot, an Irish terrier called Jack. To help keep up their spirits on these marches, the rugby-playing Pals also organized a ‘mouth-organ band’. 32

For Bryan Cooper, memories of training at the Curragh were dominated by these ‘field days’ when the air was full of the vibrant sounds of drums, fifes and pipes as his men ‘followed the music down the wet, winding roads around Kilcullen or the Chair of Kildare, with grey clouds hanging overhead’. The nationalistically minded men in the Connaught Rangers’ band were not above provoking the well-known unionist, Bryan Cooper, with their choice of music when on the march, playing ‘A Nation Once Again’ repeatedly in his presence!33