The Great War Silence

The First World War Centenary Roll of Honour and Essays,

edited by Ronan McGreevy and Emer Purcell, associate editor Tom Burnell, (National  University of Ireland / Four Courts Press, €30.00 / £24.95)

This is an important book, but of the kind that will be important to read not as a narrative, but to use for research and reference.

Essentially it is a reprint of the Roll of Honour of the National University of Ireland issued after the Great War (as it was then called, but which now, in agonised hindsight of a hundred years we have to call World War I).  It records the names of all those associated with the NUI, and some other institutions, who served in the war.

However, this is filled out with explorative and detailed essays, on women, doctors and Catholic chaplains; the professionals of the war, rather than the amateurs, the ordinary rankers; those who survived rather than those who died, to a large extent.

O’Flaherty

Approaching this large book, I thought that I might find a way in by looking to see what it recorded about the novelist Liam O’Flaherty. And here he is in the role of honour as “William O’Flaherty”  on page 51, noting his college entry in 1913, and that he had been wounded.

Having written an illustrated biography of O’Flaherty  I was well aware that he had been wounded in the head by shrapnel at the battle of Langemarck in August 1917. This left him with a visible scar on his forehead, which can be seen only in a few photos of his later life.

But the incident left him marked for the rest of his life; some of his odd behaviour as an eminent writer can be put down to him being, as so many millions of Europeans were, damaged mentally, as well as physically, by the war.

He had been a clerical student training to be a Holy Ghost Father, and was studying philosophy”

The effect of the war was recorded by the English historian Guy Chapman in a huge anthology Vain Glory (1937), with pieces from writers in the many nations involved in the war: it is evidence of just how damaged a whole generation was, the generation who came in some places to support Hitler seeing him as a man of peace. It seems to be a book unknown to Irish historians.

Using the roll of honour the editors have assembled biographical entries on many of them. There is none on O’Flaherty: he had been a clerical student training to be a Holy Ghost Father, and was studying philosophy at UCD: he was far from being merely a “man of Aran”, and was more widely read than he often revealed in later days.

Waller

But this is only one small instance of how nearly everyone of those listed in this book has a story of their own, which it would have been impossible for the editors to have uncovered. But others, using their work, will now be able to do so.

Certainly reading through both the lists of names and entries one learns many surprising things about people one knows of.  Often surprising things. One that struck me was that for James Harness Waller. He served in Royal Engineers in the Gallipoli and Mesopotamian theatres.

On a Catholic note: the cover show that remarkable painting by Fortunino Matania”

He was the inspired inventor of an arch-based building system, the patent for which he later sold to Seagrams, for a lifetime pension. His firm, Delap and Waller, still exists,  and I often heard mention of it by my father, who was a consulting engineer in the 1950s.

Anyone at all interested in Ireland’s role in the Great War as it really was, rather than how it seemed in the view of extreme nationalists, will find this an immensely valuable book.

On a Catholic note: the cover show that remarkable painting by Fortunino Matania, The Last General Absolution of the Munsters at Rue du Bois (1916), showing a mounted Fr Francis Gleason with his hand raised in blessing over the troops before their advance on 8 May 1915 at Aubers Ridge.

Chaplains

The role of the chaplains is described in a specific essay by Barbara McCormack of the RIA. These men were well regarded by the rankers as they saw it as their duty to be in the front line where the Catholic soldiers were likely to be killed, and so shared the front line horrors of the day with great courage out of a sense of priestly duty.

As I say, this is an excellent, though specialised book, one which has much to reveal about the attitudes that in later decades cast a cloud of silence rather witness over the lives, experiences and deaths of those, who like Thomas Kettle on the Somme in September 1916, one among the all too many who
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the secret scripture of the poor.