Opinion

Patrick Murphy: World War One was not some legitimate, romantic adventure

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Images of soldiers and civilians who died in the First World War will be stencilled on beaches across Ireland and Britain as part of First World War commemorations
Images of soldiers and civilians who died in the First World War will be stencilled on beaches across Ireland and Britain as part of First World War commemorations Images of soldiers and civilians who died in the First World War will be stencilled on beaches across Ireland and Britain as part of First World War commemorations

For the second time in a hundred years, Ireland has fallen in love with World War I.

First time around, in 1914, it was generally agreed that killing Germans would be good for Ireland. So, over 200,000 unionists and nationalists joined up and some 35,000 never came back.

They killed so many Germans that "we" won the war, which produced a stronger British Empire, a partitioned Ireland and some decent poetry. For years we never spoke about it, because victorious soldiers, often crippled and maimed, returned home to poverty, poor housing and, in many cases, starvation. (German soldiers suffered the same fate, but British poverty was more patriotically superior to anything the Germans could produce.)

It was all a bit embarrassing to die for deprivation. For nationalists, it was additionally awkward to discover that some British comrades had taken time off from the war to shoot the leaders of the 1916 Rising. Later, another 10,000 of those same comrades came here as Black and Tans and terrorised the country, leading many Irish to believe that they had spent four years in the trenches shooting at the wrong army.

But today World War I (WWI) is back in fashion, as part of that cyclical nature of Irish history, which for 800 years has tumbled us through contrasting eras of anti-British violence, meek Irish nationalism and, during WWI, pro-British violence.

Today, unionists and nationalists use softly spoken ambiguity to "commemorate" the war, "honour" the dead and "pay tribute to" the fallen. It is as if the war was a noble and altruistic venture, best served with pride and a plate of over-done patriotism on the side.

The sad truth is that those who fought and died for Britain were victims of a giant confidence trick. (That can be said of many armies and most wars, including our own recent political violence - although fighting against fascism in World War II was an exception.)

WWI was essentially an argument between two imperial powers. It was all a rather jolly family affair. England's King George V, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II and Russia's Tsar Nicholas II were all cousins. It is said that if their grandmother, Queen Victoria, had been alive, she would never have allowed the war to happen.

On the battlefield things were not so jolly. Having spent years using rifles against those armed only with spears, British generals were in denial about German machine guns.

The war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, described a soldier hit by a bullet, which left him "to grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked/And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,/Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans../Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,/Bleeding to death."

So it might be more appropriate to remember the dead of WWI as victims, killed as much by their own leaders' stupidity and arrogance as the Germans. (I knew of one officer who, after each sortie over the top, was ordered to go along the trenches and use his revolver to shoot in the head those who had not gone.)

To remember the dead as victims, we must distance the war from thinly disguised hints of dying for freedom. That would be the same British freedom which, twenty years earlier, had caused 29 million Indians to die from famine (as well as the million starved to death in Ireland 50 years before that.) This was the freedom which killed 30,000 Boer in the world's first concentration camps between 1899 and 1902.

In urging the Irish to fight for Britain, nationalist leader John Redmond said that the war was in defence of the highest principles of religion, morality and right. (Perhaps he had never heard of India - or Ireland.)

You could argue that many who fought were uneducated and thus politically unaware of the war's real purpose. In that sense, most died of ignorance and are to be mourned for. The same cannot be said today of those who depict the war as a noble ideal.

So let us weep for those who were fooled into dying. Let us weep too for the futility of war (and we should know about that) and above all, let us weep for the propagation of ignorance, which contends that WWI was some form of legitimate, romantic adventure.

It was murder on a grand scale, which created a legacy of British colonial wars across the globe to the present day. Recognising that lesson might be a more appropriate way to remember the dead of World War I. It would also teach the living not to romanticise the mistakes of an imperial past.