Opinion

Tom Collins: Where have all the Irish soldiers gone?

Tom Collins

Tom Collins

Tom Collins is an Irish News columnist and former editor of the newspaper.

The Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, who was killed near Ypres on July 31 1917
The Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, who was killed near Ypres on July 31 1917 The Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, who was killed near Ypres on July 31 1917

His body – or what remained of it - was identified by a book of poems in his pocket.

Francis Ledwidge, the poet of the blackbirds, was in a group of Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers building a road when he was killed by a German shell in July 1917, the first day of the third battle of Ypres.

Mercifully he died instantly. The Catholic chaplain’s diary entry was terse. “Ledwidge killed. Blown to bits; at Confession yesterday and Mass and Holy Communion this morning. RIP.”

He was one of the “lions led by donkeys”, a victim of Kitchener’s folly which saw 250,000 men dead and wounded in a 100-day battle.

The slaughter was the price for an allied advance of just five miles. It was a horrendous cost.

Ledwidge was an unlikely British recruit. He was a socialist and member of the Irish Volunteers. He was a close friend of the patriot poet Thomas MacDonagh who was executed after the Easter Rising. Ledwidge’s lament for MacDonagh opens with one of the most chilling sentences in Irish poetry: “He shall not hear the bittern cry/In the wild sky, where he is lain,/Nor voices of the sweeter birds/Above the wailing of the rain.”

Seamus Heaney wrote an elegy for Ledwidge, and regarded him as one of the greats of Irish poetry.

Although he died in the uniform of a British soldier, Ledwidge was an Irishman through and through. He believed he was fighting for Ireland’s freedom, and volunteered in spite of the entreaties of Lord Dunsany, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat who was his mentor.

Ledwidge was but one of tens of thousands of Irishmen who gave their lives in the so-called Great War and in World War Two.

Their sacrifice was largely unacknowledged by the Empire which recruited them to its service, while back home they became an inconvenience to a nation emerging from Britain’s shackles.

It is only in recent years that the Irish state has dared remember them. But there are many deeply uncomfortable still about remembrance, and who see in the poppy not the blood of the fallen, but the blood of the victims of Britain’s military machine.

In this part of Ireland, remembrance is one of the many things that have been politicised, with the wearing of a poppy seen by many as a symbol of identity rather than a mark of respect for the young boys and men shipped out to the killing fields of France, never to return.

Nationalist civic leaders – north and south of the border – have begun to challenge that taboo, not least among them Mary McAleese who became Ireland’s eighth president twenty-five years ago today: Armistice Day.

In her inauguration address she spoke of those “who died so tragically and heroically in two world wars”.

She said: “I think of nationalist and unionist, who fought and died together in those wars, the differences which separated them at home, fading into insignificance as the bond of their common humanity forged friendships as intense as love can make them.”

She went on to quote Gordon Wilson, the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing victim who became a peacemaker. And it is the figure of Wilson that I think of first when Remembrance Day comes round.

I remember vividly the images of the bombing, the shock at the loss of life, and my feeling of shame that I was not wearing a poppy that fateful day.

I know enough of history to recognise that the Irishmen who fought in those two world wars, were fighting for values as important today as they were then. The kaiser and Hitler were on the wrong side of right; as is Putin.

This Armistice Day, war is being fought again in Europe. And as the bombs rain down we do well to remember those willing to sacrifice their lives that others might live free from tyranny.

We should remember too that beneath the uniform is a fellow human being with the same hopes and fears as each of us, and the same beating heart.

In the act of remembering the dead, we must not glorify war but see their deaths as a spur to do better for our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, and our fellow human beings – whatever their nationalities or beliefs.

And we should remember Ledwidge’s words from 1916: “And here where that sweet poet sleeps/I hear the songs he left unsung”. Please, no more silenced poets.

May he and they rest in peace.