centenary of the First World War has provided the opportunity to tell new stories, stories other than military engagements or lines of command. War affects civilians and soldiers alike, noncombatants as well as combatants. Continued newspaper coverage of those serving on front lines, houses draped in black crepe, soldiers in uniform in the city, the activity at training camps, recruiting posters, the requisition of horses and mules, food and paper shortages, and the changing face of labour influenced the perceptions of old and young, women and men. The outpouring of art from the war is one consequence of the heightened awareness of wartime conditions.
Much has been written about British art of the First World War, particularly about the official war artists who where employed through the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House in London to record their impressions of the front lines.17 These artists included well-known names, such as William Orpen, Christopher Wynne Nevinson, Paul Nash, Eric Kennington, and Muirhead Bone. Their works were featured in exhibitions in London and published in a full-colour series titled British Artists at the Front. The paintings of Nevinson, Nash, Kennington, and Orpen eventually came to record their profound disillusion with the horrors of the war, in keeping with the works of the poets published after 1916. Among their public statements and private sentiments, Nash’s comment stands out: ‘I am no longer an artist. I am an artist who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.’18
Orpen, born in Dublin, an instructor at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and Harry Clarke’s teacher, became an official war artist for the War Propaganda Bureau in 1917. The Irish painter John Lavery was recruited by the War Office to paint the home front. While recent reappraisals of what constitutes war art have broadened the canon to include the Belfast painter William Conor19 and Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler,20 Harry Clarke’s illustrations are notably absent from scholarship on art and war. This may be because Clarke’s border art for Ireland’s Memorial Records was neither heroic nor horrific. Clarke’s art reveals a distinctive vision, a purposiveness mingled with the macabre. Illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period were often irreverent, demonstrating the artist’s wit and point of view.21 Clarke borrows from this tradition, encoding the border designs for Ireland’s Memorial Records with visual puns, commentary on the text, parodies, and riddles. They enter a realm of the fantastic in which imagination merges with documentary evidence and symbolism to produce something so unique that it defies easy classification.
FIGURE 1.3
‘We are Making a New World’ (1918) by Paul Nash. ©Imperial War Museum Art.IWM ART 001146.
Recruiting in Ireland
The complex status and Irish identity of the Irish soldiers memorialized in Ireland’s Memorial Records is related to questions of why the men enlisted. The horrible conditions of the Dublin slums in the early twentieth century give credence to suggestions that Irish soldiers who served with British regiments in the First World War were essentially conscripted by poverty, having no other choice than to enlist and take ‘the King’s shilling’. At the time, it was the Labour Party leader James Connolly who advanced the idea that the working class had been sacrificed by the war,22 and this attitude was promoted by his contemporary, Dublin resident and pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, who believed the enemy was not Germany, but ‘English militarism – Kitchenerism’.23 More recently, Terence Denman has asserted that ‘the urban poor, labourers and the unemployed, disproportionately formed the mass of Irish recruits in the south’.24
In 1914, unemployment was close to 20 per cent in Dublin, and a lack of manufacturing meant that most of the workforce was unskilled. Close to one quarter of the Dublin-city population occupied tenements that were ripe with overcrowding, disease, and poor sanitation. The transport workers’ strike from 26 August 1913 to January 1914 resulted in 20,000 employees losing their wages and the declaration of war in August 1914 led to a rise in prices for coal, meat, milk, and bread.25 Thomas Dooley points to these basic needs as a factor in enlistment, but adds that military service also ‘meant a job which offered escape from drudgery. It promised excitement, the potential for advancement and a future’.26
Catriona Pennell’s important study of enlistment in Ireland demonstrates that enlistment figures were consistent with those of England. In addition to the regular armies, Patrick Callan cites a figure of 140,460 men enlisting during the war’s duration.27 Over 20,000 Irishmen enlisted by 15 September 1914, predominantly from industrial areas of the island. Yet, as Terence Denman notes, the ‘class known in Ireland as “farmer’s sons” were largely disinclined to join up’ because they were needed at home.28
FIGURE 1.4
‘Your first duty is to take your part in ending the war’, Mr J. E. Redmond, M. P., at Waterford, 23 August 1915. Central Council for the Organization of Recruiting in Ireland. Image Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, WAR/1914–1918.
Pennell is careful to avoid any overwhelming motivation assigned to those soldiers who enlisted, yet she does point out that genuine belief in the rightness of the war was a motivating factor for many young men to enlist in the British forces.29 This sense that the war was a just war, ‘in defense of right, of freedom, and religion’, was encouraged by Sir John Redmond, the nationalist MP for County Waterford.30 On 27 August 1914 Redmond announced to Parliament that the Irish would fully support the war: ‘I am glad and proud to be able to think that at this moment there are many gallant Irishmen willing to take their share of the risks and to shed their blood and to face death in the assistance of the Belgian people in the defense of their liberty and their independence.’31 A month later, on 20 September 1914, upon passing through Woodenbridge, County Wicklow and seeing a parade of the Irish Volunteers, Redmond reiterated his support for the war, drawing on the stereotype of the fighting Irish to encourage enlistment:
it would be a disgrace for ever to our country and a reproach to her manhood and a denial of the lessons of her history if young Ireland confined their efforts to remaining at home to defend the shores of Ireland from an unlikely invasion, and to shrinking from the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry and courage which has distinguished our race all through its history.32
While the majority of the Irish people hoped that war would be avoided, once war was declared, many believed it was necessary and relief organizations mobilized to support the war by fund-raising, sending food, and making clothes and bandages.33 Pennell writes,
As in Britain, Irish individuals, regardless of political affiliation, volunteered for a variety of reasons. For some it was a combination of an opportunity for adventure and/or a sense of duty. Many identified with Ireland’s ideological support of the war. … Support for Belgium was a significant motivating factor. … As has been explored elsewhere, a strong tradition existed of Irishmen enlisting in the British army, both before and after the First World War. Some men were simply following a family tradition of soldiering, entering into a respectable career. … The readiness of individuals to join the colours was largely determined by the attitudes and behavior of comrades – kinsmen, neighbours,
