the slow arrival of its equipment, another consequence of the army’s rapid expansion: 16/Welsh (Cardiff City) received its first eighty working rifles in August 1915, and it was not until October that enough rifles were available for men to fire at their range course at Winchester prior to embarking for France. The divisional artillery had no horses till April that year, and even then its gunners were still drilling on tent poles mounted on wheels.154
But how painfully hard the division tried in its first big battle. On 7 July 1916, in the early stages of the Somme, it was sent in to clear the great slab of Mametz Wood, jutting down from Longueval Ridge and the German second position. It was unutterably confusing fighting in a wood in full summer foliage, and would have tried more experienced troops and staffs. ‘I could not push a way through it,’ wrote Captain Llewelyn Wyn Griffith,
and I had to return to the ride. Years of neglect had turned the Wood into a formidable barrier, a mile deep. Heavy shelling of the Southern end had beaten down some of the young growth, but it had also thrown large branches into a barricade. Equipment, ammunition, rolls of barbed wire, tins of food, gas-helmets and rifles were lying about everywhere. There were more corpses than men, but there were worse sights than corpses. Limbs and mutilated trunks, here and there a detached head, forming splashes of red against the green leaves, and, as in advertisement of the horror of our way of life and death, and of our crucifixion of youth, one tree held in its branches a leg, with its torn flesh hanging down over a spray of leaf …
A message was now on its way to some quiet village in Wales, to a grey farmhouse on the slope of a hill running down to Cardigan Bay, or to a miner’s cottage in a South Wales valley, a word of death …155
His brother Watcyn, a private soldier in the same Royal Welch Fusilier battalion (unthinkable in the old army), was killed. ‘I had not even buried him,’ lamented Griffith as he left this charnel place, ‘nor was his grave ever found.’
At the very end of the fighting in the wood the division’s Welshness was still painfully evident. ‘I crouched with some men to shelter,’ recalled Griffith. ‘We talked in Welsh, for they were Anglesey folk; one was a young boy, and after a thunderous crash in our ears he began to cry out for his mother, in a thin boyish voice, “mam, mam…”156 The division lost over 4,000 men, and was so badly jarred that it was not engaged in another major battle till the first day of Third Ypres, 31 July 1917. It suffered 28,635 casualties in the whole of the war, but somehow Mametz Wood is the right place for its memorial, a proud red dragon glaring out across Happy Valley towards the blank-faced wood and Flat Iron Copse Cemetery full of the division’s dead, with ripped-up barbed wire in its claws.157
It was not easy for all Welshmen to reconcile nationalist politics of the Chapel’s reservations about violence with service in the British army. However, the problems confronting many Irish recruits were even more serious. The long-running issue of Home Rule had not simply divided Ireland but had infected British politics more broadly, and had produced the Curragh ‘mutiny’ of March 1914, when the officers of the Curragh-based 3rd Cavalry Brigade, under Brigadier General Hubert Gough, declared that they would resign their commissions rather than march north to compel Ulster to join a united and independent Ireland. Indeed, so heated were passions on both sides of Ireland’s cultural divide that it has been well argued that the outbreak of war in 1914 actually prevented a civil war in Ireland which seemed inevitable if the British government pressed ahead with Home Rule.
But if the outbreak of a large war did indeed delay a smaller one, it nonetheless faced Irish nationalists with a cruel dilemma. Should they take the view, as some of their ancestors might have done, that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity, or should they support the war in the hope that by doing so they would demonstrate their responsibility and maturity? The nationalist leader John Redmond immediately declared that the war was:
undertaken in defence of the highest principles of religion and morality and right, and it would be a disgrace for ever to our country, and a regret to her manhood, and a denial of the lessons of history, if young Ireland continued her efforts to remain at home to defend the shores of Ireland from military invasion, and shirk from the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry and courage which has distinguished our race across its history.158
Sinn Féin propaganda had declared that an Irishman who joined the British army was ‘a traitor to his country and a felon in his soul’, though this had not stopped 9.1 percent of the regular army of 1914 from being Irish. However, the decision of constitutional nationalists to encourage enlistment sharply divided them from their more extreme brethren, and led to many Irishmen ascending history’s old Calvary, and fighting bravely in the ranks of an army to whose political principles they were firmly opposed.
With the active support of Redmond and his colleagues, Irishmen were enlisted into New Army battalions of Irish regiments. Many professional men who had been officers in the National Volunteers volunteered: indeed, there were so many good potential officers that some were sent off to England to help officer the Tyneside Irish. John Wray, solicitor and son of a nationalist election agent, was given an immediate commission in the Connaught Rangers and brought in 200 of his own volunteers. The 7/Leinsters maintained a cadet company for potential officers, and of the 161 men who had passed through its ranks by December 1915, thirty-five were to be killed in action. Three hundred and fifty rugby players from Dublin, white collar and tie men, paraded at Lansdowne Road rugby ground and then marched through the city to the Curragh, where they joined 7/Royal Dublin Fusiliers, where they became known as ‘Toffs in the Old Toughs’. A full company of Dublin dockers enlisted, and were known as the Larkinites after their union leader James Larkin, no friend of the British government or capitalism. And, as was so often the case that heady summer, there were odd phenomena: six officers and 225 men of the Royal Guernsey Militia, many of them French-speaking, volunteered for 6/Royal Irish, as they had been so impressed by the Royal Irish battalion which had been in garrison on their island. Two divisions were soon formed, 10th (Irish), in 1st New Army, and 16th (Irish), part of the 2nd New Army. Neither was ever wholly Irish, still less wholly nationalist, but there was a solid and unmistakable streak of Irishness running through both formations.
Ulstermen, too, faced a dilemma when war broke out. The Ulster Volunteer Force was 80,000 strong, and many of its units, organised on British military lines, were well armed and well drilled. There were initial doubts about throwing the considerable weight of the UVF behind the British government (against which it might so easily have found itself fighting), but these were soon resolved after discussions between Kitchener and Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader. The formation of what was to become 36th (Ulster) Division began in September 1914, and many of its battalions were firmly based on units of the UVF. Frank Crozier had been forced to leave the army in 1908 after bouncing cheques, which one astute commentator has called ‘a lifelong habit’. In 1914 he was, as he put it, ‘a hired mercenary’ training Carson’s UVF, and was quickly re-commissioned into the British army to be second in command to ‘my Shankhill Road boys’, now transmuted into 9/Royal Irish Rifles. Before the transition was complete he watched a regular battalion of the Norfolks leave for France, seen off by a guard of honour of the UVF’s West Belfast Regiment. ‘Five months previously,’ mused Crozier, ‘these very men of the Norfolks had quitted Belfast for Holyrood, owing to the menace in their midst of the very men who were doing them honour now, and from whom they evidently felt disposed to accept the compliment.’159
The iconography of 36th Division made its origins clear. The divisional sign was the Red Hand of Ulster; some units wore badges which harked back to their UVF origins, and when the division took immortality by storm on 1 July 1916 (the anniversary, in New Style, of the Battle of the Boyne),
