Winter on Grayson, 'Dublin's Great Wars: The First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution'


Richard S. Grayson. Dublin's Great Wars: The First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 484 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-02925-5.

Reviewed by Jay Winter (Yale University)
Published on H-Diplo (March, 2019)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53327

Michel de Certeau observed that to understand the history of a city, you had to observe the trajectories of its inhabitants.[1] This Richard S. Grayson does to great effect, by charting the footsteps of Dubliners into the British army, and into Irish republican forces, both in the fight against British rule and in the civil war that followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. He shows tellingly how some men wound up in both British and Irish military and paramilitary forces, thus providing a powerful, multivocal account of a decade of violence in Ireland beginning in 1914. One of the profiles with which he ends this fine book is that of Michael McCabe, who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and then joined the British army and was wounded in 1918. After the armistice he deserted from the British army and took part in the occupation of the Four Courts. For his troubles, he was imprisoned by the Irish Free State. 

McCabe’s story embodies the central theme of Grayson’s book. The men and women of Dublin were both loyalists and disloyalists and insisting on any one voice or color or motivation would distort the complexity of their lives in the turbulent decade of the Great War and its aftermath. Grayson has developed an important ground-level marker for analyzing military participation of Dubliners, relying on active addresses to mark the population of men living in the city who joined up in 1914 or after. He is thus able to show how closely to each other grieving sets of parents lived on the same street in 1915, after having received the message that their sons were killed during the landings at Gallipoli. He shows too where grief struck the parents of men who died on the Lusitania, or those of Francis Brennan, of the 10th Dublins, killed in the Rising on April 24.

Grayson has found a new way to observe city life at the street level during war, and has thereby provided military historians of the Great War with a new approach to bringing our attention to families and households, where identities are formed in the first place. In the French countryside, it was the sight of the mayor walking down village streets that brought dread to the hearts of people who breathed a sigh of relief when he passed by their door, with a message for their neighbors and not for them. At least not for them that day. Grayson has treated Dublin as a network of villages and thereby has found a way to let us into the domestic realm of grief that war inevitably creates. I wonder if Irish districts of Glasgow or Liverpool or London were marked in the same way; my guess is that they were. In reading this book, I find echoes of Sebastian Barry’s wonderful play, The Stewart of Christendom (1995), in which grief marks the life of a man literally made mad by Ireland’s multifaceted history.

Grayson’s linkage of war and civil war is based on his convincing interpretation of a prior militarization of Irish life, both because of the politics of Home Rule and because of the long-established pathway out of urban (and rural) poverty by enlistment in the British army or navy. This enables him to treat the decade of violence in Ireland from 1914-24 as a unit. 

And yet, in the minds of those who lived through this period, the distinction between the war on the western front and the fight for Irish independence still stands. Thousands of soldiers in the Russian imperial army wound up in the Red Army after 1917, but no one would equate what they did in one uniform with what they did in another. The difference is the ugliness of civil war, unbound by rules that at least superficially (and at times profoundly) separate the violence of soldiers under military discipline from bands of killers whose enemies are at times their own people, not the hated foreigner. 

For families, the difference here was secondary; the primary matter was which family member was no longer alive. But even then, the war after the war over eastern and southern Europe created similar or even more complicated situations. Russian Poles were at the front fighting German Poles until 1918; thereafter in a war of liberation, the same Poles fought and died in a different war, one for their independence. Did it matter in which conflict these men fell? Perhaps; perhaps not. Just as in Ireland, there was (and still is) a hierarchy of wars, some more just and more suitable to commemorate than others. It would be interesting to draw out further Grayson’s approach to these questions by adding a comparative perspective. After all, what does he or she know of Ireland, who only Ireland knows? 

It would be churlish to end a review of an important book on such a dissonant note. This is a book of sensitive scholarship, one based on a deep knowledge of both the military history and the social history of the men who waged it. It measures what can be measured, and never tries to go too far. It is not the full story of Irishmen in the Great War, since so many volunteered in particular in London at the outbreak of the war. But it is the best history we have of Dubliners at war, and, like James Joyce’s “The Dead,” published in 1914, it treats them with the sympathy and compassion they deserve.

Note

[1]. Michel de Certeau, The Politics of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91.

Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History emeritus at Yale. He is author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995) and editor of the Cambridge History of the First World War (2014).

Citation: Jay Winter. Review of Grayson, Richard S., Dublin's Great Wars: The First World War, the Easter Rising and the Irish Revolution. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53327

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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