The first World War was by far the biggest military conflict in which Irish people were engaged. More than 200,000 Irishmen fought and 35,000 were killed, although memories of the war were suppressed for political reasons afterwards. Those memories are now being recovered with the centenary of the outbreak of the war and the improved relationship between Britain and Ireland.
A new book, Ireland and the First World War (Mercier Press, €30), tells the tumultuous story of those four years through pictures and words. It gathers together hundreds of images from before the war until Armistice Day, by which time the relationship between Britain and nationalist Ireland had changed beyond measure.
Many of the images come from the Imperial War Museum or from the publisher’s own collection, but others are from private collections and individuals.
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One image in particular, spontaneously taken, which was rare in those days because most photographs were posed, was of a tearful mother saying goodbye to her son who is in the Connaught Rangers as he embarks on a train for the Western Front. Her worst fears were justified. He was killed a year afterwards.
Some of the images graphically demonstrate the horrors endured by soldiers at the front. One image shows flies enveloping the body of a dead German soldier; another shows the men knee deep in the slime of the trenches.
Others, however, show that there was also levity amid all the horror and that the war took Irishmen to places they could never have conceived of visiting otherwise. One image shows Irish Catholic chaplains posing in front of the Pyramids in Egypt.
The book is edited by teacher and writer Cormac Ó Comhraí, who is from Furbo in Co Galway. It took several years to gather all the pictures together.
