Nor law nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A Lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds
SO wrote W. B. Yeats of the death of Robert Gregory, and the lonely-impulse motif is the popularly accepted one for Robert Gregory's reasoning for joining the Royal Flying Corps during the Great War.
Yet Yeats himself torpedoed this explanation in a poem which has curiously resisted subsequent publication, either because Yeats himself initially suppressed it, or because it suggests a motivation wholly unpoetic and distressingly unKiltartan - that Robert Gregory went to war because he thought it right to, and he fought with unmitigated ruthlessness and joy.
There is a third line of reasoning which might explain why Robert hastened off to fight the beastly Hun - that he simply could not bear the endless presence of Yeats himself at Coole.
Poet Throttling
Until reading Roy Foster's quite marvellous first volume of the biography of Yeats, I had assumed that Lady Gregory owned the big house, where WB was perpetually welcome. Not so - according to Roy, Robert owned Coole, and he and his wife Margaret bitterly resented WB's endless visitations, especially as the poet always ensconced himself in the master bedroom, where he no doubt talked to ghosts.
Having an unwanted guest in your house is bad enough; having one who takes over your bedroom and writes poems justifies poet-throttling; and as for one who communes with the dead, what can a fellow do but join up?
Yeats, of course, was perhaps immune to the self-doubt which would have enabled him to have understood this simple truth. And when he wrote his unpublished poem after the war - one which referred to Robert's success as a fighter ace, having shot down 19 German planes - he then speculated on what Robert might have thought on the cause he had served and for which he died.
Half drunk or whole-mad soldiery are murdering your tenants there.
Men that revere your father yet Are shot at on the open plain.
There is a certain amount of poesy here, for firstly we learn from Roy that Robert had been ardently anti-Sinn Fein, though no doubt not so ardently as to wish to see his tenants murdered. But the murders which would have enraged Robert quite as much as those of the locals was the slaughter by the IRA of army officer guests of his widow Margaret; and as for "men that revere your father yet", we might well wonder.
Robert's father was possibly Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who had an affair with Lady Gregory, or according to one of Roy's foot notes (always a goldmine in a Foster book) it could have been a local blacksmith, Seanin Farrell, whom Robert resembled in his striking smallness and who was then despatched off to America, seed having been sown; but it was most unlikely to have been Sir William.
Did Yeats know this? Or was he too busy talking to spirits, most of whom seem to have lacked real authenticity? According to the Foster account, the only plausible candidate for spiritual authenticity from the beyond was a Thomas Emerson, an RIC officer who had killed himself in 1850. Robert no doubt found such supernatural inquiry quite unbearable.
Bravery Forgotten
After all he was a brilliant horseman, and later, a brilliant pilot who joined 40 squadron, Royal Flying Corps, which was full of Irishmen whose bravery and brilliance have been as effectively forgotten as the name of Robert's father. The best known was the Cork-born Mick Mannock, who was to win a posthumous Victoria Cross, but others have vanished completely. Who were de Burgh, Dolan, Mulholland and George McElroy? Are their families aware today how their forebears played a part in the life of the subject of the greatest poem ever written about an aviator?
George McElroy was one of the bravest Allied pilots of the entire Great War. He won the Military Cross thrice and the Distinguished Flying Cross thrice, and was recommended for all sorts of other awards before being shot down and killed in unknown circumstances in 1918.
He was a Dubliner, educated at Mountjoy School, which is, I dare say, now one of the amalgamated comprehensives where his name is quite forgotten. As, no doubt, is all memory of the 68 boys from the school who were killed in the war; one of whom was a fellow-pupil of McElroy's, a James Emerson, who won a posthumous Victoria Cross.
Emerson, Emerson could that be any relation to Thomas Emerson, the RIC man who topped himself and with whom Yeats was in posthumous communication? It would be grand to say it was, and so stitch the Yeats-Gregory-40 Squadron Mountjoy School connection into one neat and graceful little parcel to delight biographers and the idly curious. But alas, James Emerson's family are certain they are not related to Thomas Emerson.
We forget James Emerson and George McElroy, and Dolan and de Burgh, Dolan and Mulholland; but we remember John MacBride, and no doubt some celebrate his memory. John MacBride typifies the perversity of myth, though it should be said he was a pioneer in a couple of regards.
Distinct Vileness
He served against the British in the Boer War, but I am unable to find anything which suggests he did so with distinction. But he was not totally without that quality; on the contrary, his vileness was distinction itself.
On his honeymoon with Maude Gonne in Gibraltar, when not drunk, he planned to assassinate visiting British royalty, and he was not the last Irish republican to plan murder on the Rock. Both the honeymoon and the murder-plans came to nothing.
Later he sexually molested his 11-year-old stepdaughter Iseult and seduced his wife's teenage half-sister, Eileen, who was later married off to his brother Joseph. These events were hushed up, but we know of them now, thanks to Roy; what other youngsters did he lay his hands on before those hands were finally stilled by a British bullet (not before time) and before the myth of patriot took over?
Those children grew to adulthood in an Ireland which had forgotten the reality of the Gregorys and the Mannocks, the Emersons and the McElroys, but it revered the "memory" of the man who had defiled their infancy and desecrated their innocence.
We might fairly ask what is it about nationalist myth that its selective amnesia can turn scum like John MacBride, known by his contemporaries to be paederastic child-abuser, into a hero? He wasn't the last to get away with child-abuse; not by a long chalk.