Chapter VI: The Raising of the Irish Brigades (3)

"It is a fact, which has its origin in history, and which I need
not refer to more closely--it is a fact that in the past recruiting
for the British Army was not popular with the mass of the Irish
people. But when the war broke out, my colleagues and I, quite
regardless, let me say, of the political risks which stared us in
the face, instantly made an appeal to those whom we represented in
Ireland, and told them that this was Ireland's war as well as
England's war, that it was a just war, and that the recent attitude
of Great Britain to Ireland had thrown upon us a great, grave duty
of honour to the British Empire. We then went back from this
country, and we went all through Ireland. I myself, within the
space of about a month after that, made speeches at great public
meetings in every one of the four provinces of Ireland. We set
ourselves to the task of creating in Ireland--creating, mind
you--an atmosphere favourable to recruiting, and of creating a
sentiment in Ireland favourable to recruiting. I say most solemnly,
that in that task we were absolutely entitled to the sympathy and
the assistance of the Government and the War Office. I am sorry to
say we got neither."

He disclaimed all imputation upon the Prime Minister or the Under-Secretary, Mr. Tennant--exceptions which pointed the reference to Lord Kitchener.

"The fact remains that when we were faced with that difficult and
formidable task, practically every suggestion that we made, based
on the strength of our own knowledge of what was suitable for
Ireland and the conditions there, was put upon one side. The
gentlemen who were responsible for that evidently believed that
they knew what was suited to the necessities of Ireland far better
than we did. A score of times, at least, I put upon paper and sent
to the Government and the War Office my suggestions and my
remonstrances, but all in vain. Often, almost in despair, I was
tempted to rise in this House and publicly tell the House of
Commons the way in which we were hampered and thwarted in our work
in Ireland. I refrained from doing so from fear of doing mischief
and from fear of doing harm. To-day I am very glad that I so
refrained, because in spite of these discouragements, in spite of
this thwarting and embarrassing, and in spite of the utterly faulty
and ridiculous system of recruiting that was set on foot, we have
succeeded, and have raised in Ireland a body of men whose numbers
Lord Kitchener, in his letter to the Irish conference, declared
were magnificent."

He quoted the Unionist _Birmingham Post_ for the saying that what had happened in Ireland was "a miracle." From the National Volunteers 27,054 men had joined the colours; from the Ulster Volunteers 27,412. In both forces there must be many left who could not leave Ireland, yet might be utilized in Ireland.

"It may be remembered that the very day the war broke out I rose in
my place in this House and offered the Volunteers to the Government
for Home Defence. I only spoke, of course, of the National
Volunteers. I was not entitled to speak for the Ulster Volunteers,
but I suggested that they and we might work shoulder to shoulder.
From that day to this the War Office have persistently refused to
have anything to say to these Volunteers. The Prime Minister, a few
days after I spoke, in answer to a question told me that the
Government were considering at that moment how best to utilize
these Volunteers. They have never been utilized since. A few days
after I made my speech I went myself to the War Office, and as a
result of my interviews there I submitted to the Government a
scheme which would have provided them at once with 25,000 men. If
that offer had been accepted, not 25,000, not 50,000, but 100,000
men would have been enlisted for Home Defence within the month. But
no, it was obstinately refused. I hear that an hon. member below me
is now apparently inclined to take the point that the War Office
took. The War Office said that would interfere with recruiting in
Ireland. Of course, we know Ireland better than the hon. member. We
know our difficulties in Ireland. We do not believe that it would.
On the contrary, we believe that it would have promoted recruiting.
We believe that the enlistment of these men, their association in
barracks and in camp, with the inevitable creation and fostering of
a military spirit, would have led to a large number of volunteers
for foreign service. Our views counted for nought. In this instance
they were not only our views. These views had the approval of the
Irish Command, and from the purely military point of view the Irish
Command was in favour of some such scheme as I had outlined, and
the reason was plain. They have to provide, and are providing to
this day, 20,000 to 25,000 men from the Regular Army for the
defence of the coasts of Ireland--guarding the coast, guarding
piers, railways, bridges, and so forth. If these men of ours had
been taken up, within two or three months of training and in camp
they would have been able to do this work, and would have done it
ever since, and would thereby have released from 20,000 to 25,000
men. That is the chief reason, I fancy, why the Military Command in
Ireland were in favour of this idea. But to this moment the refusal
continues. I see that an unofficial Bill was introduced by the
Marquess of Lincolnshire into the House of Lords doing, to a great
measure, for England and Wales what we have been asking should be
done for Ireland. I claim that that Bill shall be extended to
Ireland."

The Volunteer Bill came to the House of Commons in a form making it applicable to Ireland. There it was opposed by Sir Edward Carson, who demanded that no man of military age should be accepted as a volunteer unless he consented to enlist for general service if called. This killed the Bill.

Sir Edward Carson was of opinion that the necessities of the case demanded universal compulsory service; and conscription was already in sight. With that prospect Redmond's anxiety became very grave.

On November 15th he wrote his mind to the Prime Minister:

HOUSE OF COMMONS,

_November_ 15, 1915.

_Private_.

MY DEAR MR. ASQUITH,

I have been in a state of great anxiety for some time on the
question of a possible Conscription Bill, and I have discussed the
matter fully with Mr. Birrell, who knows my views, and who, no
doubt, has communicated them to you.

I think it well, however, to shortly put, in writing, our position.

In your Dublin speech you asked the Irish people for "a free
offering from a free people," and the response has been, taking
everything into account, in the words of Lord Kitchener,
"magnificent."

Recruiting is now going on at a greater rate than ever in Ireland,
and it would be a terrible misfortune if we were driven into a
position on the question of conscription which would alienate that
public opinion which we have now got upon our side in Ireland.

The position would, indeed, be a cruel one, if conscription were
enacted for England, and Ireland excluded.

On the other hand, I must tell you that the enforcement of
conscription in Ireland is an impossibility.

Faced with this dilemma, if a Conscription Bill be introduced, the
Irish party will be forced to oppose it as vigorously as possible
at every stage.

I regret having to write you in this way, but it is only right that
I should be quite frank in the matter.

Very truly yours,

J.E. REDMOND.

RT. HON. H.H. Asquith, M.P., _Prime Minister_,

Assurances reached him that the first tentative Bill for compelling unmarried men to enlist would only be introduced to fulfil a pledge given by Mr. Asquith in connection with the Derby Scheme, and that as the Derby Scheme had not applied to Ireland, the pledge also had no bearing there. By December 21st the matter was raised in the House of Commons. Redmond, after the Prime Minister had spoken, defined what he was careful to call "my personal view" on the question of compulsory service.

"I am content to take the phrase used by the Prime Minister. I am prepared to say that I will stick at nothing--nothing which is necessary, nothing which is calculated to effect the purpose--in order to end this war." He added: "That is the view, I am certain, of the people of Ireland."

The whole question was presented by him as "one of expediency and necessity, not of principle." From that standpoint he declared himself unconvinced that the adoption of compulsion in any shape was either expedient or necessary. It was inexpedient because it would "break up the unity of the country"--unnecessary because they had already many more men than they could either train or equip. In Ireland, a limited task had been defined, to keep up the necessary reserves for fifty-three battalions of infantry, and he pointed to the fact that so far the new organization of recruiting was producing the stipulated flow.

On these grounds, he said, the Irish party would oppose the measure, and on January 5th that opposition was offered, though Ireland was excluded from the Bill. But the first division showed a majority of more than ten to one for the proposal; and in face of that, when the House returned to the discussion, Redmond declared that Irish opposition must cease--especially in view of the support given by the responsible leaders of Labour. Sir Edward Carson, following, pressed him to go one step farther and accept the inclusion of Ireland in the Bill. Nothing, he said, could do so much to conciliate Ulster. This was the first time that any suggestion of this possibility had come from that quarter, and it came in backing a suggestion which Redmond could not accept. I was not present at the debate, and it is hard to judge of such matters from the printed record, but the impression on my mind is that the suggestion was made without any desire to embarrass. A few days later, in the Committee stage, an Ulster member moved an amendment which would have included Ireland. Mr. Bonar Law, speaking for the Government, advised against it--on the ground of expediency; it would not be an easy thing to put this measure into operation in Ireland. Sir Edward Carson spoke later and counselled the dropping of the amendment. With matters in this stage Redmond spoke very fully to the House, recognizing the absence of all partisan tone in the speeches of Ulster members. He had long felt, he said, that "if conscription came, Ireland's whole attitude towards the war was likely to suffer cruel and unjust misrepresentation," because it must emphasize a difference between the two countries. Conscription in Ireland would be "impracticable, unworkable and impossible." Instead of leading to the increase in the supply of men it would have the opposite effect.

"It would most undoubtedly paralyse the efforts of myself and others who have worked unsparingly--and not unsuccessfully--since the commencement of the war, and would play right into the hands of those who are a contemptible minority among the Nationalists of Ireland, and who are trying--unsuccessfully trying--to prevent recruiting and to undermine thus the position and power of the Irish party because of the attitude we have taken up."

He complained once more of the Government's failure to utilize the Volunteers and of the damping effect which had resulted from the non-fulfilment of Mr. Asquith's words. Yet Ireland was doing all that was asked of it--maintaining the reserves of Irishmen for Irish regiments at the front.--This was true at the moment; but the Sixteenth Division had scarcely yet begun to come into the line and the Ulster Division, during its first few months, suffered slight casualties. In point of fact, however, the bare rumour of conscription had checked recruiting, and Redmond was guarded in his terms. It was, he said, "on the whole very satisfactory, and in the towns amazing"; but he admitted that the country districts had not given an adequate response.

But he made now an appeal to the House as a whole to lift the consideration of this whole matter on to broad lines, to view it on the plane of statesmanship. If five years earlier anyone had foretold that in a great war Ireland would send 95,000 volunteer new recruits to fight by the side of England, would he not have been regarded as a lunatic? "The change in Ireland has been so rapid that men are apt to forget its history." That was a true saying; his own success had created difficulties for him. Once more he quoted the example of the other statesman in the Empire whose position had most analogy with his own. "I honestly believe," he said, "that General Botha's difficulties were small compared with those we had to confront in Ireland.... It is true to say at this moment that the overwhelming sentiment of the Irish people is with the Empire for the first time."

That was his claim, and in that month of January 1916 he was fully entitled to make it; and the House, I think, recognized his justification. His speech has in it the ring of confidence, of assurance that he would be taken at his word.

"Rest satisfied," he said; "do not try to drive Ireland." Wise words, and they were not unwisely listened to. There was no room for doubting this man's earnestness when he went on to tell how he himself had recently met Irish troops in the field, and had then pledged himself to them to spare no effort in raising the necessary reserves for their ranks among their own countrymen. "Trust us," he said to the House, indicating himself and his colleagues, "trust us to know, after all, the best methods. Do not carp at Irish effort, and do not belittle Irish effort." Then they might count on loyal and enduring support till the great struggle was ended.

That speech, as I read it, marks the highwater-line of Redmond's achievement. His statesmanship in the counsels of the Empire had prevailed for his own country. The Home Rule Act was on the Statute Book, and though not in legal operation it was present in all minds; and now on a supreme issue--the blood-tax--Ireland's right to be treated as self-governing was recognized in fact. The argument which underlay implicitly Redmond's whole contention was never set out; it was contentious, politically, and he wisely avoided it. He spoke for a nation to which autonomy had been accorded by statute; he preferred men to feel for themselves rather than be asked to admit that no self-governing nation will submit voluntarily to the imposition of the blood-tax without its own most formal consent. All that he said was, in effect: You have Ireland with you for the first time, by our assistance; do not destroy our power to continue that assistance, do not alienate Ireland. In the counsels of the Empire his argument prevailed; and during the early months of 1916 the relations between Great Britain and Ireland were better and happier than at any time of which history holds record. An utterance from one Irishman, and the general response to it, showed this in extraordinary degree.

Our Division, or rather two brigades of it, had detrained in France on the 19th of December; the first impression as we shook ourselves together for the march to strange billets was the sound of guns. Scattered about in different villages lying round Bethune, our battalions passed the next two months in the usual training before we should take up our own sector of the line, and we saw little or nothing of each other. March found us engaged, though still only attached by companies to more seasoned troops, in some rough crater-fighting on the ugly mine-riddled stretch between Loos and Hulluch. It was when we were marching out from broken houses about the minehead at Annequin that we first met again our old stable companions, the Royal Irish--and that I first saw Willie Redmond in France at the head of his company.

He was on foot as always, for he never could be persuaded to ride while the men were marching, and I never saw more geniality of greeting on any countenance than was on his when he came up with outstretched hand to where I was sitting by the roadside--for we had halted to see them go by. Here was a man utterly in his element, radiant literally in the enthusiasm of his devotion. He refused to listen to our talk of the bad time we had been through in the place where they were to succeed us (and in two winters of that war I never saw worse); all his talk was of the good time which we should have in the billets we were going to, which they had just left. Back there, in and about Allouagne, they rejoined us; and I remember dining with him in his company mess and hearing his eulogies of the splendid fellows that his company officers were. Then, about the time we moved up into trenches, our first leaves began and he got home in March. Naturally, he looked in at the House of Commons, and realized for the first time how uneasy well-informed persons in the lobbies were about the chances of the war. Everybody who ever came home from the front must have experienced the effect of that strange transition from unquestioning confidence to worried anxiety; but Willie Redmond was the only man who ever adequately gave expression to it.

It was on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, and the Army Estimates were under discussion in a very thin House--a wrangling, fault-finding debate. In the middle of it Willie Redmond got up, and said that as he was not likely to be there again, he had one or two things to say which he thought the House would be glad to know. Speaking as one of the oldest members, who had all but completed his thirty-third year in Parliament, he told them that every soul in the House should be proud of the troops--not of the Irish troops, but of the troops generally--because more than anything else of the splendid spirit in which they were going through the privations and dangers,--which he described with passion. If he were to deliver a message from the troops, he knew well what it would be:

"Send us out the reinforcements which are necessary, and which are
naturally necessary. Send us out, as we admit you have been doing
up to this, the necessary supplies, and when you do that, have
trust in the men who are in the gap to conduct the war to the
victory which everyone at the front is confident is bound to come.
'And when victory does come,' the message would run on, 'you in the
House of Commons, in the country, and in every newspaper in the
country, can spend the rest of your lives in discussing as to
whether the victory has been won on proper lines or whether it has
not.' Nothing in the world can depress the spirits of the men that
I have seen at the front. I do not believe that there was ever
enough Germans born into this world to depress them. If it were
possible to depress them at all, it can only be done by pursuing a
course of embittered controversy in this country--as to which was
the right way or the wrong way of conducting affairs at the front.
When a man feels that his feet are freezing, when he is standing in
heavy rain for a whole night with no shelter, and when next morning
he tries to cook a piece of scanty food over the scanty flame of a
brazier in the mud, he perhaps sits down for a few minutes in the
day's dawn and takes up an old newspaper, and finds speeches and
leading articles from time to time which tell him that apparently
everything is going wrong, that the Ministers who are at the head
of affairs in this country, upon whom he is depending, are not
really men with their hearts in the work, but are really more or
less callous and calculating mercenaries, who are not directing
affairs in the best way, but are simply anxious to maintain their
own salaries. I say that when speeches and articles of that kind
are found in the newspapers they are calculated, if anything is or
can be so calculated, to depress the men who are at the front."

Then came a few words in praise of the Irish troops and in deprecation of the failure to recognize some of their services; a confident assurance that, "whether they are remembered or not," the Sixteenth Division would do their duty, with an equal assurance that the Ulster men would do as well as they--and he reached to his conclusion:

"Since I went out there I found that the common salutation in all
circumstances is one of cheer. If things go pretty well and the men
are fairly comfortable, they say 'Cheer O!' If things go badly, and
the snow falls and the rain comes through the roof of a billet in
an impossible sort of cow-house, they say 'Cheer O!' still more.
All we want out there is that you shall adopt the same tone and say
'Cheer O!' to us."

It is not too much to say that this speech was received with a cry of gratitude all over the country and throughout the Army. It said what badly needed to be said, and said it with a freshness and a dash that came superbly from a company commander in his fifty-fourth year. It was the best service that had yet been rendered to John Redmond's policy. Everybody quite naturally and simply accepted the Nationalist Irishman as the spokesman for all the troops who were actually in the line. Mr. Walter Long, always a generous and candid human being, was quick to give voice to this feeling:

"The honourable and gallant member for East Clare has been in
conflict, not only with one particular political party, but during
the greater part of his career with every party in turn, and has
engaged in bitter controversy with them. Does anybody doubt the
fact that when war was declared one great factor in the mind of the
Emperor responsible for this war was that dissension would paralyse
the hands of Great Britain? Ireland, whatever may have been our
differences in the past, and whatever may be our differences in
happier days again when we are at peace, everybody must feel by the
action of her representatives, who have fought so bitterly in this
House and in the country, has created a new claim for herself upon
the affection, the gratitude, the respect of the people of the
Empire by the great and proud part that she has played in this
great struggle."

That was the position to which Redmond's policy, backed by the Irishmen who supported it with their lives, of whom his brother was the outstanding representative, had brought this great issue. The next thing which brought the name of Ireland prominently before the world was the story of action taken by other Irishmen, also at the risk of their lives, to reverse the strong current which was then carrying us forward with so hopeful augury.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Moore, C.B., an officer who had served with distinction in South Africa, and whose father, George Henry Moore, had been a famous advocate in Parliament of Tenant Right and Repeal.]

[Footnote 6: Rifles were really not available, nor competent instructors. But the essential was recognition. A grant towards equipment should have been given, and possibly other assistance. We secured several thousand rifles in Belgium about this time. For instructors, any old crippled veterans paid by Government would have conveyed the sense of recognition.]