Caught in history.

Ireland is just finished celebrating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, a seminal event on the road to the country becoming the republic is today.

But, the thing about history is that the course of it only ever seems obvious in hindsight. Did the Irish realise at the time that the (initially unpopular) rising would have such a effect on the course of the country’s history, and be so fated a century later?

The clear answer is no, and to get an idea why, I’m going to tell the story of three brothers who lived through the whole thing and had very different experiences; Their fates being dictated by little more than the year of their births.

The three brothers are my grand-uncles Frank and Ed, and my grandfather Hubert.

Frank was the eldest in the family, born in 1883. He qualified as a vet and joined the British Army’s veterinary corps (AVC). At the time, the British Army was driven by horses, so vets were in high demand.

Frank was a career soldier and served throughout the first World War, rose to the rank of Lieutenant and stayed in the army after that conflict ended to serve in the Waziristan campaign in India.

Hubert, my grandfather, was the youngest, born in 1893. He was refused entry to the British Army due to shortsightedness and so instead studied and qualified as a medical doctor. But more about him later.

The person I want to concentrate on is granduncle Ed, born in 1888, who managed to squarely fall between two stools of history.

Ed joined the British Army as part of John Redmond’s Irish Volunteers (the history of why Irish volunteers ended up joining the fight with the British Army is worth a read on its own merits). Unfortunately for him, he ended up in France in the first half of 1916.

In April of that year, the rising took place at home and in May the leaders of the rebellion were executed, leading to the start of the turning of public opinion in favour of complete independence from the rest of the U.K.

These developments probably passed my family by as they had become concerned about Ed’s fate. In late July their worst fears were confirmed when this letter from the War Office arrived at the house.

The Battle of the Somme raged on through the summer autumn of 1916 leaving a million men dead and injured, so as time passed and Ed appeared on no prisoner of war list and no word of his fate came to my family, he was given up for dead.

One can only imagine their surprise and delight when this arrived through the door in January 1918:

After 19 months without word, over which the worry that Ed had been killed must have become a certainty, those five words would surely have seemed like a miracle.

Ed’s capture and disappearance probably deserves a post by itself. But the edited version is: Ed went ‘over the top’ in late June 1916 and while crossing no-man’s-land was shot in the leg. He fell into a crater where his day quickly went further downhill as he was almost immediately joined by a hand grenade. He attempted to throw the grenade clear of the hole, but it caught on the lip and exploded caused Ed head injuries.

When the Germans took their turn to cross no-man’s-land, they found Ed and took him back to a field hospital for treatment before he was to be sent to a POW camp. In the hospital the Germans discovered that Ed spoke perfect German and decided that it would be useful to keep him to act as a translator between the doctors and the incoming injured British soldiers. This meant that Ed never made it to a POW camp and thus was never processed, so his capture was never recorded, meaning no information on his fate ever made it home to his family.

Whatever the stresses of Ed’s continental misadventures, the Ireland the shell-shocked soldier arrived home to must have seemed like a foreign country.

When he left for the continent, the political situation was that the country was still focused on Redmond’s Home Rule bill and the republican nationalists were a fringe organisation. When he got home, John Redmond was dying and rebel leader Eamonn DeValera was his local Member of Parliament. By the end of 1918, Sinn Féin, led by DeValera, held 73 of the 105 Irish Westminster seats.

Ed must have realised that he’d picked the wrong side in Irish history. He’d fought in the war for the British to find that even though he’d picked the winning side in the war, he’d picked the losing side for himself. He was living Yeat’s poem:

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Not one to cry into his tea for too long, Ed, whose nationalist tendencies were already clear from his membership of Redmond’s volunteers, decided to join the Irish Republican Army. For whatever reason, the IRA (known as ‘the old IRA’ in Ireland to distinguish them from the IRA of more recent troubled history) decided to appoint him as military police in the organisation.

The War of Independence was fought as a guerrilla campaign between 1919 and 1921 and produced a victory, of sorts. Which put Ed on the winning side in two wars inside ten years, though I suspect, considering the outcomes it is unlikely he would have celebrated either much.

As a footnote, Hubert and Frank are worth another mention for their part in the War of Independence. My grandfather Hubert had set up a successful medical practice in Limerick city. He did not fight in the War of Independence as but he did run a very secure safe house for IRA volunteers.

The British Army barracks in Limerick were no more than a few hundred yards from the safe house he kept, but the army never thought to raid him. The Army knew that his brother Ed had fought in the World War, but more importantly, his brother Frank was still in the British army fighting in India. In short, the family were seen as British Army people.

I guess the British army, like so many, hadn’t seen how quickly history can change.