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ON EASTER MONDAY, 1916, on the steps of the GPO in Dublin’s Sackville Street, the leaders of an insurrection against British rule read out their proclamation of an Irish Republic. The proclamation expressed the belief that Britain had sought to divide unionist and nationalist on the island, in order to rule the Irish people more successfully. It also expressed an aspiration to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’, a sentiment echoed in the colours of the tricolour which flew at the new rebel head quarters. The republican flag was coloured green, white and orange, to express a hope that nationalist and unionist, republican and Orangeman could live at peace with one another in a new and independent Ireland. However, it was not to be. For many unionists, a battle on the banks of a French river, a few months later, was to function as the true mark of separate Protestant identity.

Remember 1916
Philip Orr

A NUMBER OF First World War battles have significance for individual countries. Gallipoli is important both to the Turks and to the Australians who fought there whilst for France, no battle raises such poignant memories as that fought at Verdun in 1915, when the homeland was defended at appalling cost. For the British, the battle of the Somme in 1916 is particularly significant as it was here that they lost a whole generation of volunteer soldiers. For Ulster unionists, the opening days of the Battle of the Somme also hold particular significance.

Prior to the outbreak of European war in 1914, Ireland had been engulfed by the Home Rule Crisis, in which hundreds of thousands of Irish unionists had refused to accept the creation of a local parliament in Dublin, believing that this would lead to the impoverishment and marginalisation of Protestants. As the spearhead of militancy against nationalism in the north east of the island, a paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force had been created, armed with smuggled rifles and determined to fight the forces of the Crown to prevent Home Rule from taking place. When Britain went to war with Germany, the plans for a Home Rule bill were put on hold; the Unionist leadership, meanwhile, felt obliged to offer the UVF as soldiers of the King, in the belief that loyalty would be rewarded by a favourable constitutional outcome when the war ended.

Thousands of fit young recruits were drafted into a unit known as the 36th (Ulster) Division. The men trained at locations such as Clandeboye and Ballykinler in County Down and then marched proudly through Belfast city centre, prior to taking the boat to England where they completed their training. Shortly afterwards, they sailed for France and spent a winter getting used to the trials of trench warfare on the western front. As the summer of 1916 approached, plans were made by the allies for a new offensive in the Somme sector. Lord Kitchener’s volunteer army would dash across no man’s land and break through the German lines, which would have been smashed by an artillery bombardment. The 36th (Ulster) Division would be one of the units involved in this huge attack.

The Ulster soldiers were asked to attack the well-defended German emplacements opposite Thiepval Wood and on either side of the River Ancre. On the sunlit morning of 1st July, they rose from their trenches and made their way across no man’s land, like thousands of other troops. Sadly, at Thiepval, as elsewhere on the front-line, the bombardment had not destroyed enemy positions. The German machine-gunners soon mowed down their victims in a hail of bullets.

Within the three days that elapsed before the Ulster Division was withdrawn from the line, they lost over three thousand men, with many more injured or missing. The British army had experienced the most costly episode in its history. Although the Somme offensive went on until the autumn, little ground was gained and the hoped-for breakthrough was never achieved.

The news of the 36th Division’s catastrophe soon reached home. Telegram-boys arrived at many Ulster homes with the grim news that a son, father or husband had been killed. Some Ulster communities had lost their best and brightest young men. As for the 36th Division, it continued to fight in other campaigns until the war ended in 1918 but it was never the same proud troop of Ulstermen again. In the postwar years, as Ireland’s troubles continued and the island experienced partition, the unionist rulers of the fledgling British province of Northern Ireland were able to look back at the sacrifices of the Somme as a key moment when Ulster Protestants proved themselves to be worthy of the Britishness that they had not wanted to see diluted.

The Somme soon grew in significance during the early decades in Northern Ireland. Orange lodges were named after the Division’s battles, as were Ulster streets. A portrait of the charge at Thiepval was hung in Belfast’s City Hall and ‘Somme Day’ was commemorated each 1st July at the cenotaph in the City Hall grounds, and elsewhere in the province. Just as the river Boyne in 1690 held a place in unionist memory, so too now did the river Somme in 1916. The first day of July had been important in the pre-war Orange ‘marching season’ as it was the day of the Boyne commemoration according to the pre-Gregorian calendar. ‘Somme Day’ fitted nicely into the pattern of remembrance. As the Irish Free State looked increasingly to Easter 1916 as its founding myth of blood-sacrifice, so too Northern Ireland could summon up a blood-soaked myth from 1916 – albeit one which had its setting in France rather than the Ulster homeland.

Crucial for Ulster unionists was the pride they felt in the military accomplishments at Thiepval. The fact is that few other divisions managed to advance as far as the Ulster Division on 1st July 1916. Certainly, Ulster soldiers did manage to break through the German lines before being forced back due to the failure of the men on either side of them to advance. Their advance was due to the resourcefulness and foresight of the Ulster commander, who had sent the division out into No Man’s Land well in advance of zero-hour. However the relative success of the 36th allowed a myth of martial prowess to develop – important for a people who saw themselves struggling to maintain the rights of Irish Protestants on an island where they were in a clear minority.

With the onset of the latter-day Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Somme became of renewed importance. The threat posed to Ulster by the Provisional IRA in all likelihood led to the intensified espousal of this strongly military image in unionist culture. The loyalist paramilitary groups who surfaced during the Troubles held the story of the 36th Division in high respect, painting murals which illustrated the suffering and bravery of the Somme and naming their huts in Long Kesh prison after the Division’s Great War campaigns. Arguably preoccupation with such a disastrous event was indicative of a stress on the negative and the catastrophic in unionist consciousness – a preoccupation that also fixates on such disasters as the sinking of the Titanic, which had of course been built in the Protestant shipyards of Belfast as the Home Rule crisis began to gather steam.

However in the 1980s and 90s, a more textured and sensitive approach to the story of the Somme also became possible for a couple of reasons. Firstly, a range of local historians had managed to interview the last survivors of the battle and their accounts started to filter into public and commemorative discourse. The veterans of the Somme had little time for glory or mythology and they spelt out for future generations the ghastly brutalities of the western front in a way that prevented patriotically slanted simplicities from taking further root.

Secondly, the availability of cheap travel to France and Flanders meant that thousands of Ulster people – including groups of school children – were able to visit the sites of the Ulster Division’s battles. They came back better informed than previous generations as to the cultural and military context of the Ulstermen’s deaths.

One new factor has to be taken into account in understanding the meaning of the Great War in contemporary Ireland. Irish nationalists have begun to take a deep interest in their own long poverty-stricken tradition of recruitment to Britain’s armed forces. Because of new-found cultural and economic confidence, Irishmen and women are now more ready to explore the painful reality that, despite the realities of the Easter Rising, some 200,000 soldiers went from this island to fight in the trenches and that the majority were not in fact Ulster loyalists. Many of them went to the war believing that their generosity would be rewarded by Home Rule, just as unionists had joined up hoping for the opposite outcome.

The rediscovery by Irish nationalists of their ancestors’ sufferings in the Great War could be said to pose a threat to unionist mythology insomuch as it robs the Somme story of some of its uniqueness as a marker of identity. It is important that, in reclaiming its own First World War heritage, nationalist Ireland treads carefully, recognising that Ulster preoccupation with that battle is about much more than just the lives lost and the pain suffered – it is about remembering how much Ulster Protestant psychic energy has gone into identifying with imperialism, a political phenomenon now commonly derided as belonging to the scrapheap of history.

This fact must be recognised when an Orange march is stopped in its tracks by protestors on its way to a service at Drumcree to commemorate the Somme. Those men in Orange sashes, whose truculent anger is so incomprehensible to much of the on-looking world, are evidence of a tragic Ulster fidelity to the era of empire which the battles of the Great War so comprehensively blew apart, from St Petersburg to Berlin – an era that also began disintegrating on the streets of Dublin at Eastertide in 1916.

PHILIP ORR is a retired teacher and is a Research Associate at the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland.

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