IRELAND'S RECORD IN THE WAR

New Zealand Tablet, 20 February 1919, Page 18

IRELAND'S RECORD IN THE WAR

Ireland’s record in the war has been, from the point of . view of the Allies, magnificent (says a writer in the New. Statesman). The magnificence of the Irish contribution to the cause of freedom has, been only less amazing than the flood of calumny and belittlement that has been consistently poured on it ever since August, 1914. Ireland has made a greater voluntary contribution of men to the Allied forces than any other unfree nation in the world. That is the leading fact of the situation. Sir Charles Russell, speaking at a Red Cross meeting- at Dublin a few weeks ago, declared that Ireland had given 250,000 men to the British army and navy ; and this leaves altogether out of account the equally large number of Irishmen who have taken part in the war in the Australian, Canadian, and American armies. If these are added in we need not hesitate to accept Mr. John Redmond’s estimate that 500,000 Irishmen have fought in the ranks of the Allies for the liberty of the world. At the same time, as was shown in the New Statesman some time ago, Ireland has been second only to America itself in the supplies of food she has sent to England during the perilous years of the war. Had it not been for the assistance rendered by Ireland, both in men and foodstuffs, it is doubtful whether the Allies would yet have been able to force Germany to submission. This is not to claim that Ireland has done more than any other country. It is to claim merely that she was a necessary link in the great chain of the Allied success. He would be a knave and. a fool who would attempt to disparage the sacrifices of France and England, of tortured Belgium and tortured Serbia. He would be equally a knave and fool, however, who, having accepted the services of half a million Irish soldiers and sailors, would pretend that Ireland has not made an immense and foreseeable contribution to the victory of the Allies, and who would reward the Irish dead with a weak sneer about the abundance of butter in Ireland in war time. It may be asked why, these things being so, has the average Englishman been allowed to get the idea that' Ireland has stood aside and sulked during the war? Some people think that the insurrection of 1916 is chiefly to blame. Well, there were not enough Irishmen in the Dublin insurrection of 1916 to make up even one battalion of the Irish Guards. One was told at the time that the Dublin insurgents numbered about a thousand. One has learned since then that they were hardly more than six hundred. Clearly, if Ireland’s freedom is to depend upon' whether her services to the Allies have outweighed her disservices, she has earned her freedom about a thousand times over. For every Irishman who shouldered a rifle on the insurgent side a thousand Irishmen have borne weapons on the side of the Allies. I doubt if one Englishman in a hundred thousand realises this. If they did. they would insist on seeing that then* Irish allies had a free Parliament restored to them before the Peace Conference sits. Never was the need of a national government proved more completely. Had Ireland possessed a national Government during the war she would have had an organ for making known her services to the civilised world. Canada, Australia, and South Africa have but to speak of what they have done, and all the world listens. The Times, and the press in general, pay deference to them as free nations that command respect. South Africa has not contributed nearly so many men to the Allied armies as Ireland has done, but,'luckily for herself. South Africa is free; and even her most malignant enemy of the old dav r s dares not criticise her gift. She too, like Ireland, had a small insurrection; but even after this she escaped calumny. She, too, has been divided in opinion as to the war—far more so. indeed, than Ireland was before the malevolence of the anti-Irish authorities had had time to destroy the people’s enthusiasm for Belgium. “It is an unfortunate fact,’’ said Mr. Merriman in the early part of the present year, “that we in South Africa are for our sins riven into two factions of almost equal

strength! Almost one-half of the European population is coldly neutral towards the issue which we look upon a? vital, if* indeed, they • are- not positively hostile tothe cause of the Allies.’’ Axxs yet South Africa is free. If there is any coldness towards the Allies it is on account of past wrongs. In Ireland, on the other hand,, if there is any coldness towards the Allies it is on account of present wrongs. Some months ago, when a dinner was given in honor of Mr. Burton, the Minister of Mines in South Africa, Mr. Asquith in a speech mentioned the numbers of the South African forces who had served in the war. The Times, for some reason or other, omitted the figures in its report. I wondered at the time whether it was because they made Ireland’s contribution seem so immense by comparison. The Times was content to give the report of the dinner some general appreciative heading, such as “Loyal South Africa.’’ It is more exigent in regard to Ireland. , English statesmen, it is clear, have also one standard for South Africa and another for Ireland. Mr. Burton, we are told, related to the assembled guests the story of a wounded Boer soldier who said that he wished to get to France in order to repay the gift of free institutions to his country. He went on to say that the soldier’s eye brightened as he added : “I would not have raised one single hand for the Empire if the Empire had refused to establish in my country that freedom which South Africa now enjoys.” It is said that Mr, Austen Chamberlain mid other representative statesmen who were present cheered this remarkable saying of the Bosr soldier. By what fatality is it that they are unable to see that Irishmen are human beings, with the same passions as Boers ? General Botha wrote to Mr. Redmond to say that he agreed with him that South Africa’s services to the Allies were simply the fruit of the concession of national freedom. Yet even without national freedom, and as a pure act of faith, Ireland poured her sons into the trenches in the most critical days of the war and helped to hold the line at its weakest for the world’s freedom. „ Let me say again that I do not make these comparisons in order to belittle the services of any other nation, but only to show up Ireland’s services in the war in a true light. Most of the free nations have published a list of their and wounded soldiers during the last week or two. Let us have a full list of the dead and wounded Irish soldiers, so that Ave may judge how great have been the sacrifices made by Ireland. Has Japan contributed as many dead as Ireland ? She has not. Yet Japan is praised. Has New Zealand contributed as many? She has not. Yet New Zealand is praised. Has South Africa? Has Canada? Canada has a greater population than Ireland. Yet, if figures were to be had, I am confident it could be shown that far fewer Caandian-born men than Irish-born men have fallen in the Avar. Captain Esmonde, M.P., said in the House of Commons the other day; “I have seen myself, buried in one grave, 400 Nationalist soldiers killed in one fight”—two-thirds as many as the total number of the Dublin insurgents of Easter week. And that mournful spectacle has been repeated not after one fight, but after fifty during the Avar. In the most desperate days of the war-—at Mons and at the Marne —lrishmen were present at the thickest of the fighting, and battalion after battalion gave itself up to the slaughter, singing “The Bold Feiner Men,” “A Nation Once Again,” and other songs of the kind that the police nowadays suppress with baton charges in Ireland. At the beginning of the war a battalion of the Irish Guards mutinied. It was because it had been rumored that they were not being sent to the Front ! The Irish Guards, it will be remembered, had been reprimanded at the time of the Buckingham Palace Conference for cheering Mr. Redmond on his way down Birdcage Walk. I knew a soldier in the Irish Guards dead —who declared that hie battalion called themselves “Redmond’s Own.” Well, they are dead, and so . are the Redmonds, and Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Bonar Law have made the glorious sacrifice of surviving to perpetuate the subjection of Ireland. One is not sur-

prised to hear of the Nationalist soldier back from the Front who said to Mr. Dillon: "Mr. Dillon, the worst of it is I know now that we are not fighting for liberty, for England is going to betray us." England, please God, with the help of Labor, is going to do nothing of the sort; but Mr. Bonar Law and Mr. Shortt, so far as they are able, have already made the great betrayal. Anti-Irish influences have for the moment triumphed, and Ireland is held up to contempt as a sullen shirker to all the free nations of Europe. Mr. Lloyd George admitted, in the days following the insurrection, the malignity of the anti-Irish influences that had been at work among the English official classes in the early days of the war. This malignity has been shown by nothing more clearly than by the nature of the anti-Irish propaganda carried on by propagandists in the United States. The misrepresentation of Ireland to the United States could not have been more vehement if Ireland had been fighting for the Germans instead of for the Allies. If an American soldier, going ashore in Ireland, got into a drunken row that ended in a fight, the incident was telegraphed to America as if it were an unprovoked assault on the American flag by Irish Nationalists. And what can be said of the egregious statements about Ireland made in Mr. "lan Hay's" propaganda book published in America and exposed by Mr. Devlin in the* House of Commons ? Irishmen ask themselves whether an English Government that meant to deal honestly by Ireland would actually pay for the spread of antiIrish feeling in America. It seemed to me at the beginning of the war that England was now about to take the attitude before the world: "Well, we have done wrong in the past; but we are now going to liberate the small nations of the world— among them." Instead of that, English propaganda, so far as it has related to Ireland, has largely been occupied with an attempt to show, not that England has at last admitted the justice of the cause of Ireland, but that, comparatively speaking, England's attitude to Ireland is satisfactory and just. Every other Allied country except Ireland has been glorified in pamphlet after pamphlet. Ireland alone has been maligned. One egregious pamphlet has been published to show that the English do not behave as badly in Ireland as the Germans in Poland. On grounds of this kind nearly any country might be denied its freedom. One can usually find some other country which, in some respect or other, has suffered still worse.

Here, then, is the plain truth about Ireland. Some powerful influences, which have always hated the thought of Irish freedom, have devoted themselves resolutely to the abnegation of Ireland since the beginning of the war. Why, the story of the heroic deeds of the Irish regiment at Gallipoli were suppressed until Mr. Redmond raised a storm about them, after the troops of every other nation had been given full credit. And to-day people who are praising the Czecho-Slovaks and the Poles — both of whom fought (under compulsion) against the Allies by the fifty thousand —rare to be found denouncing the Irish, who contributed an immense and vitally necessary army to the cause of the Allies. I thank God. for the freedom that is coming to the Poles and the Bohemians. But Ireland, too, has some little claim on the attention of the statesmen of these years of liberation. As she thinks of her dead, lying in a world of graves in Flanders, Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia, she may well (adapting lines of Mr. Kipling’s) cry out, in the agony of her soul: “ If blood be the. price of nationality,, Good God, we ha’, paid in full.” In this hour of the triumph of justice, let not the great deeds of this little nation be forgotten.