The War That Ended Peace – two recommended books on the Great War of 1914-1918.

Although the Great War of 1914-1918 is skewed in most people’s memory, it did nonetheless bring many large scale changes that shook the foundations of our planet. There was the use of chemical weapons in the Western Front, with exploding canisters giving rise to shouts of ‘Gas!’ by the soldiers. An entire generation were mercilessly sent to the slaughter, with old world tactics of ‘proper attacks’ by unwitting generals confronted by the new order of fortified artillery and machine gun fire. Some soldiers signed up thinking of it in a sense of an adventure and what they found instead was disillusionment. The picture of a world with a jackboot forever on your face or a court-martial if abscond was popularized in this era. Then there’s also the gripping thought of the survivors of this war becoming the trainers of posterity in an even greater war by the mid of that century – giving a whole new meaning to the notion of ‘fathers and sons.’

From Belfast to Belgrade: tales from antique territories.

Irish forces cycling along the struma valley, 1917. (Courtesy: National Army Museum.)

I.

As I was recently perusing through a number of World War 1 books, a thought of schoolboy proportions struck me like a cat lashing out while I initially mistook it to be friendly. Unable to prevent my conscience from looking for details on Race, Nationality, and Empire relating to British Imperialism, wouldn’t it be the case that the contribution of July 1 massacre of the Ulster Protestants of Belfast in fueling the sectarian conflict that engulfed the same city after the war, the influence of Gallipoli and the Somme on the emergence of Australian self-determinism, or of the Vimy Ridge fighting on the formation of Canadian nationalism in themselves could constitute a book on empire? The subject had left an ineradicable impression on my mind, but the scale of it had discouraged me from taking it up any further as these, and other incidents such as Delville Wood and the swathes of Indian regiments recruited to fight the allied cause could themselves constitute a book on empire, under the rubric of today’s ‘post-colonial studies.’ Such a discharge from myself is nothing more than a greeting from our age of plenty to an age of jackboots, regimentation, militarism and uniformity. But our curiosities can be naggingly persistent – just as persistent as the comfort from atrophy and routine, and I’m glad to say that it had eventually won through. Thus, here I’ll present my foray into this area that had led me to chronicle the story of a subsection of the 10th Irish Division who went to fight in the war.