Sebastian Barry. A Long Long Way (2025)

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The Great War and the 1916 Uprising: The Impact of Irish Military Service upon Collective Memory as seen via the Retrospective Lens of Contemporary Literature

Eric Patterson

On 24 April, 1916, more than 1,000 rebels of the Irish Volunteers and associated organizations under the leadership of Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Eamon de Valera, and others declared an independent Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. At that same moment, tens of thousands of their countrymen were in the British Army, participating in the Great War on the mainland, and many thousands of Irishmen had already been killed in Gallipoli, Salonika, Belgium, France, and elsewhere in service to the crown. This paradox creates the opening for many interesting questions. How did those Irish troops and the Irish public, especially those connected to serving Irish soldiers, react to the Easter Uprising? Most importantly, for the purposes of this paper, what was the collective reaction to Irish service in the Great War immediately following the armistice, and what was the continued impact upon public opinion, political action, and internecine strife throughout the following decades? Using the historical novel “A Long Long Way” as a structural framework for analysis, this paper will address these unspoken realities by comparing the modern memory as reflected in this historical novel to the historical reality as recorded by witnesses and scholars.

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Life in the Trenches: Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (lecture)

Paul Mulvey

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Survivors of a Kind: Memoirs of the Western Front

The English Historical Review, 2010

's newest book presents an analysis of Western Front memoirs written by British and Commonwealth authors, acting as an analogous volume to The Unquiet Western Front: Britain's Role in Literature and History.(1) The study is organised into a series of essays discussing individual authors, which are in turn complemented by comparative thematic chapters. Chapter titles indicate, roughly, the representative roles of the various servicemen selected: for example, Alfred Pollard and John Reith as the 'Fire-eaters'; General F. P. Crozier as 'Martinet, militarist and opponent of war; and Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, somewhat ironically, 'having a "good war"'. Within these general topical divisions one finds a breadth of experiences and opinions, which Bond conveys through a series of well-selected quotations from the memoirs, supplemented by published and unpublished works by the highlighted authors, letters, regimental histories and contemporary biographies. Robert Graves' 1929 memoir Goodbye to All That (2) is addressed in the opening chapter, and is presented as a product of the author's 'mordant contempt for all the conventional values of the time' (p. 3). It serves as a foil to Charles Carrington's A Subaltern's War (3), also published in 1929 but written ten years earlier. Carrington's account implicitly rebuts Graves' characterisation of the war as an engine for disillusionment, instead arguing that 1919 and peace provided 'the real moment of disenchantment' (p. 16), the point at which the serving generation lost confidence in the meaning of their collective experience. These two books offer contrasting, but not necessarily binary archetypes; what links all of the memoirs is a respect for fellow soldiers, particularly those that did not survive the war. While Graves' literary talents serve him well, 'transforming it [his war experience] into his own brilliantly colourful myth' (p. 3), Bond points out that much of the bitterness conveyed by the memoir is tempered by his tangible and 'undoubted

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A Review of Irish Literature and the First World War

Jane Potter

International Yeats Studies, 2017

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Dermot Bolger’s Ghosting the War

Aleksandra Kędzierska

AVANT. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard, 2017

Dermot Bolger's Walking the Road (2007) is a tribute to Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917), one of the greatest Irish poets of the First World War. Focusing on the life and afterlife of Ledwidge who, as depicted in Bolger's play, emblematizes the condition of other Great War combatants doomed to oblivion, this essay, concerned with the various functions of the deployment of ghosts in Bolger's drama, argues that spectrality can become an effective means of revealing the plight of the war dead: the unremembered, whose names were effectively erased from public memory and who, thus turned into homeless revenants, were forced into a continual involvement in the war from which they cannot escape, even after death. As a spectral witness who moves between prewar Ireland and the world of the trenches, Bolger's hero makes one aware how similar these realities are. Furthermore, as a classic case of shell shock, he demonstrates the role of haunting in the narrative of trauma, identity and memory. Last but not least, whilst enhancing the gothic dimension of the war, Frank's perceptions, as well as his spectral discourse, not only contribute significantly to illuminating the enigma which he personified, but, by providing an insight into his search for himself, they convey the plight of truth seekers who grasp, yet never fully encompass the Irish experience of the war.

Two Irish Plays of the Great War : Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme and Dermot Bolger's Walking the Road

AKIKO SATAKE

2017

This paper examines how Frank McGuinness and Dermot Bolger represented the formation of collective memory and personal memory with regard to WWI in their plays Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme (1985) and Walking the Road (2007). I began with an overview of earlier Irish plays dealing with WWI in comparison with the English ones, explaining why memory has come to be of particular concern in Ireland. With Observe the Sons of Ulster, I focused on Part 3, in which four diff erent conversations conducted by four pairs of soldiers on leave in Ulster merge into one concerted call to march back to the front. This, as I argued, was the way McGuinness symbolically represented the formation of the collective memory of Ulstermen at the Somme, which ironically becomes fi xed into a myth to deepen sectarian division. Bolger depicts the process in which the ghost of Francis Ledwidge recreates the memory of his life to make it whole and accept his death. This is what every person does, it is suggested, by having all the ghosts of soldiers marching to their respective home with Ledwidge joining in. I concluded by saying that this is a new type of WWI play in which the audience commemorate the dead soldiers through the performance, the personal memories thereby becoming collective memory without losing their individuality.

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A Long Way to Tipperary: The Irish in the First World War

Eugenio F Biagini

The Historical Journal

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The First World War soldier and his contemporary image in Britain (Pre-print copy)

Helen McCartney

The analysis, opinions and conclusions expressed or implied in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Joint Services Command and Staff College, the Ministry of Defence or any other government agency. Today, the First World War has become a byword for futility in Britain. The words themselves conjure images of a pointless industrial war, directed by incompetent generals. It has come to be seen as a war that caused the senseless slaughter of millions of young men who fought in an alien landscape of muddy trenches and gaping shell holes for an unappreciative and uncomprehending public at home. 1 The image of the First World War soldier as a victim is a logical consequence of these popular narratives. Troops are often portrayed as the victims of the flawed purpose, mechanistic nature and suspect methods of the war and of civilian callousness and indifference. These negative perceptions of the War in general, and the soldier in particular, have developed over the last century and have, for the past three decades, become indelibly etched on the British popular imagination as a set of strikingly stable beliefs. 2 By contrast, the last three decades have seen the diversification of the academic historiography of the First World War. 3 Historians from a range of traditions have worked, collectively and individually, to ask novel questions that have 1

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Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the British and German Armies, 1914-1918 by Alexander Watson (Review)

Edward Madigan

First World War Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012

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The 1916 diaries of an Irish rebel and a British soldier

Lisa Weihman

Irish Studies Review, 2018

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Sebastian Barry. A Long Long Way (2025)
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