Published: 12/11/2010
AS AN IRISHMAN, it saddened me to see those Glasgow Celtic supporters at last Saturday’s game against Aberdeen holding up a banner claiming that the poppy was “bloodstained”.
The same bhoyos sing proudly: “If you know your history.” Presumably, they are referring to the history of their football team. They certainly don’t seem to know much about the history of the poppy or they would know that a large amount of the blood that stained the poppies in the fields of Belgium and elsewhere was shed by Irishmen who gave their lives in the hope that their sacrifice would lead eventually to Irish freedom from British rule.
It’s not only Britain which has chosen the poppy as a reminder of the dreadful carnage of World War I. It has also been adopted by Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Sri Lanka. In America, it is used on Memorial Day in honour of those who died serving the nation during wars.
The origin of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance is generally attributed to the poem In Flanders Fields, written by Canadian military surgeon Major John McCrae in May 1915 to mark the death of a friend during the second battle of Ypres. The poem was published by Punch magazine on December 8, 1915.
Shortly afterwards, American YMCA volunteer Moina Michael and Frenchwoman Anne E. Guerin popularised the use of artificial poppies as a symbol of remembrance in Europe and North America.
But poppies had been associated with war and carnage in Flemish fields for centuries before the 1914-18 conflict. At the Battle of Landen in 1693, between the forces of Louis XIV (including the remnants of the army of James II, the exiled King of England) and William III, or King Billy, as his present-day admirers prefer to call him, Irish, Scottish and English soldiers fought and died on both sides. Some 20,000 men lost their lives. The French army achieved a narrow victory.
A year later, James Drummond, Duke of Perth, an exiled Jacobite living in Antwerp, visited the site of the battle. In a letter to his sister Anne in Scotland he wrote: “. . . over the field where the battle was fought last year, (the) ground that is cultivated has two stalks of that popie which you call cock-poses for one of grain and where it is lying untilled a scarlet sheet is not of a deeper dye nor seems more smooth than all the ground is with those flowers, as if last year’s blood had taken root and appeared this year in flowers.”
Among the dead at Landen lay Patrick Sarsfield, a major-general in the French army and the most celebrated Irish soldier of his generation.
Many thousands of Irishmen were to serve in French regiments, from Flanders to India, over the following 100 years and more. The people of Ireland were proud of their fighting men’s exploits.
In the months preceding World War I, Ireland was on the verge of achieving home rule – a form of government similar to the one Scotland enjoys currently. For the first time in centuries, the Irish would have a parliament based in Dublin, independent from Westminster in many areas. It wasn’t complete freedom, but it was all the nationalists could hope for.
Of course this arrangement didn’t appeal to the Ulster Scots and other unionists in the north of the island. They raised a citizen army of 100,000 volunteers, the Ulster Volunteer Force, of whom my grandfather was one, to fight any attempt to hand power over to their Irish enemies. Those Irish enemies mobilised their own force of 190,000 in the south to make sure that any agreement on devolution with the British was upheld.
My other grandfather was stationed with the British Army near Dublin. When his regiment was ordered to march against the UVF, 60 officers mutinied and others threatened to join them. The British government caved in and told the troops they would not be required to fight the Ulster loyalists. It looked as if civil war was inevitable, but then Archduke Franz Ferdinand got himself shot in Sarajevo and Europe was plunged into war on a much grander scale.
Naturally enough, most of the northern volunteers rushed to enlist to fight for king and country. Fortunately for me, my grandfather chose to keep on with his job at the Harland and Wolff shipyard. I think my grandmother might have had something to do with this decision.
Meanwhile, down south, the nationalist politicians were urging their 190,000 volunteers to enlist in the fight against the Kaiser in the hope that a grateful Britain would make good its promise on home rule when the Hun was defeated.
It’s estimated that up to 200,000 Irishmen of all persuasions joined up. Of those, nearly 50,000 failed to return home.
Any hopes on the part of the nationalist politicians and those poor souls who were sent to their deaths that their sacrifice might lead to their country’s freedom were dashed by the 1916 uprising, a poorly-supported act of rebellion orchestrated by a ragtag mob of guerrilla fighters and romantics who took over the Dublin GPO.
It was doomed to failure from the start, but the British authorities responded with such cold-blooded vengeance against the ringleaders, executing one man as he sat in a wheelchair, that most Irish people lost interest in the concept of home rule. They wanted to sever all ties with Britain once and for all.
This proved to make life difficult for those Irishmen who had obeyed their politicians’ demands to join the British Army. When the survivors returned home, they were treated with contempt by many of their fellow-citizens, despite having gone through hell for years in a vain attempt to earn the gratitude of their British masters.
It is those men and their fallen comrades who deserve the respect today that they didn’t get all those years ago.
I don’t suppose the thickos that held up that banner last Saturday will see it that way.
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