Ireland, the Great War, and the Geography of Remembrance (review)

My grandfather arrived home to Dublin's North Wall quay, having survived four years on the western front at Ypres. Although a fortunate war survivor, his family received him in awkward silence until they had returned to their house, and he had discarded his British army uniform. At a time when Ireland's political identity hung in the balance, his status as "war hero" was anything but assured. Johnson addresses the questions that such a scenario raises about war and its remembrance within the larger society. Her aim is to explore how World War I was interpreted and commemorated in Ireland, using a select set of episodes that occurred largely during the first two decades following the conclusion of hostilities. Ireland's fractured social and political geographies make it a complex and intriguing location for tackling these connections between place, social memory, and war. Johnson's approach combines methodologies from geography, history, and social theory; in the last case, issues of representation and myth from the work of Barthes feature prominently.¹ This interdisciplinary perspective, well discussed in an opening chapter, is applied to a diverse range of source materials in five main chapters.

Mythical representation was important in shaping not only postwar social memory but also wartime recruitment. In Chapter 2, Johnson uses the varied textual and illustrative content of war posters and pamphlets to argue that universalistic appeals to military "duty" converged with "highly localized frames of reference" in a widespread drive to attract volunteers (55). The Irish rural landscape and its women were presented as objects worthy of defense, for example, while masculinist verities about the "old Irish fighting spirit" were summoned to inspire Irishmen to "answer the call." Although domestic "Irish" themes were seen as necessary to spur enrollment among southern Catholics, northern Protestants were more likely to be persuaded by universal tropes of British imperial defense. They were not fed rhetoric about the plight of small nations such as Belgium.

In the war's aftermath, the "memory work" about its significance to Ireland and its people could begin. But how did this work intersect with local and regional geographies? In Chapter 3, Johnson examines the representational content of street parades celebrating the peace in 1919. She argues that the places of commemorative activity were themselves constitutive in communicating the meaning of the war to local audiences. That the Battle of the Somme resonated as a potent expression of Ulster's sacrifice in defense of Britain is clear from the description of the Belfast parade. The contrast with Dublin, where the parade was not endorsed by the local council, could not be more striking. Ireland's political and religious geography clearly inflected the intensity and practice of commemoration across the island, and these discontinuities also extended to public discourses regarding the construction of war memorials (Chapter 4). The Dublin government long debated the location of a memorial, but Belfast wasted little time in placing a cenotaph within the grounds of its city hall, as if to confirm its place within the British state. The Ulster Tower at Thiepval, dedicated in 1921, also served to narrate the northern province's difference from the rest of Ireland.

The fifth chapter discusses the war as portrayed in literary sources. It is telling indeed that the Irish canon on the Great War is small and that none of the works that Johnson analyzes present a heroic interpretation of the conflict. Her insightful interrogation of Sean O'Casey's controversial The Silver Tassie, a play the modernist structure of which exposed the interconnectedness of the war and home fronts, contrasts with the more orthodox modes of expression used by veteran authors for whom the brutality of war was located specifically in the trench. There was more than one way to imagine the geography of war.

The Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin undermined World War I's place in the social memory of the new state. In her final chapter, Johnson skillfully...