81 MARTIN DECKER , Regensburg "I'm at home, you little bastards:" Re-Envisioning the Marginalised Irish Soldier in Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way and Dermot Bolger's Walking the Road Investigating the issue of national identity, Patrick Lonergan notes how [the Irish] want to be seen as cosmopolitan but distinctive, traditional but not backward, authentic but not alien, forward-looking but not amnesiac. We want our present to be prosperous and our past to have been oppressive. And perhaps most difficult, we continue to seek a single narrative to explain an identity that has become diffuse. (2006, 316) Lonergan points out the problematic, even contradictory, nature of the process of constructing a national identity, a process described in Benedict Anderson's classic model of the 'imagined community,' which sees national identity as based on the formation of a specific national narrative, a particular version of a collective past. According to Lonergan, the selective character of the national narrative fails to do justice to the complexities of past and present Irish experience – and indeed, certain sections of Irish history and identity do not seem to feature in the national narrative or have even been purged. In the following, such a case of marginalisation and of an exclusionist national(ist) community and its unwanted identities will be addressed by looking at a long-neglected aspect of Ireland's collective past: the role of Irish soldiers of the First World War and the reflection and re-negotiation of their history in contemporary Irish writing. After an introduction to the historical, social and cultural context, I will focus on two recent examples of Irish war literature, Sebastian Barry's 2005 novel A Long Long Way and Dermot Bolger's 2007 play Walking the Road – two works that set out to re-envision the fates of Irish soldiers of the Great War, attempting to reconcile these troubled figures with a forgetful home community. Ireland and the Great War The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 occurred in a heated political climate that saw Ireland on the brink of civil war over the question of independence and self- government. Yet, it was followed by a rather astonishing reaction: hostilities between nationalists and unionists eased (Jeffery 1999, 4) and large numbers of Irishmen from across the political spectrum enlisted – by the end of the war about 200,000 Irishmen had served. While many joined up to escape poverty, "the king's shilling being prefer- able to starvation and disease in the tenements of Dublin whatever the risks" (Brown 1993, 226), political motivations also played a central role. Unionists saw their ser- vice in the British forces as an opportunity to demonstrate their fidelity to Britain and the Empire, while many Irish nationalists were attracted by the prospect of Home Rule, expecting independence as Britain's reward for the Irish contribution to the war effort. 1 John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, propagated the idea 1 Actually, Home Rule for Ireland had passed into law on 18 September 1914, its implementation, however, was postponed until the end of the war. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 26.1 (March 2015): 81-91. Anglistik, Jahrgang 26 (2015), Ausgabe 1 © 2015 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 82 MARTIN DECKER , Regensburg that the Irish involvement in the Great War would prove a solution to the ideological division of Irish society, forging a new collective national identity in the shared expe- rience of the war: For the first time in history, we have to-day a huge Irish army in the field. Its achieve- ments have covered Ireland with glory before the world, and have thrilled our hearts with pride. North and South have vied with each other in springing to arms, and please God, the sacrifices they have made side by side on the field of battle will form the sur- est bond of a united Irish Nation in the future. (John Redmond pamphlet, rpt. in John- son 2003, 30) However, by 1916, the ostensible unity behind the war effort proved to be suspi- cious and conditional (Gregory and Paseta 2002, 2). Redmond's idealistic and chival- ric vision was eventually buried when paramilitary nationalist groups took advantage of Britain's occupation on the Continent and launched the Easter Rising in Dublin. The insurrection was crushed rigidly by the British army – also including Irish sol- diers in its ranks. However, the most vital step to alter public opinion was the execu- tion of the Rising's leaders: an ill-fated, chaotic nationalist coup thus turned into an event that would come to be understood as the foundational moment of a new, inde- pendent Ireland, attaining a near-sacred status in Irish historical consciousness (Phil- Winter Journals lips 2010, 115; McNulty 2010, 66-67). This rendered the service of the Irish at the Somme and elsewhere irrelevant or even treacherous while the Easter rebels would become icons of Irish patriotic self-sacrifice. Their martyrdom came to constitute the "mytho-poetic core" (McNulty 2010, 64) of Irish national identity for much of the 20 th century, while the Irish dead of the Great War entered a political and historical void. 2 This division was already recognised during the war by the Irish MP and war poet for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution Thomas Kettle, who had enlisted in support of Home Rule. Kettle, who was killed at the Somme in September 1916, bitterly predicted that the Easter rebels "will go down to history as heroes and martyrs, and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer" (qtd. in Lyons 1983, 293). Indeed, Irish veterans turned out not to be a relevant partPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) of the discourses of post- war Irish identity – they were retrospectively understood to have made a fundamentally wrong choice, having taken "a historical wrong turning" (Brown 1993, 229) that left them "tainted with the stain of collaboration" (Gregory and Paseta 2002, 5). It seems as if the harsh sentiment expressed in Maud Gonne's 1900 statement about Irishmen in the British forces had turned into a general consensus twenty years later: "If they die, if they live, it matters not to me, they are no longer Irishmen" (2004, 185). The narrative of Irishmen risking their lives for the former oppressor was incompatible with the attitudes of the new independent nation, its 'identity project' relying on a construction of a collective identity based on Irish nationalist myths, particularly the Easter Rising, and a Catholic anti-modernism that shunned any British influences (O'Mahony and Delanty 2001, 156-157; 184-185). 2 The Northern Irish involvement in the Great War attained a central role for Northern Irish communal identity. See, for example, Orr (1987). Anglistik, Jahrgang 26 (2015), Ausgabe 1 © 2015 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) RE-ENVISIONING THE MARGINALISED IRISH SOLDIER 83 After the war, a substantial number of Irish soldiers decided not to return to Ire- land. Those who did frequently encountered resentment and even violence 3 and faced unemployment, poverty and homelessness. The 2008 essay collection Our War: Ire- land and the Great War includes reproductions of letters that illustrate the grim situa- tion of veterans and their families. For example, in a 1926 letter to King George V., a former army nurse "beg[s] your Gracious Majesty's protection from the stigma now vouchsafed those loyal women who served also. That they may not be demoralised by been [sic] thrown by the Sherriff's men on the roadside" (Horne 2008, 254). In a 1928 petition, the Bagenalstown branch of the British Legion of Ex-Servicemen reports how there "has been no employment here for Ex-Service men for the past 2 or 3 years, and there is no scheme whatever around here to provide work for them. In fact 90% of them are out of work and no prospect of getting any in the near future" (Horne 2008, 255). In a 1957 letter to Éamon de Valera, the wife of a veteran explains that without a pension "leaving our home is the spectre looking into our faces" (Horne 2008, 256) – in his curt reply, de Valera's secretary makes it abundantly clear that "the question of an award of pension in respect of service in the World War of 1914-1918 would not be a matter of the Government of Ireland" (257). The unwelcome Irish legacy of the Great War also shows in the long absence of a substantial culture of remembrance. While the Republic of Ireland has officially cele- brated the anniversaries of the Easter Rising, remembering the Irish victims of the Great War had not been a relevant part of the political agenda until the 1990s. 4 This silence also extends to the cultural sphere. The artistic representation of Ireland's part in the Great War constitutes a problematic task for much of the 20 th century, which shows in the remarkably limited literary output addressing the topic and, even more directly, in active forms of (self-)censorship of war-related works, most prominently in the case of Sean O'Casey's 1928 play The Silver Tassie (McNulty 2010, 68). As Terence Brown observed in 1993, "[i]t was as if the Irish had agreed collectively […] to dismiss from consciousness their own involvement in the greatest cataclysm ever to have befallen European civilization. And the silence of the country's writers speaks volumes" (229). It is astonishing how peripherally this subject, not only as a mono- lithic European disaster but also as the greatest demographic catastrophe in Ireland since the Great Famine (Jeffery 2012), is represented in Irish literature, which is usu- ally so dedicated to exploring the nation's past.