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Harry Clarke’s War. Marguerite Helmers
Читать онлайн.Название Harry Clarke’s War
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isbn 9780716533092
Автор произведения Marguerite Helmers
Издательство Ingram
By Saturday, April 29, Pearse surrendered the forces from the GPO and those who occupied other sites soon followed. The Irish rebels from the central city were gathered in the Parnell Square at the north end of Sackville Street, where they spent a night outdoors and in the rain, huddled together in stillness and discomfort under the rifles and eyes of British guards.
Though the Rising was not immediately or generally popular with the Dublin citizens, the summary execution of the leaders of the military coup turned public opinion in support of the revolutionary heroes. Fourteen were swiftly shot after secret tribunals at Kilmainham Gaol in west Dublin. On May 3, only four days after the surrender, Padraig Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Thomas Clarke were executed by firing squad. Five more leaders were shot in the next two days. Within the week, six more men were executed. Thousands more were deported to prison camps in Ireland, England, and Wales. In total, there may have been as many as 500 dead by the end of the week,67 among them Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, war protestor, pacifist, and friend to artist Seán Keating, who left his home to stop looting in the city.
The dead of the Easter Rising, including the leaders and the civilian casualties, are memorialized in the Garden of Remembrance in central Dublin’s Parnell Square, the site where rebels huddled in discomfort after the surrender. A written and illuminated record of the rebellion was begun by the artist Art O’Murnaghan in 1924 as Leabhar na hAiséirghe, Book of the Resurrection, a twenty six-page book of remembrance that may be compared to Ireland’s Memorial Records. These beautiful illuminated pages are displayed at the National Museum, Collins Barracks.
The Somme, 1916
During the revolution in Ireland, British forces were engaged in battles in Mesopotamia and massive troops and equipment were moving into the Picardy region around the Somme River. What ensued was a series of battles that extended from late June 1916 to November 1916. These battles would be the proving ground for the 36th (Ulster) Division and the 16th (Irish) Division. The area had been occupied by the German army since the opening months of the war in 1914, which gave them sufficient time to deeply entrench themselves and heavily fortify the towns, including Beaumont, Bapaume, Thiepval, Guillemont, and Ginchy. By July 1916, German machine gun posts covered approaches to the area from the west, north, and south, effectively blanketing the thirty-kilometer line of the front with heavy fire. Working with the French troops under the command of Colonel Joffre, British General Douglas Haig planned to advance on 1 July 1916, following a weeklong bombardment of German lines that they anticipated would cut the wire and destroy the artillery. Beginning on June 23, the British launched a barrage of three million shells on German lines. Early in the morning of July 1, the BEF detonated seventeen mines under German positions. At 7:30 a.m., whistles blew along the miles of trenches to send the advance waves of troops over the top.68
Among those in the first wave of July 1 were the 36th (Ulster) Division under the direction of Major-General Sir Oliver Nugent, who were in trenches dug within Thiepval Wood. Although they would achieve the objective of reaching the German lines, they were unable to hold the position. The division would face heavy losses. Casualties from the first day of fighting numbered over 19,000 British soldiers. Martin Middlebrook estimates that 2,000 Ulstermen were killed on the first day of battle and 3,000 were dead by the third day.69
FIGURE 1.7
Two British soldiers standing in a wrecked German trench at Ginchy (September 1916), photograph by John Warwick Brooke. © Imperial War Museum Q 4338.
The Tyneside Irish (Northumberland Fusiliers) were situated to the east of the 36th (Ulster) Division; their objectives were La Boiselle and Contalmaison. The 1st and 2nd Battalions of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers were positioned to the northwest of the 36th (Ulster) Division, facing Beaumont-Hamel. By noon on July 1, over 60 per cent of the officers and men of the 2nd Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers were casualties of the advance. On July 3, roll call of the 9th Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles, 36th (Ulster) Division, revealed only one of four officers was alive and thirty-four of the battalion’s 115 men were dead, wounded, or missing.70
Although it was not their first action of the war, the 16th (Irish) Division is particularly associated with the attacks on the German-controlled towns of Guillemont and Ginchy on the eastern end of the line. Gerald Gliddon refers to the village of Guillemont as ‘a fortress with a chain of dugouts and tunnels that defied the heaviest artillery barrages’.71 The first attempts to take the village of Guillemont occurred on 23 July 1916. By August 27, with the rain now muddying the roads and the bodies of the dead filling the trenches, the 6th Connaughts, 7th Leinsters, 8th Munsters, and 6th Royal Irish were called in from the 16th Division for a new plan of attack from the north. This attack was successful, and in his official report, John Buchan wrote, ‘The men of Munster, Leinster, and Connaught broke through the intricate defenses of the enemy as a torrent sweeps down rubble.’72
However, two other objectives beyond Guillemont remained: a heavily fortified area known as the Quadrilateral and the town of Ginchy. Until the advance on Ginchy, ‘the brigades of the 16th Division were thrust piecemeal into a continuing battle under the command of other divisional commanders’.73 On September 5, Major-General Sir William Hickie leading the assembled Irish Division was successful in taking the town. On September 9, Ginchy was secured. One of the casualties was Lt Tom Kettle of the 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, poet and barrister, who was shot while leading his men into the ruins of the town. (Ironically, five months earlier, his brother-in-law Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was executed during the Easter Rising.) With Kettle was James Emmet Dalton, who, having survived the war, would go on to join the IRA. Dalton was with Michael Collins during the 1923 ambush and assassination at Béal na Bláth, Cork. The total number of casualties from Irish regiments at the battles at Guillemont and Ginchy are 11,500.
Harry Clarke and the Arts in Dublin
When Harry Clarke was awarded the commission to prepare borders for Ireland’s Memorial Records, he was 30 years old, a father, and just beginning the decade that would be the most fruitful of his short career. That year, his friend Thomas Bodkin, a Governor of Ireland’s National Gallery of Art and Clarke’s lifelong friend, wrote an article titled ‘The Art of Mr Harry Clarke’ for the important artists’ monthly, The Studio, which praised Clarke’s artwork, citing over 250 of his completed works.74 That same issue contained several articles relating to war memorial commissions. Ultimately, the Studio article gave Clarke exposure in England and America that would lead to many commissions and extend his work beyond Ireland.
Harry Clarke was born in Dublin on 17 March 1889, the son of Joshua, a stained-glass manufacturer and church decorator hailing from Leeds, and the former Brigid MacGonigal from County Sligo. Like James Joyce, he received a Jesuit education at Belvedere College on Dublin’s north side. Clarke studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and the South Kensington School of Design in London. Returning to Dublin to work in the stained-glass studio of his father, he became involved with the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland and the Guild of Irish Art Workers, and he resumed studies at the Metropolitan School of Art with William Orpen. In his memoir Some Memories, 1901–1935, George Harrap recalls Clarke as ‘an indefatigable worker,’ citing the ‘over two hundred finished works’ that Clarke completed between 1915 and 1919.76
FIGURE 1.8
Harry Clarke, circa 1924. Image courtesy of Fianna Griffin.
The illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination represent a transitional moment in Clarke’s illustrations, in which they move from a spare and gracious design to a darker and more complex pallet of line and ornamentation. Within the Poe drawings, viewers begin to detect the subversive elements that would dominate the drawings of the 1920s. It is as if Poe’s literary explorations of heaven and hell, beauty, madness,