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and London’s Royal Academy of Arts to establish a common memorial language, given that nation’s unprecedented struggle to honour the millions of dead. Accordingly, I introduce the publication of Imperial War Graves Commission cemetery registers by Douglas Cockerell to this discussion.¹

Chapter Three examines the detailed drawings for each of the nine plates in Ireland’s Memorial Records. The record of an artist’s thought is often found within the work itself. Clarke did not leave any written or sketched record of his commission, other than the printed pages of the books. Bowe, who had access to the family papers as she worked on her many detailed studies of his stained glass and graphic art, reports that there are no known extant sketches, preliminary drawings, or correspondence related to the commission.5 I have relied on my research into First World War posters and my previous publications on the visual culture of the war to build an interpretation for readers.

      Chapter Four takes up the story of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens, which I contend were designed as an archive, a Palladian construction of four bookrooms where copies of Ireland’s Memorial Records could be housed and consulted. Sir Edwin Lutyens, who drew up the architectural plans for the Irish National War Memorial Gardens, replaces Clarke as the protagonist in this chapter, for Clarke passed away in 1931, just as the ground was broken for the memorial in Islandbridge. This chapter concludes with reflections on the irony of the two forgotten spaces: Ireland’s Memorial Records and the bookrooms of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens.

      My position as an American researcher has allowed me to weigh the facts as I have found them. I have treated Harry Clarke’s engravings as I have treated other aspects of visual culture that I have written about in the past: examining the way that the illustrations came into being, the details of the artistic work, and how the set of Ireland’s Memorial Records are displayed. This is a work about rhetoric and the particular rhetorical trope of epediectic, or display. It is not a work about politics. That Harry Clarke’s illustrations for Ireland’s Memorial Records were intended to be housed in an Irish national war memorial does not mean that this war memorial is being elevated above other memorial sites in Dublin or Ireland.

      Although the legacy of the war once known as the Great War is still contentious, we need to remind ourselves that Harry Clarke was in no way celebrating war and that Ireland’s Memorial Records are not instruments of propaganda. Clarke was creating art – and art matters. Art mattered just as much in 1923, when the books were published, as it matters now. Art can restore the soul and refresh the senses. Art can make us think and see the world around us in a new way. Clarke’s decorative designs gave voice to his intellect and his sentiment, and they should engage our minds as well as release our emotions. If they ask us what we believe, so much the better, as that is one province of art. Ireland’s Memorial Records are distinctive; they are the only national roll of honour completed by an internationally renowned artist to emerge from the 1914–18 conflict. This singular feature is a distinction for Ireland, for Dublin, and for art.

¹The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was created by Royal Charter in 1917. In 1960, its name became the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Throughout this book I refer to it by the name in use from 1917–39.

      NOTES

1.P. Murray, Skippy Dies (New York: Macmillan, 2010), pp.552–53.

2.E. M. Cope, Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1877).

3.H. Clarke, National Library of Ireland, MS 39,202/B, contains diaries from 1914 and 1919.

4.J. Horne and E. Madigan, Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912-1923, (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2013); K. Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); F. D’Arcy, Remembering the War Dead: British Commonwealth and International War Graves in Ireland Since 1914 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 2007); P. Murray, Skippy Dies.

5.. N. Bowe, personal conversation, June 2014.

      The Irish in Gallipoli

      Francis Ledwidge, 1917

      Where Aegean cliffs with bristling menace front

      The Threatening splendor of that isley sea

      Lighted by Troy’s last shadow, where the first

      Hero kept watch and the last Mystery

      Shook with dark thunder, hark the battle brunt!

      A nation speaks, old Silences are burst.

      Neither for lust of glory nor new throne

      This thunder and this lightning of our wrath

      Waken these frantic echoes, not for these

      Our cross with England’s mingle, to be blown

      On Mammon’s threshold; we but war when war

      Serves Liberty and Justice, Love and Peace.

      Who said that such an emprise could be vain?

      Were they not one with Christ Who strove and died?

      Let Ireland weep but not for sorrow. Weep

      That by her sons a land is sanctified

      For Christ Arisen, and angels once again

      Come back like exile birds to guard their sleep.

I

      Things Fall Apart: Art Emerges from Conflict

      1919. In Dublin, the artist Harry Clarke is struggling with a commission to illustrate an anthology of poetry edited by Lettice d’Oyly Walters, titled The Year’s at the Spring. Harrap’s in London has just published Clarke’s macabre illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. William Butler Yeats writes ‘The Second Coming’, reflections on the aftermath of the First World War. Dáil Éireann assembles in January, but by September is ruled illegal. Two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary are killed in Tipperary. The aviators John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown cross the Atlantic in their First World War era Vickers Vimy bomber, landing in Clifden, Connemara. The complete poems of Francis Ledwidge, who was killed in the Battle of Passchendaele, are published posthumously.

      The Treaty of Versailles is signed on 28 June 1919, marking five years to the day after the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Anarchy and revolution spread throughout Germany. In Berlin, Max Beckmann completes his painting, Die Nacht. On Bastille Day in Paris, a two-hour victory parade marches under the Arc de Triomphe, passing a towering pyramid of cannons along the Champs Élysées. In London, Edwin Lutyens designs a cenotaph to the dead and wounded that will be the centerpiece of Allied Peace Day celebrations. In Dublin, the Viceroy, Sir John French, decides that in Ireland, too, there will be a parade and a permanent memorial to the missing and wounded. Harry Clarke receives the commission to illustrate the eight volumes of Ireland’s Memorial Records.

      Ireland’s Memorial Records are Commissioned

Ireland’s Memorial Records were commissioned in 1919 and published in 1923 by the Dublin firm Maunsel and Roberts.1 These volumes contain the names of 49,435 individuals of Irish birth, ancestry, or regimental association who were killed in action or died of wounds in the First World War. There are eight volumes and 100 sets

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