The Anglo-Irish

Lacking the brains for the Church or the law, Kendal Coghill's profession was predetermined from his days at Cheltenham School. ‘My pugilistic qualifications steered the final decision to the Army—and India.’ It was probably family finances in Cork that preordained his destination. ‘India was my fate, and to India I went.’Footnote ²⁶ Even after the abolition of the purchase system for officers’ commissions in 1871, the Indian Army was a more realistic prospect for the younger sons of down-at-heel Protestant gentry. Even when they could afford to join British regiments, it was typically among high-numberedFootnote ²⁷ infantry of the line, with plenty of overseas service, that they found their niche. Frontier postings and imperial flashpoints, however, were a sphere in which they could rise to honour and prominence. The two antagonistic poles of the late Victorian army, Sir Garnet Wolseley and Lord Roberts, were both Anglo-Irishmen who began their careers in India. The latter is the quintessential imperial soldier, his career encapsulated in his title: the 1st Earl Roberts of Kandahar, Pretoria and Waterford. Born in India to a father in the Company's service, he was a ‘younger’ son. For such men, family tradition meant fighting tradition. If enlistees with their thoughts on a pound of bread found there was a ‘persistent military flavour to Irish life’, then the Anglo-Irish who frequently commanded them had reason to consider themselves a ‘military caste’.Footnote ²⁸

A martial race?

There was a strong statistical basis, then, for the formation of a persistent stereotype of the ‘fighting Irishman’. Just as the Indian Army drew distinctions between various Indian recruitment pools on the basis of ethnic martiality, the British Army was an institution in which the ‘races’ of the United Kingdom were culturally distinguished. Their ethnicity was defined and nurtured for military ends.Footnote ²⁹ The Duke of Cambridge, wary of fostering national sentiments within the forces, had long argued that regiments should observe a ‘judicious mixture’ of Englishmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen.Footnote ³⁰ But he did not perhaps anticipate that the opportunities offered by empire could serve as a unifying force, and that the experience of empire through military service might be instrumental in generating a sense of broader affiliation. While national identities were in fact enshrined in military custom, the overarching structure flattered its countless bricks with an appealing notion of what Kenny has called ‘imperial belonging’.Footnote ³¹

This is particularly pertinent to the Irish because the role they were expected to fulfil was military. The Highland kilt may have captured the Victorian imagination more forcibly, but it was the Irish who were most thoroughly scrutinized by the ‘martial race theory’ devised in India. Irish graduates were prominent in the Indian Civil and Medical Services, and Ireland furnished India with several viceroys. But the ‘archetypal’ Irishman abroad in India was a soldier.Footnote ³² A martial reputation had long been attached to their nation, and propagated by Irishmen. The intemperate Irish duellist had trod the London stage at the same time as the mercenary ‘Wild Geese’ trod European battlefields. David Omissi has suggested that the Indian martial race theories promulgated in the latter half of the nineteenth century may have grown out of ideas developed about the Irish and Scots in the preceding decades.Footnote ³³ If this was the case, then like other concepts which found in India both a theoretical formulation and experimental laboratory, these racial ideas were in turn re-applied to their place of derivation. For it was the High Victorian period of frequent imperial warfare and constant recruitment which saw the systematization of this warlike reputation into received colonial knowledge about the Irish. Like the Sikh, declared Sir Michael O'Dwyer, the Celt turns soldier ‘for sheer love of fighting’.Footnote ³⁴ It was likewise necessary for such unruly warriors to be commanded by English or Anglo-Irish officers. But when ‘well led and in a high state of discipline’, declared schoolboys’ favourite W. H. Fitchett, ‘there is no better fighting material in the world than an Irish regiment’.Footnote ³⁵

Moreover, like the mainstay of the Indian Army—the Punjabi Jat—the ideal Irish recruit was a sturdy agriculturist, physically hardy and mentally impressionable.Footnote ³⁶ These qualities were also attributed to the same ‘environmental determinism’ which Tan Tai Yong has shown to underpin much Indian martial race theory.Footnote ³⁷ As in Punjabi districts like Rohtak, where poor rains often left the soil flinty and unworkable, the mundane process whereby impoverished peasants turned redcoat for sustenance conveniently meshed with the official notion that a hard land bred tough men. Moreover, as with the Gurkhas, the perennial and uncorrupted raw material was to be found in those districts least tainted by modernity. The mind's eye of an army officer classically spied its recruit tramping the wild and isolated tracts of Galway, Kerry and Connemara, as depicted in Elizabeth Butler's painting Listed for the Connaught Rangers. As the nineteenth century progressed, officers such as the painter's husband, an Irish Catholic Lieutenant-General, bemoaned in his ‘Plea for the Peasant’ the noticeable supersession of these stout, easily-disciplined men by undernourished and fractious slum-dwellers.Footnote ³⁸ But this lamentable reverse might not be guessed at from the representation of fighting Irishmen. Officers wanted to see their men as peasants. Taking their cue from the newspaper cartoons studied by Michael de Nie, they and the public at large tended to see the Irish trooper with especial uniformity as ‘a Celt, a Catholic, and a peasant’.Footnote ³⁹ Such images proved, among other things, that the Irish were incapable of self-government.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is instructive that at times of rebel outbreak and land agitation these same cartoonists and columnists reached for the dark corners of the Empire for a simile—to India's bloodcurdling ‘thugs’ on more than one occasion.Footnote ⁴¹ What this hegemonic knowledge added up to was a means of control over a troublesome dependency that, as the Empire's Achilles’ heel, was often contemplated in the global context. Analogies between India and Ireland may have been exploited by nationalists of both countries, but they also, as Kaori Nagai has shown, were the focus knobs which brought the great image of empire into unquestionable clarity.Footnote ⁴² The Irishman was marked with the savagery of the ‘native’, but a thorough knowledge of his ways offered a means of turning those ‘pugilistic qualifications’ to good use.

Regimental identities

The institution which aimed to achieve this, by manufacturing an identity for its Irish recruits, was the regiment. Arguably an antiquated formation by the late nineteenth century, it was nonetheless retained in 1874 and 1881 under the major army reforms effected by Edward Cardwell and Hugh Childers. A small unit, it remained suitable for the frequent ‘little wars’ of empire. But the regiment also served to accommodate Britain's local identities. The reforms tied each to a specific recruiting region associated with its name and history. Ideally the officers too hailed from this region. Such units, it was thought, were steadier in battle and possessed in abundance the esprit de corps so prized by defenders of the system.Footnote ⁴³

The Irish, however, were already reputed for an esprit of their own. They had always brought a ‘culturally different element’ to the army, but the late Victorian regiment provided the means to define, foster, preserve and control this element.Footnote ⁴⁴ The combination of previously distinct units into two-battalion outfits meant that officers set out, to borrow Hobsbawm's phrase, to invent the traditions of their regiments.Footnote ⁴⁵ For the Irish units, regimental identity equated to, or rather superseded, national identity. The soldier-turned-academic, Sir John Hackett, remarked that the purpose of inculcating a notion of regimental difference is to encourage ‘a feeling of betterness’.Footnote ⁴⁶ For Irish soldiers this meant competition to be pre-eminent in Irishness. The Royal Irish Regiment may have been the oldest and most prestigious Irish unit, but the Connaught Rangers often considered themselves the most distinctively Celtic.Footnote ⁴⁷ At the same time as recruiters in Punjab, by only enlisting ‘true’ Sikhs, were encouraging Sikhs in general to distinguish themselves from Hindus by accepting baptism as members of the Khalsa, the culture of the Irish regiment displays the same tendency to protect, nurture, traditionalize and ultimately ossify what it considered to be ‘Irishness’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Needless to say, this notion of ‘Irishness’ was founded on well-established and overlapping layers of stereotype. The lyrics of regimental songs celebrate the fighting virtues of the Irish as well as their capacity for drink, adventurous spirit and giddy and eccentric mannerisms.Footnote ⁴⁹ This encouragement of ethnic spirit had political implications. The regimental identity which Irish enlistees adopted was intended not to erase, but to override anything preceding it. Any nationalism in which they indulged was to be strictly regimental. Irishmen arrived in the army with much local baggage: Catholic, Protestant, rural, urban, Anglophone or Gaelophone. They were not obliged to forget these associations, and an officer might even congratulate a man on his fine Tipperary brogue.Footnote ⁵⁰ But men were expected to settle their differences in the idiom of regimental Irishness—along with some blunter instruments of expression. ‘Many a fight there was’, recalls an Ulster Protestant of his early days with a draft of Galway Catholics, ‘till we began to know one another’. Discipline and unity in India were essential, ‘seeing we are in an enemy's country’.Footnote ⁵¹ The process was not fully successful, as when in 1901 St Patrick's Day fell on a Sunday. James McConville recalls a scene of grudging acceptance in Fort William, Calcutta:

However reluctantly, then, Irish behaviour was literally regimented by the British Army, which here plays a very different role socially than the Indian Army did within the communities which supplied its manpower. Punjabi recruitment policies consciously reproduced the social ‘cleavages’ which divided caste and creed in an effort to forestall dreaded ‘combination’ and mutiny.Footnote ⁵³ The army was the mirror of what the British fancied to be a polity so utterly fragmented that it could only be held together by their overlordship. But because disaffection or sectarianism could not be tolerated in Irish troops garrisoning the empire, the army itself was their unifying genius.

Military culture and popular culture

The formation of the Irish Guards provides a picture of how a regimental culture could be artificially assembled from scratch.Footnote ⁵⁴ Formed in 1900 as a gesture of reward from Queen Victoria to ‘my brave Irish soldiers’ for their severe losses in South Africa, they were intended as an Irish elite. Only the finest recruits were selected and every officer was Irish. They were also a simulacrum of everything in Irish culture recognizable and pleasing to the Victorian armchair general. ‘Come back to Erin’ was chosen for their slow march, they kept an Irish wolfhound called ‘Brian Boru’, and St Patrick's Day was celebrated with banqueting, hurling and the presentation of the Royal Shamrock—followed immediately by Mass.Footnote ⁵⁵ The political objective which informed this formula for a national tradition was loyalty. It was intended as an ideological counter to nationalist efforts to recruit Irishmen for the Boer cause.

But then the Guards’ tradition was not invented ex nihilo. It was referential. Besides older regiments, by 1900 there was much to draw on from popular culture and public perceptions of the Irish soldier. His image had been developed not just by martial race theorists, but by the relentless sentimentalism of the Victorian age. The process can already be seen in motion in the 1840s. Music covers show sorrowful leave-takings on the shores of Dublin Bay or ‘Wild Geese’ murmuring ‘Savourneen Deelish’ in foreign fields ‘from Dunkirk to Belgrade’, to quote Thomas Davis's contemporary poem.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such images of the lonely, sacrificial soldier culminate exploitatively in Colenso-themed ballads like ‘Some Mother will Lose a Son’. A glance at the back cover rewards with a list of other songs from the same London publisher, including ‘He'll ne'er forget Ould Ireland’, ‘What Paddy gave the drum’, ‘Queen and the Shamrock’, ‘What do you think of the Irish now?’ and two panegyrics on ‘Bobs’ among other Irish-themed ditties.Footnote ⁵⁷

The crucial formative period for this phenomenon, however, was the 1850s. The first two wars to receive modern journalistic coverage brought about a radical change in the public image of the soldier. The Crimean campaign saw British troops deployed in Europe for the first time since Waterloo. But it also saw a new kind of imperial public and a change from the scum of the earth recruited for drink, as Wellington dubbed his cannon-fodder, to the gallant and obedient patriot richly deserving the gentle ministrations of ‘the Lady with the Lamp’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The public was starting to understand the Empire, and hence it was starting to understand that which underpinned it: the armed forces. There was a fast-growing interest in the life of the individual soldier, a demand for it to be represented. Ireland was always the colonial jigsaw piece that refused to fit. Its politics were complex and misrepresented. Its problems seemed intractable. Hence the British public started to make sense of John Bull's Other Island Footnote ⁵⁹ through their representatives in the military. In this they followed their sovereign who, perhaps, never really understood her Irish until they laid down their lives for her at Hart's Hill.Footnote ⁶⁰ India was the premier imperial theatre in which the Irish served England in her wars. Hence the second great conflict of the 1850s was instrumental in educating the British public not only about India, but also about the Irish.

The Irish Regiment: virtues and vices

These representations should be seen in the context of the institutions that moulded the Irish soldier: the regiments. The rebellion and administrative shake-up that followed produced two-side effects which deepened the association of most Irish regiments to India. For units like the Connaught Rangers, which did not return to Europe until the 1870s, South Asia became a second home. For four other Irish regiments, an Indian tradition of service came as an inheritance. In Childers's 1881 reforms, six of the nine European outfits of the Company armies were yoked into two-battalion Irish units.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although the official reasoning is uncertain, the amalgamations made perfect sense to the Inniskillings’ historical committee, for whom the Madras Infantry was ‘Irish in all but name’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The transfer of the Europeans over to the British Army at the conclusion of Company rule had rendered the former even more Irish-heavy, since proportionately fewer Irish troops chose to accept a free discharge. Probably they faced dimmer prospects back home than their British counterparts.Footnote ⁷¹ Any inconsistencies in amalgamation were papered over by the new wave of regimental histories. One heralds the Munster Fusiliers as ‘the Inheritors and Trusted Guardians’ of the Bengal Europeans’ proud traditions.Footnote ⁷² If the Company units were seen as characterized by the presence of an Irish culture, it was appropriate that their descendant regiments should be among the chief vehicles of Irish martial identity.

As British soldiers saw more and more of their overseas service in Asia, India assumed a central place in regimental culture. The army—until 1914, of course—no longer fought great battles in Europe. Fighting for England meant fighting for the Empire. Chillianwalla, Kandahar, Colenso, Ladysmith, Sind, Punjab, Mutiny, Nepal, three times each Afghanistan and Burma: these were the names now embroidered on regimental colours. The ‘fighting Irishman’ crops up everywhere. The martial approbation he received within the army was echoed in such consumable militarism as W. J. Elliott's contribution to ‘The Deeds of Daring Library’. In this catalogue of Victoria Cross winners in Afghanistan, Elliott concludes his account of Major O'Moore Creagh's exploits with a racial compliment:

There was even a Maxim gun detachment from the Royal Irish Rifles on the 1903–1904 Younghusband (Sir Francis Younghusband) expedition to Tibet.Footnote ⁷⁴ The 50 years after the rebellion saw the image of the Irishman as soldier, with his attendant characteristics, become hegemonic. Moreover, the image becomes increasingly inflected with the martial race discourse which as the century progressed became such common currency for Indian officers. It is particularly significant when men like Wolseley, Roberts, White or Kitchener apply this language to Irish soldiers, because not only are they drawing on a theoretical framework of which they (especially Roberts) were the chief architects, but because they may also be recalling perceptions acquired through their own Irish background.Footnote ⁷⁵ Roberts himself had the pleasure of discovering, upon enquiry, that a solitary attacker he observed charging up a precipitous Afghan mountainside ‘apparently utterly regardless of the shower of bullets falling around him’, was an Irish private whom he claims was later awarded the Victoria Cross.Footnote ⁷⁶

If popular media supplied the British and Irish public with images of the gallant Gael, the Indian military legacy was impressed on the men themselves through their regimental culture. The Connaught Rangers celebrated the anniversaries of their Indian victories, tended the graves of comrades laid in Indian soil, and left behind them a memorial at Kanpur and an altar at Rawalpindi.Footnote ⁷⁷ But the most potent symbols of regimental association with India were the great military displays which accompanied the imperial Durbars of 1877, 1903 and 1911, and the 1885 Rawalpindi Durbar at which the ferocious efficiency of the huge British war machine was impressed upon the newly-installed Emir of Afghanistan. A young upcountry reporter named Rudyard Kipling observed with approval the synchronized manoeuvres of units representing the army's multiple ethnicities, both Indian and European. Always fascinated by Paddy Atkins, it is characteristic that his analogy should dwell first upon the Royal Irish Fusiliers:

At the 1911 Delhi Durbar the Irish were not merely one part of a well-oiled machine: they were the star attraction. The Connaught Rangers furnished a guard of honour for George V in Chandni Chowk, and their drums were given pride of place on parade. The King expressed his gratitude by investing them with new colours, after their formal anointing with Holy Water by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Agra. It was of course Britain to which the King was referring when he explained to the ranks that a colour is ‘the outward sign of your allegiance to God, Your Sovereign, and country’. At the officers’ reception, however, a Gaelic note was struck by Sir O'Moore Creagh of Afghanistan fame, the Indian Commander-in-Chief. Misquoting Davis's ‘Irish Brigade’, he proposed a toast to the Rangers:

These grandiose displays of power were in their way the most masterful of representations, symbolically enacting with military precision the sacred fictions of empire. The role of the Irish in them, as in India as a whole, was ambiguous. It was a place where they, a colonized population, were charged with keeping down another, and in this they occupied not a hypocritical position but an intermediary one. The colonial power needed them to embody the superior qualities of British troops and British character. One martial race meets another in Sir George MacMunn's account of an engagement during the 1888 Black Mountain Expedition. But what sets the Royal Irish Regiment apart is training:

However, the Irish trooper also needed to be reminded that he was not quite, to use that figurative as well as literal Victorian phrase, a ‘white man’. This was not just a question of Irishness, but also of class. It was important that years of bossing Indian servants should not be allowed to turn the heads of mere rankers. In the British caste system, ‘Tommy Atkins’ was very low down the pecking order. Any new-found affection for the brave young soldier was tempered by the old contempt, and there was particular cause for this in India. The drunkenness, lechery and disorder of the other ranks were an embarrassment to the master race.Footnote ⁸¹

But if soldiers were chided for such offences, they still had to be represented as committing them. Such failures of character confirmed their subordinate status. Their degraded behaviour, in need of officership, demonstrated the wisdom of a rigid social order which persisted in India long after it had begun to decay in England. But for the Irishman in India, such backsliding tendencies represented the wisdom of colonial rule, and his incapacity for self-government. Among the low, he may well have been the lowest, his inferiority obvious even in the eyes of Indians, who identified the ‘Rishti’ separately from the ‘Angrese’.Footnote ⁸² Even officers’ characters may not have been untouched by this slur. In a rare surviving memoir of an Indian sepoy, the author Sita Ram expresses approval of ‘true English sahibs, not sahibs from the hilly island’.Footnote ⁸³ In 1831 the young Mary Fitzgibbon braved her father's fury and wedded a ‘poor soldier’ at Bangalore. The fact that she states very plainly and proudly his Clonmel roots, and that only one Mrs McGregor broke the social boycott imposed upon her, suggests that his origins made her choice all the more offensive.Footnote ⁸⁴

The faults which undermined British superiority included drunkenness, debauchery, ignorance, overt and violent racism, criminality, mendacity, as well as traits which deflated their overblown manliness, such as ‘femininity,’ sentimentality or, more darkly, the personal weakness that led to desertion or suicide. Such mortal frailties almost certainly ran through the rank and file as a whole, but are attributed particularly to the Irish. As well as having a reputation for thieving, the ‘Connaught Footpads’ may also have been especially notorious for applying the fist and boot to disrespectful ‘natives’.Footnote ⁸⁵ A riot nearly ensued when, according to Frank Richards in his salacious memoir Old Soldier Sahib, a bazaar seller decided to quote to some Rangers Lord Curzon's injunctions against the ill-treatment of their Aryan brothers.Footnote ⁸⁶ But if this behaviour truly was characteristic of the regiment, it was not confined to its Irishmen. Corporal Fred Williams regaled his sister in England with the Ranger's pastimes at Ferozepore:

The uses of stereotype

True or not, stereotypes served a representative purpose. The Irish were the obverse side of the two-dimensional British colonial character. Envisaging an imperial conscription society, the architect of army reform, Hugh Childers, told his constituents ‘I wish to see the people of England in the best sense military, but not warlike’.Footnote ⁸⁸ But, while they may have kept it to themselves, the British public in fact loved their ‘little wars’ exquisitely.Footnote ⁸⁹ Fortunately they could defer the messier side-effects of noble conquest onto the ‘warlike’ Irish. In India, where the warrior's vanity came more to the forefront of the British personality, they remained a useful hook on which to hang the personal defects and weaknesses which underlay that immoveable visage. Brave they may be, but from beneath the war-paint could emerge a ridiculous, unmanned childishness. ‘Fine men’, remarked the Derry-born Sir George White of the Munster Fusiliers, ‘but sadly naughty boys’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Therefore the Irish are often represented as having a dual or Protean character, always unpredictable but always ready to play a new role and assume a new form, ‘everything by turns, and nothing long’.Footnote ⁹¹

Their supposed defects were, of course, often the same that dogged Indians. O'Dwyer, once a district magistrate, wrote that ‘only an Irish peasant can outdo a Punjabi in lies and evasion’.Footnote ⁹² This analogy means that the men who govern or officer them have to possess an understanding or affinity with them, a ‘native touch’. They have to mix their white with a little black. An Indian Army memorandum instructed officers who wished to accrue all-important ‘personal influence’ with their Sikhs or Gurkhas to acquaint themselves with their ‘customs and prejudices’.Footnote ⁹³ Likewise a good officer of Dubs or Munsters should ‘know his Irish to the ground’ to paraphrase a remark in Kipling's correspondence, for ‘they have to be handled on imaginative lines’.Footnote ⁹⁴ To accomplish this, in Sir Garnet Wolseley's view, the men had to be at least part Irish themselves. After a blatant cheeking shown him by some Tipperary striplings during his ‘griffin’ days in Burma, the young officer was struck by the discipline meted out by his superior, ‘an old and amusing Irishman’. Instead of reading them the Articles of War, Colonel Grattan, Royal Irish, chose to throw his desk out of the way, rush at the guilty men and literally kick them out of his office, calling them ‘limbs of Satan’. ‘As I think of the whole scene’, Wolseley comments, ‘I feel all the more how necessary it is that Irish soldiers should have Irish officers over them, who understand their curiously Eastern character’.Footnote ⁹⁵

The Irish military identity also, in this respect, represented an object of desire for the imperial consciousness. Matthew Arnold described Celtic literary sentiment and effusion as a kind of safety-valve for buttoned-down English culture. Despite its evident inferiority, ‘it is a temperament for which one has a kind of sympathy notwithstanding. . .one feels. . .magnetized and exhilarated by it’.Footnote ⁹⁶ It was challenging and bewildering, but as Kipling attempts in his description of a fictional regiment in India, the race that ‘fight like fiends, argue like children, reason like women’ and ‘obey like men’, could be comprehended through the military.Footnote ⁹⁷

Within the army, the idiom of Irishness could be one of social flexibility, a lubricant in men-officer relations. There is evidence that Irish regimental esprit de corps created a less rigid code of conduct and narrowed the social division between officers and men.Footnote ⁹⁸ Certainly the Irishman who could pull off audacity with characteristic humour, enjoyed a certain leeway with indulgent officers. In some respects this was the legacy of Company India, where an improbable explanation told in an irresistible (and possibly exaggerated) brogue could, according to one nostalgic memoir, excuse a drunkard four days absence without leave.Footnote ⁹⁹ Irishmen were emblematic of the old Company army and the rough and ready days when racial distinction and Club-consciousness were only beginning to circumscribe an Englishman's ambit of opportunity in the Subcontinent. They represented the strange age and manners of ‘the men who won India’. Swashbuckling eighteenth-century figures such as George Thomas, ‘the Raja from Tipperary’, exerted a fascination for the colonial imagination. In 1880, the Calcutta Review published an article on the life of Thomas, a Navy deserter who entered princely service, carved out a petty kingdom in Haryana, but died in poverty:

For the most masterful of imperial fabulists, such Irish rovers served as compelling liminal figures in the Indian social landscape. Stereotypes are frequently self-contradicting, and the composite mofussilite Irishman is no exception. In spite of his alleged racism, the Irish Catholic recruit, whether speechifying in Calcutta bazaars or lounging on a barbarian throne, is thought to possess a sort of racial understanding with the Indian native. Representationally, he slips between interstices of a cultural fabric impenetrable to the thoroughbred Englishman. Kipling makes his favourite character, Private Mulvaney, appear at home in India. Not only can he successfully impersonate Krishna while singing an Irish music-hall number but, finding Europe uncongenial at the expiration of his service, he returns to India as a railway foreman.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It is, moreover, Irishmen that Kipling makes use of when wanting to push his characters beyond the fascinating verge, into amalgamation with the ‘native’. Namgay Doola is a relic of Clive's era, the descendant of an Irish soldier-of-fortune still cleaning his Company musket in a Himalayan valley. Carnehan, Dravot, McIntosh Jellaludin and Kim's father, meanwhile, are all members of the despised population of European ‘loafers’.Footnote ¹⁰² Legislated against, these itinerant vagrants were nonetheless pursued by writers with almost anthropological interest, and typically represented as Irish ex-soldiers.Footnote ¹⁰³ Although he elsewhere recalls a real loafer who was English, the police memoirist A. T. Crawford describes his archetypal white tramp as ‘obviously Irish’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Bearing a shillelagh and perpetually drunk, the man appears to have stepped out of a Punch cartoon on Home Rule.

Crawford, with surprising indulgence, remembers his loafers as exemplars of the brawny manhood that won India. It is just that like Thomas, ‘a foiled, circuitous wanderer’ or Mulvaney, a ‘grizzled, tender, and very wise Ulysses’, they have somehow lost their way.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The essential characteristic of the Irish soldier, then, is that he is a wanderer. Everywhere at home, but always homeless, he is the ultimate creature of empire, the riddle and its answer. The Scotsman John Pindar, en route to Calcutta in 1859, recalls being imaginatively nourished by the extraordinary blarney of an old soldier:

With this modest admission, the veteran sings another man's lyrics, ‘Forget not your Kathleen’, to express his sentiments towards his native land.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is impossible to say of course whether Pindar is embroidering a genuine personality with the traits of fictional characters or, even more fascinatingly, whether the real McCann was fashioning his personality from a reading of Orientalist romance.

The Black Irish

Denman has remarked that the Irish soldier never developed a cult like that of the Highlander. But in the Subcontinent he certainly attained a larger-than-life status.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Because of the representative purposes which he served, in India the idea of the Irish soldier persisted long after his actual numbers declined. An icon perhaps for the working-class ranks as a whole, he was the public face of the army, regarded by turns with adoration and contempt. He stood for the Empire, and was a stand-in for Britain's warmongering spirit. Denman is right, therefore, to stress the many faces of the Irishman, for he was both ‘sentimentalised, patronised, abused, and feared’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Fear emerges in the paranoid accusation and vehement denial of conspiracy. Officers considered it wise to keep an eye out for seditious Catholic chaplains, while Kipling found it necessary to ridicule Dhulip Singh's plot to suborn the Irish regiments.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ By recruiting what one officer dubbed ‘turbulent spirits’, Peers has suggested that Indian colonial armies ‘acted as a sponge, siphoning off possible opponents’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Likewise the British Army was a force which not only enforced but also instilled loyalism in Ireland, but it did so by representational as well as by material means. In an era of increasing politicization for both India and Ireland, the promotion of Irish images of loyalty became paramount, and the military was a locus for such reassuring emblems.

It is striking that an Anglo-Irish Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, compared the nascent Congress to Irish Home Rulers in their ‘Celtic perverseness’. It betrays the anxiety that nationalists of each country would observe the analogies of government and racial perception linking them, and combine. Heather Streets has argued that the loyal Highlanders were deployed as an ideological counter to their troublesome Celtic brethren. But the army already possessed archetypes—or stereotypes—of good Irishmen.Footnote ¹¹¹ Just as Victorian newspapers frequently assured their readers that land agitation was out of sympathy with the ‘true Irishman’, Kipling's Mulvaney drew a firm line between the Tommy and the Fenian:

Ballads, although they have often been used as an example of subaltern opinion, can also be a means of manufacturing public opinion, of compelling citizens to sing the state's tune. Two contemporary ballads from the Mutiny era delineate the good Irish and the bad. In ‘The Irish Sepoys’ a Protestant loyalist voice compares Catholic Ribbonmen with Indian mutineers. The ‘Victory gained at Lucknow’, meanwhile, literally puts words into the mouths of returning heroes ‘that to England belong’—even though they are returning to Ireland.Footnote ¹¹³

But to turn to their own words and thoughts, how did the Irish represent themselves? Did they speak and act as they were urged, or did they articulate their own language?

Imperial identity

Evidence suggests that, at least in the nineteenth century, imperial destiny bound Irish soldiers together more cohesively as an ideology rather than as a national resistance, partly because it was, through army culture, more successfully yoked to their racial identity. One purpose, after all, of the manufactured identity was to forestall this opposition spirit.

Two valuable late nineteenth century sources demonstrate the fallacy of automatically regarding Irishmen as subaltern voices. George Keating's papers from the Second Afghan War contain not only a diary but also many poems and sketches, from which a suggestive picture of his origins, views and aspirations may be constructed. The 1911 speech of an anonymous Antrim man of the Royal Irish Fusiliers is unusual in that it is written to be performed. Reminiscing on an Indian service roughly contemporary with Keating's, it is delivered in a distinctly loyalist tone at a time of intense political division. As members of a literate minority in the ranks (the fusilier's comrades thought him ‘a prodigy of learning’), these men may be unrepresentative of the mass of recruits.Footnote ¹²¹ However, they nonetheless demonstrate how barrack-room ‘scholars’, considered dangerous firebrands during the White Mutiny, can instead in the 1880s become the articulators and applauders of an invented tradition.

The two men, one from Dublin and the other from Belfast, are enthusiastically loyal. Among Keating's papers is a newspaper cutting, also copied by hand, containing a poem condemning the 1882 Phoenix Park Murders,Footnote ¹²² the assassinations which made his contemporary, O'Dwyer, feel ‘ashamed of being an Irishman’.Footnote ¹²³ Recalling the same period, the old fusilier gives his audience a taste of marching across Punjab while singing the praises of Irish regiments:

Like W. Patterson, who was bitterly disappointed not to meet the King after failing to reach the top three in the boys’ running race at Delhi in 1911, this man also enthusiastically participated in a military Durbar. While Kipling watched the manoeuvres from on high in 1885, he was doing extra duty as the regiment's telegraph operator, and spent his free time wondering at the lamentable discipline of the Emir's bodyguard.Footnote ¹²⁵

Keating, moreover, participates in the process by which military culture absorbs and co-opts rebel rhetoric. In the same way that the Queen's desire in 1900 that her Irish wear the shamrock on St Patrick's Day transformed what had once been considered a seditious symbol into an ornament of uniform, the Irish military identity is capable of singing rebel ballads of the '98 while charging into battle against Pathans and Afridis. Awaiting a major engagement at Kandahar, he uses Thomas Moore's ‘Song of the Battle Eve’ to evoke his sensations, a poem which ends ‘then for Erin and her Cause, boy, hurra! hurra! hurra!’Footnote ¹²⁶ This phenomenon is integral to the ‘fictive unity’ which Kipling engineers for the Empire, one so persuasive that it is capable of incorporating even its rebel subjects.Footnote ¹²⁷ His fictional Black Tyrone bristles with Fenians, and yet fights for ‘the Widdy betther than most, bein contrairy-Oirish’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Despite the evident contradiction, Irish soldiers may well have conformed to such hegemonic representation, not merely because it was inculcated in or expected of them, but because it made sense to them. Military culture was capable of reconciling apparent contradictions, and possessed a power that could even be extended to the public sphere when regiments marched out of Irish cities to rapturous applause and the tune of ‘A Nation Once Again’. Henry Jourdain, an Irish officer of the Connaught Rangers, recalls a tipsy Boer War evening spent with his comrades singing ‘The Wearing of the Green’ in a hotel bar. This was intended patriotically, not mockingly, but it was the patriotism of a staunch loyalist on imperial service. A radical South African politician who, overhearing, remarked ‘ha, ha, then I am not the only rebel here’, either mistook their meaning or understood it all too well.Footnote ¹²⁹

Lastly, Keating and the old fusilier are complicit, or even collaborate, in the stereotypical portrayal of Irishmen. Their martial status is heartily reinforced. ‘I daresay you would like an opinion as to the qualities of our countrymen as soldiers’, the latter tells his audience. The old soldier says he can do no better than quote Lieutenant Shipp's famous appraisal of Irish merits in the Peninsular as ‘promptness to obey, a hilarity, a cheerful obedience, and willingness to act’. Here the speaker serves literally as a mouthpiece for English views.Footnote ¹³⁰ As for ‘hilarity’, Keating's papers contain more than one joke of which a dozy Irishman is the inevitable butt. Moreover, the culturally-aware fusilier's recollection of a genuine clashing of East and West at Rawalpindi, in which some less-educated friends ignore his warning not to flirt with some Punjabi women and are nearly murdered by an angry mob, is at base a rather unhappy and ultimately prosaic misunderstanding. Nonetheless he embroiders this ‘tay party’ into an amusing anecdote of the feckless Irishman's penchant for getting into a scrape, and unselfconscious willingness to try a universal lingo with his fellow peasant. He sets it up as an encounter between India and the Irish race as a homogeneous whole, naming the soldiers involved as

Negotiating the stereotypes

Keating and the old fusilier handle their blunter-minded countrymen with something approaching condescension, while seeking to exemplify the fighting spirit of the loyal Irishman in themselves. In this they perhaps aspire to the manner of the officers for whom, more so than the rank and file, identity is flexible and can be manipulated. The various characteristics which make up Irishness can be adopted or rejected for the individual advantage of a man like Kendal Coghill, who found an enjoyable outlet for his public school pugilism at Delhi in 1857. Although he holds the Adjutancy of the 2nd Bengal Europeans, his bravado is undercut by a social inferiority complex. Cutting a grotesquely comic figure amidst the ruins, among his brother officers he deploys his Irishness so as to be accepted as an Englishman. Coghill allows his comrades, including the dashingly murderous William Hodson, to call him ‘Paddy’.Footnote ¹³² He also contrives to loot jewellery by concealing it inside a broken down Irish cart, which he then purchases in the prize yard for four rupees, giving the impression that he is doing so for the sake of ‘affection for anything reminding me of the ould country’. ‘The National sentiment paid’, he concludes. He even plays the fool with his Commanding Officer, who questions him on his recollections of first going into action. ‘I really cant say Colonel I answered. I was only a lad freshly captured from Ireland and I think I thought it a hot sort of Donnybrook.’Footnote ¹³³

At almost the same time that Coghill was comparing an Indian battlefield with the famously riotous Dublin fair, another young officer, L. M. Buchanan of the Connaught Rangers, was doing the same with a festival witnessed in a Himalayan village.Footnote ¹³⁴ Therefore, although Anglo-Irish officers might invoke an Irish idiom in their quest for personal advancement, it might be necessary for them to periodically denigrate their ‘curiously Eastern’ country or countrymen to brush off its Gaelic taint. ‘A fine fighting lot, but a bit out of hand at times’, remarked Gough of the 53rd Foot. Gough approved its ‘wild Irish’ charge, but did so as a level-headed English officer who knew how to handle and channel this loose-cannon fighting spirit. He had, however, his own reputation for impetuous assaults and for wasting lives, and so it may have been expedient for him not to associate too closely with this spirit.Footnote ¹³⁵ Attachment to an Irish identity could undermine authority and standing. The Scotsman, Private John Brown, may have had General Napier's nationality in mind when he dubbed his address to the troops ‘blarney in first rate style’, while the old subadhar, Sita Ram, implies that this disrespect could extend to Indian troops.Footnote ¹³⁶ The threat is more obvious in the case of brother officers. On a Himalayan hunting trip in the 1870s, Lieutenant Hugh Pearse delighted in the antics of his companion Fenico, evidently an Irish officer. Exasperating at times, Fenico nearly bores Pearse to sleep trying to prove that Moore was (excepting Shakespeare) the greatest poet who ever lived, but makes up for it with his hilarious inability to sit still when fishing. Fenico's finest hour arrives in a thunderstorm, when he hides in a schoolhouse ‘frightened out of his wits and calling on all the saints in the calendar to save him’.Footnote ¹³⁷ The Irishman's perspective on all this is unfortunately not discernible, but it was probably fear of suffering a similar fate which motivated Coghill to compare post-siege Delhi to a city in the grip of an Irish District Council, though stretching from Castletownshend to Bunalun.Footnote ¹³⁸ Even the great Roberts did not escape. ‘He is fickle,’ brooded General MacGregor in his Afghanistan diary, ‘like all Irishmen.’Footnote ¹³⁹

Such men, members of a nativized colonial class, retain a necessarily ambiguous relationship with the analogy between Irishness and Indianness. It is a comparison which springs to mind surprisingly easily in their perceptions of India. ‘Amidst the strangeness it was pleasant to note a familiar touch’, recalls Captain McKeag of his arrival in India in 1916. When asking a tonga-wallah for the fare, the ‘little brown man’ replied ‘“anything you like, Sahib”, and touched his cap as if he had studied the gesture from the Dublin jarvey’. ‘Though’, McKeag adds significantly, ‘one missed the air of independence infused by our compatriot.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ But do men who might end up as jarveys co-operate in the comparison? Keating does betray an affinity, even an affection for what Kipling's soldiers refer to as ‘the Trap’, and his position as a soldier affords him a certain liberality in his social intercourse. Nonetheless, in his poetic description of the soldier's life in the Subcontinent he remains firmly an outsider, presumably to the British world as well as to the Indian:

It is hard to imagine Keating applying the boot to tardy servants, and even on the battlefield he is moved to pity by the sight of an Afghan and his son lying dead together.Footnote ¹⁴³ However, it seems unlikely that equation with Indians through the unpleasant, degrading or weak parts of the Celtic stereotype would have pleased Irish soldiers. Unlike officers, they could not nearly as easily cut themselves off from their Irish identity. They were left with several choices. If they were treated as children or animals, they could act accordingly. The social conditions which pushed men to behave in degraded and undignified ways were common to all. But if the characterization of these traits as Irish was partly based on truth it was because these conditions were more acute for Irishmen. They were particularly looked down upon by officers and civilians They had less prospects, less to gain, and therefore less reason to behave well. They may have felt the need to be violent to match their martial reputation, and racist to assert themselves as white men.

Alternatively, men could present themselves as members of the ‘respectable poor’. Aspiration, to a degree, could exist in the British army, especially in India where there was frequent opportunity for medals, where expenses were low and a teetotaller could save his meagre wages, where a man could educate himself in his ample spare time, and where with the toleration of his superiors he could be a member of the ruling race instead of a corner-boy or guttersnipe. The education certificate James McConville earned in India helped him rise to the heights of Lieutenant-Colonel. Edward McCullagh, the son of a Dublin porter, did not achieve promotion but was nonetheless certified as ‘a hard-working, steady, sober and honest man’ by 2nd Lieutenant D. French, who accompanied his attestation with a somewhat paternalistic private note to his former charge, urging him to ‘work hard and do well’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

To achieve this state, however, it was necessary for aspiring rankers to emphasize their martial and loyal Irish virtues while shunning the vices. The diaries kept by Lance-Corporal J. A. Maxwell of the Royal Irish Rifles at Meerut and Maymyo in Burma are filled with such perfunctory disciplinary notes as ‘Two men wilfully broke up their rifles to-day’ and ‘McClusky got the “Clink.”’ Almost the only occasion in 1911 which apparently warranted descriptive language was a ‘parade in celebration of assumption of the title of Empress of India by her Regal Majesty Queen Victoria’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In his study of Indian troops in the Company armies, Kolff has shown how the peasant sepoy ‘could ignore identities handed down to him, adopt new ones, or toy with them for a lifetime.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Possibly in the early Company period a similar potential for self-invention was available to Irishmen such as the freebooter ‘Raja from Tipperary’, and it continued to be the case in settler societies like South Africa or Australia. But India was different. White men were not intended to settle, and even those who slunk beneath the official radar were governed by the rigid caste hierarchy which the British imposed on themselves as well as on their Indian subjects, of which martial race theory was only one offshoot. Therefore what flexibility for re-definition was permitted to Irishmen took place within the nexus of stereotype and national identity, through which in India some became practised at making cunning sideways movements. It was possible for such men to pick and choose facets of Irishness, and construct with their selections a ‘good’ Irish identity. Scott Cook has emphasized that the high noon of empire was an equinox at which the ideologies of imperialism and of Irish nationalism could be pursued in parallel.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Keating's is a ‘healthy’ national feeling, indulged in the safe language of Young Ireland romanticism. His invocation of Erin in Afghanistan is not to be scrutinized, but encouraged, for she needs such loyal devotees to keep her symbolic purity out of Fenian hands.

Switching nationality

The social pressures of the officers’ mess, barrack-room and bazaar, then, could compel Irishmen to become truly Protean. They demonstrate that national identification is permeable, flexible, can be suppressed or abandoned and later revived, but that it can also come back to haunt a man. This did not mean necessarily the loss of nationality and the fate of a Ulyssean wanderer. The Company's men did commit themselves to a life abroad. But if their social aspirations were more circumscribed, soldiers in the British Army were sustained by the prospect of return. Homesickness like Keating's was clearly very common. But to actually go back to Ireland meant being only an Irishman—or possibly an Ulsterman—whereas abroad these men could be British, a privilege not within the grasp of ‘native’ troops. The younger son of an Athlone clergyman, John Edward Moffatt, travelled to India as an army doctor in 1858. Referring in his journal to the seagoing qualities of ‘our countrymen’, he evidently means British or even Englishmen. But the long Cape voyage and melancholy sight of a maritime funeral led him to meditate on the necessity of keeping one foot on native soil:

Soldiers in colonial service can exhibit a split-nationality, identifying simultaneously as British and Irish. They can be publicly English but privately Irish, or air their Irishness in public as part of an aspiration to be British. To bid a fond farewell to ‘dear old England’ from an India-bound troopship is a pattern common to Anglo-Irish officers like Wolseley, but also to rankers like the old fusilier.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ ‘Roll on Blighty’ was the expression constantly heard by Private Henry Brooks of the Inniskilling Fusiliers, when stationed at Secunderabad shortly before the First World War.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

The overarching structure that permits this switching remains the regimental identity, its power demonstrated by the ability to ‘convert’ recruits to its regimental nationality. In contrast to Irish soldiers who bid adieu to Dover cliffs, a spell in the Royal Irish Rifles sufficed to make the Kent man George Horton wonder sadly ‘how many would return to see those green hills again’, on departing ‘old Ireland’ for the colonies.Footnote ¹⁵¹ David McAusland was born in Abbey Parish, Belfast, but he took to the Black Watch with such alacrity that only a consultation of the regimental description book assures one that he was not Scottish. He intersperses his memoir with poems glorifying Scotland and the 42nd. Worshipping Sir Colin Campbell as other Irishmen adored Roberts, he proudly recalls the day when ‘the old Chief’ rode up to him in person:

Common to both these men however is an imperial sense of the world and a pride to have played the game wherever they were sent. Liam Ó Murchú recalled bitterly the ‘brain washing’ his father received from the Dublin Fusiliers. A ‘six week voyage on a troop ship was long enough to cut the cord of memory and launch him headlong into the new colonial world’.Footnote ¹⁵³ But the records of these men suggest that their national identities were not erased but absorbed into a feeling of belonging to an imperial race. Keating repeatedly copies out division orders and congratulatory telegrams of senior officers, along with the complete service record of Lord Roberts, while Private Brooks articulates his own position in India with reference to colonial history. Obviously intending his memoir to be read, he includes a brief and somewhat misinformed history of the Mutiny, and concludes his narrative by predicting the gradual submission of India to ‘British Law and order’. Repeating the maxims of the civilizing mission, he awaits her establishment as ‘a commercial country of first rate importance’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

This is not to suggest of course that all Irish soldiers were obedient imperialists. The old fusilier recalls three men trying to shoot their superiors.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Gonne and MacBride, as already mentioned, made recruitment itself became a nationalist battleground during the Boer War. But, for the time being, the army held the representational trump. Despite their challenge its ability to reduce Irish efforts at self-definition into mere types remained undiminished, and ultimately all such types—good and ‘black’, reformed and incorrigible—feed back into the Protean image of the Irish soldier. Those who understood this discourse were capable of negotiating their Irishness through the imperial idiom. The effect this ultimately had on Irish society has been underestimated, and given a different course of events it may even have prevailed in Irish life and politics.

The fraternity of exiles

However, regimental nationalism also lent itself to structures of corporate identity which stood apart from official channels. The growth of Freemasonry was closely tied to the army population, more than fifteen Irish military Lodges being established in India during the colonial period, often connected with specific regiments. The papers of Anketell Moutray contain sizeable correspondence related to the Connaught Rangers lodge which he founded, and Orange Lodges enjoyed a similar worldwide appeal.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Even without an institutional basis, the Company period in particular saw networks form within and between Irish-dominated regiments along which news about home regions and towns travelled between men with common roots.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Messes frequently raised subscriptions to commemorate fallen officers, but an inscription at Kamptee Catholic cemetery, it appears, was paid for by the rank and file of the Munster Fusiliers:

L. M. Buchanan strongly approved of his own Connaught Rangers ‘fraternising’ with the Royal Irish Fusiliers at Delhi in 1860: ‘a splendid Regt. . .like ourselves their men are exclusively Irish’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ But he would not have smiled at Cork friends Farrier Murphy and Private Denine exchanging notes one year before on the ‘Tyrany’ [sic] of the military authorities. Officers realized that disaffection in the army would likely develop and spread through these ‘townsmen’ relationships, just as Irish rebellions typically struck sparks in the hot forge of local deprivations and resentments.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The supplanting of local affinities with membership of the homogenizing military ‘fraternity’ served to counter this trend. Murphy's complaints are an example of the former and his turn of phrase—‘this station that they transported us into is the devils own place’—is significant. The comparison of Company soldiers to entrapped convicts was in currency both as mockery and self-pity.Footnote ¹⁶¹ As Kenny has argued, the sense of exile felt by individuals obliged to emigrate or enter imperial service is not to be underestimated as a defining feature of their identity.Footnote ¹⁶² Even in Keating's case, the repetition of a theme in his collected ballads is impressive: ‘Dublin bay’, ‘Limerick is beautiful’, ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ and the entirety of Campbell's ‘The Exile of Erin’. The Irish military identity in India may have generally remained dependent on the British imperial identity, lacking a mode of expression that was not prefabricated. But it remained, if only tenuously, tied firstly to something else, personal and unquantifiable, back home, and secondly to the experience of separation from that home. Hence social organizations based around that personal connection, lying beyond the military remit, exist in an ambiguous relationship to the regiment. Irish imperial Lodges may no longer in this period have been a much-resented harbour of Masonic dissent and shabby characters excluded from English foundations. Rather they were an unofficial arena of regimental patronage and promotion.Footnote ¹⁶³ But the consolidation within them of Unionist politics by an influential figure like Moutray, while largely in keeping with the conservative tenor of the officer corps, nonetheless demonstrates that Irish social institutions were permeable on both sides. If the social forces within them were largely yoked to regimental affairs, home interests could also seep in with the latest newspapers and each incoming member. The politicization of Irish soldiers, then, is not a movement which needs to be tracked or an event which needs to be dated. As long as they remained a body drawn together by a corporate feeling they constituted a political body set apart from other soldiers, inherently a danger. Peter Karsten has argued that, despite such crises as the Fenian infiltration of the 1860s, the Irish soldier remained largely subordinate.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Indeed, quiescence was largely assured for an extended period because Irish social institutions smoothly channelled this corporate feeling upwards into regimental promotion and imperial aspiration. But they remained an unsealable membrane through which political interest groups could make an entry. The question of politicization in the army is not actually one of activism, national awakening or even resistance to cultural hegemony. The 1910s did in fact see the significant permeation into the ranks of a political mood, but it was triggered fundamentally by a crisis of identity.

The war of identities

So Gerald Little consoled his brother in a letter from Delhi in July, 1920, showing how even the most callow officer, preoccupied with promotion, was obliged to pay attention to events at home. Although he may not have realized it, the evocation of Irish martiality and heroism by civilian paramilitaries was the death knell of the all-Irish regimental culture that he had entered upon his commission in the ‘Royal Dubs’. Irishmen now had a choice of armies to join, and their choice would determine what sort of Irish they were. The dichotomy that they had long negotiated between the ‘good’ and ‘black’ sides of their national stereotype was now politically divided. What has not been appreciated is that home tidings did not only exert a social pressure on Irishmen to declare themselves nationalists but also on Ulstermen to call themselves such and Unionists. At least after the signing of the Ulster Covenant, diehard unionism may have indeed posed just as much of a divisive threat to military discipline as do-or-die nationalism, as in the case of the ‘Curragh Mutiny’ of 1914. Jimmy Tate, a Lieutenant in the Indian Public Works Department, had likely followed this incident in the news, and in 1917 he thanked his parents for keeping him up to date with the Ulster Volunteers. ‘They still seem to be scrapping about home rule’, he confided to his father. ‘I hope the Whiteabbey Company is still ready to give them a good beating.’Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Meanwhile at Kanpur, just three weeks before the Easter Rising, M. Murphy signed what was probably his last ever letter home to his wife ‘your fond husband and fenian’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Murphy may have used the word in a sentimental sense to mean an Irish warrior, but its political meaning was certainly well-established. The ambiguity is indicative of the rupture in the longstanding continuum between Irish origin and Irish military identity. Desperate to boost flagging Irish enlistment for the Western Front, the army commissioned exploitative recruitment posters urging men to sign up for Erin, for the shamrock, for tradition, adventure and even for St Patrick. Their very shrillness suggests the weakening and contradiction of the army's cultural grip.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Officers and men were left on opposite sides of diverging loyalties. Having recently returned to Ireland from the Indian theatre, the Masonic aficionado Moutray found himself on the point of pulling his revolver on a Connaught Ranger. To the officer's horror, the ‘dirty dog’ objected to joining a flying column to hunt down his own countrymen. The violence of his reaction may have owed something to the fierce climate of suspicion in which even this arch-Unionist was suspected by his brother officers of disloyalty. Failure to stand for the national anthem at the Chamba Club, Dalhousie in 1913 had set off a series of private interviews and correspondence which nearly concluded with Moutray's retirement.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

It was not long before the regiment was posted back to India, and it is in this context that the mutiny of the 1st Battalion in 1920 should be understood. While Lieutenant Little nonchalantly reflected on civil strife, ‘more than eighty men at Jullunder and Solon ground arms in reaction to British atrocities in Ireland, sparking a paranoia of Irish combination and frantic censoring of soldiers’ correspondence’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Although the nationalist significance of the protest has been both exaggerated and downplayed, the finding by a member of the guard of the letters ‘IRA’ carved into the bedsteads of every cell in which mutineers were housed at Dagshai suggests that the event was more than a freak flash in the hot pan of the Indian summer. More suspect but, nonetheless, suggestive local evidence has it that a man on furlough threw off his uniform onto a Roscommon railway platform upon hearing the news of the Jullunder mutiny.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Any republican infiltration notwithstanding, it seems likely that these men were responding to external pressure in the same fashion as the Munster Fusiliers who are reported to have sworn a public oath in 1917 that they were as good nationalists as any Sinn Feiner. Branded as traitors by their republican countrymen and regarded with suspicion by their British comrades, rash gestures were made by these men in a ‘losing battle to defend their Irishness’. Many soldiers expected Home Rule, but first victory.Footnote ¹⁷² Instead, not only were they pressured to give up the service which represented their social worth and retirement security. Ultimately their martial identity itself had been appropriated by the disciplined, unsmiling but astonishingly Irish martyrdom of the Easter Rebels. Those who gave their rifles away to insurgents may not have done so wholly out of sympathy, but because the retention of a soldier's identity would necessitate joining them. Only self-abnegation was left to men who were no longer permitted to reconcile their nationality to their profession.