From their assumed connections with the Irish Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force, both the 16^th and 36^th Divisions have attracted academic and popular attention. The 10^th (Irish) Division actually entered battle earlier – at Suvla on the Gallipoli peninsula – than either the 16^th or 36^th Divisions, yet has been comparatively neglected. In part, as Stephen Sandford’s new study demonstrates, this was not only because the 10^th Division had no obvious sectarian affinity, but also through its resemblance to other Kitchener divisions, notwithstanding its inclusion of battalions from all eight nominally Irish regiments. Indeed, Sandford profitably draws parallels between the 10^th and another of those in ‘K1’, the 13^th (Western) Division. As the 10^th had to be made up with a battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, and received significant drafts of English recruits – particularly from Wiltshire – it does certainly resemble the haphazard process of recruiting the New Armies that has emerged from other studies in recent years. There was even a ‘Pals’ element in the 7^th Royal Dublin Fusiliers drawn from the Irish Rugby Football Union although most Irish recruits were unskilled.

Rather in the manner of Richard Grayson for West Belfast, Sandford has used census material and medal rolls rather than Soldiers died in the Great War (1919) to identify those serving in the 10^th Division, as well as surviving service records. There are almost thirty pages of statistical appendices. With regard to those Irishmen serving in the division, it enables Sandford to challenge the existing interpretation of Irish recruitment patterns in 1914 by earlier historians such as Patrick Callan and, especially, David Fitzgerald in terms of earlier suggestions of motivation derived from assumed social composition. Detailed scrutiny of the division’s officers also leads Sandford to showing that Cooper’s old history of the 10^th at Gallipoli, published in 1918, was quite wrong in claiming 90 per cent of the officers were Irish. In reality, it was somewhere between 67 and 74 per cent, with a surprising number of those who were Irish being men promoted from the pre-war regular ranks. A few were from the Royal Irish Constabulary but others were also from beyond what might be termed as the pre-war officer class. The officers’ files now available at the National Archives can be quite revealing, as in the case of Lieutenant H. G. Montagu, an Australian originally commissioned in the Royal Fusiliers in 1911, who then deserted to serve in the Turkish army during the Italo–Turkish War. Yet Montagu managed to obtain a commission in the 7^th Royal Munster Fusiliers in 1914 and, despite dishonouring cheques, went with the battalion to Gallipoli. Sent home to answer charges of murder and drug-taking that predated the war, Montagu resigned but was then killed serving as a private in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in 1916.

Such details enliven Sandford’s analysis but, unfortunately, once he has passed beyond Gallipoli, where the division lost 75 per cent of its original strength, there is rather more general discussion of such aspects as leadership, morale and discipline, from which the division almost disappears. Even in the chapter on leadership at Gallipoli, there is far more on familiar figures such as Ian Hamilton, Frederick Stopford, and Aylmer Hunter-Weston than on the division’s commander, Bryan Mahon. Nor does Sandford delve down below brigade level. It is also somewhat surprising to find such a well-known soldier as Horace Smith-Dorrien referred to as Smith-Dorian. The tendency to stray on to more general issues such as artillery supply – and techniques employed at Neuve Chapelle and Loos – is also apparent in the concluding chapter on the ‘Indianisation’ of the division in Palestine in 1918. At least Sandford succeeds in rescuing Mahon from the contemporary criticisms of Hamilton and the more recent judgement in Robin Prior’s study of Gallipoli. Sandford also sheds some light on the nature of Mahon’s clash with Henry Beauvoir de Lisle at Gallipoli.

The 10^th Division was certainly not Irish in terms of its composition although Sandford suggests its individual battalions drew on the Irish ethos of the parent regular battalions. Sandford concludes that the 10^th Division was a ‘solid if unspectacular’ example of a New Army formation. His study of it is similarly a solid contribution to the historiography.