I went to the Service of Remembrance in the Friary in Waterford at 12.15. A very moving ceremony for the Waterford war dead with a bit pomp and pageantry provided by some local British Armed Forces veterans.
Did you make any of the commemorative events in Waterford over the weekend @Fagan_ODowd? I believe there was a commemoration yesterday, close to your neck of the woods in the church in Mayorâs Walk.
As my father said one day when he was perusing the book The Waterford War Dead âJaysus it was the greatest clear out of Protestants everâ
Most would have went to put food on the table.
Indeed, the poor cunts, when you think of what they went through only to return home and be treated as traitors by many, and still are by some dipshits on the Internet who never got a fingernail dirty in their lives
Which is a fair call, but then theyâre called souptakers.
Political climate had changed rapidly while they were away - a sizable amount also went off their own back to answer Redmondâs call. Like everything, itâs not a black and white issue. I have no qualms with any Irish man fighting in either world war â Like I said many times, my own grandfather was at Dunkirk. I also have no issue with remembering the Irish fallen but I think we can do it without jumping on the Poppy bandwagon as that has been hijacked to mean something completely different.
cc @Tim_Riggins
For the ego of kings.
Unionists still have that delusion. Propping up a government thatâs only itching to cut them adrift.
The unionists here still think theyâre holding the brits to honour their sacrifice. It runs very deep with them. As if the British government cares about the ordinary English squaddy, never mind the Irish ones.
My Great Grandfather barely had a pot to piss in working as a farm labourer all his life trying to scratch out a living. He went to war at the age of 34, got badly injured and got home only to pass away after a couple of years.
Shove your unionist shite up your pretend Ra hole, you uucoam! He went to war out of necessity, fought for his country and my grandfather grew up not knowing his auld boy because of it
Ferguson takes an unexpected line today
november 11 2018, 12:01am, the sunday times
niall ferguson
The young are being taught dangerous nonsense about the Great War
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To my 19-year-old son, the First World War â which ended 100 years ago today â is as remote an event as the Congress of Berlin was to me when I was 19, Lloyd George as distant a figure as Disraeli. To my generation, the First World War was not quite history. My fatherâs father, John Ferguson, had joined up at the age of 17 and fought on the western front as a private in the Seaforth Highlanders. He was one of more than 6m men from the United Kingdom who served. Of that number, 722,785 did not come back alive. Just under half of all those who lost their lives were aged between 16 and 24 â a fact that never fails to startle.
John Ferguson was one of the lucky ones who survived and returned. But, like more than 1.6m other servicemen, he did not come back unscarred. He was shot through the shoulder by a German sniper. He survived a gas attack, though his lungs suffered permanent damage.
My grandfatherâs most vivid recollection of the war was of a German attack. As the enemy advanced, he and his comrades fixed bayonets and prepared for the order to go over the top. At the last moment, however, the command was given to another regiment. So heavy were the casualties in the ensuing engagement that my grandfather felt sure he would have died if it had been the Seaforthsâ turn.
As a schoolboy, reading the poetry of Wilfred Owen, learning to shoot an antiquated rifle in our schoolâs Combined Cadet Force, I could readily imagine the raw fear of awaiting that order. I wonder if my son knows that sensation.
His generation is not only more distant from the war than mine. It has also been exposed to a great deal of nonsense on the subject. Here are just a few examples I have encountered in recent weeks.
Despite the enormous sacrifices of life and treasure, the war was worth fighting. (No, as I argued in my book The Pity of War, an unprepared Britain would probably have been better off staying out, or at least delaying its intervention.)
The peace of 1919 failed and was followed just 20 years later by another world war because there wasnât enough European integration in the 1920s. We learnt our lesson after 1945 and thatâs why we havenât had a third world war. (No, we havenât had a third world war mainly because of Nato.)
The peace failed because of American isolationism. (No, it failed because Woodrow Wilsonâs belief that Europeâs borders could be redrawn on the basis of national âself-determinationâ was naive.)
Today, 100 years later, politics in both Europe and the United States is afflicted by the same pathologies that destabilised Europe after the First World War. (No, populism isnât fascism.)
Let me counter with 10 points that I would like all my children to understand about what happened to their great-grandfatherâs generation.
The war was not âfor civilisationâ, as claimed on John Fergusonâs Victory Medal. It was a war for predominance between the six great European empires â the British, the French and the Russian against the German, the Austrian and the Ottoman â that broke out because all their leaders miscalculated that the costs of inaction would exceed the costs of war.
It was not fought mainly by infantrymen going over the top. It was fought mainly with artillery. Shellfire caused 75% of casualties. The war-winning weapons were not poison gas or tanks so much as improvements in artillery tactics (the creeping barrage, aerial reconnaissance).
The Germans were not doomed to lose. If the French had collapsed in the first six months of the war â when 528,000 French soldiers were permanently incapacitated â it could have been 1870 or 1940. French resilience was one of the surprises of the war. Even so, by mid-1917 the French were finished as an attacking force. German submarines were sinking frightening numbers of the ships supplying Britain. With Russia consumed by the revolution, American investors saw a German victory as possible as late as the spring of 1918.
True, the Germans were handicapped in many ways. Their allies were weak: Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria. Their generals used methods â submarine warfare, in particular â that made American intervention likely, if not inevitable.
Economically, too, the German side was at a massive disadvantage. Britain and her allies had bigger empires (the population ratio was 5.3 to 1), bigger economies (3.6 to 1) and bigger budgets (2.4 to 1). Moreover, even before the US entered the war, Britain had access to Wall Street.
However, the Germans were formidably superior at killing (or capturing) the other side. Overall, the Central Powers killed 35% more men than they lost, and their average cost of killing an enemy soldier was roughly a third of the other sideâs. The German soldiers were effective enough to win their war against Russia in 1917.
The Germans ultimately lost because the British Army proved more resilient than theirs. Men such as John Ferguson simply would not give up, despite all the hardships they had to endure. Was it patriotism? Did they simply believe in the official war aims? Or was it because British propaganda was so effective â and British military justice so harsh? Perhaps all of these played a part. But it also mattered that British officers were generally competent; that the average Tommyâs lot was made bearable by plentiful âplonkâ and fags; that, despite high casualties, the bonds between âpalsâ and âmatesâ endured.
The German army finally fell apart in the summer and autumn of 1918, after it became clear that British tenacity and American intervention made a German victory impossible, and after Bolshevik ideas began to spread westwards from the eastern front. Beginning with the Battle of Amiens (August 8-11, 1918), the Germans lost the will to fight and began to surrender in droves.
The war was followed not by peace but by pandemonium. The dynasties toppled: Romanovs, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Ottomans â all gone. Their great multi-ethnic empires also disintegrated. The Saxe-Coburgs survived by renaming themselves âWindsorâ, but still lost the lionâs share of Ireland. Not only in Russia but all over the world, red revolution seemed unstoppable. To cap it all, an influenza pandemic struck, killing roughly four times as many people as the war had.
Not until the advent of a new generation of nationalist strongmen â starting with Jozef Pilsudski, Kemal Ataturk and Benito Mussolini â was it clear that belligerent nationalism was the best antidote to Leninism. Some called it fascism. However, few of the interwar dictators regarded the peace treaties drawn up by the warsâ victors as legitimate. Most of the treaties were dead letters long before war resumed in 1939.
Today, please do observe the two-minute silence, at least, in memory of all those whose lives the Great War ended prematurely. But donât just zone out, as itâs easy enough to do. If only for 120 seconds, just think of your grandfather or great-grandfather as a boy, in a trench, mortally afraid. And ponder how he got there.
Fought for his country? Ireland were not at war.
My own great grandfather was in a similar boat. 32 years of age when he was killed. Went essentially for the job. Itâs beyond sad that so many lads went exchanging fire, in a manky trench, for several years, just cos a few cousins couldnât get along. Shows the value the wealthy elite place on human life
He didnt fight for his country
Why not emigrate rather than murder?
Maybe he was English?
Its amazing the revisionism and rewriting of history here and the euphemistic portrayal of 5he great war. The facts are John Redmond a so called pacifist and a self proclaimed imperialist sent 30,000 Irish people to the slaughter for no good reason. He was a lick arse who wanted his tummy tickled at Westminster and who wanted to be seen as a loyal subject. All these FG clowns cheerleaded by John Bruton who wear this bastardised version of the poppy think he was some kind of visionary but he was not. He was a fraud. How his views remain unchallenged today is mind boggling. A picture tells a thousand words.
A great day for our internet Ra men.
I suspect those who left this area to fight were no doubt lured by propaganda but also by the fact that they had absolutely nothing and life was utterly shit. They didnât have the internet to inform themselves either.
A lad who returned from the Somme told of how it was possible to walk across the river on a bridge of bodies.
Another local lad cut off his trigger finger so as he wouldnât have to go.
The poppy has been bastardised now. The British army and their cunt acting has seen to that but all of those poor cunts on both sides that died in a game of monopoly for a few big hitters deserve to be remembered.
There wasnt conscription in wexford mate
Never said there was pal. But a good few poor cunts from around here were lured across. Dazzled by the others they saw in uniform. And Redmond and the promise of a few bob.
And it a proper Ra hot bed at the time too. Like the real Ra, not the pretend one we have now.
