TRANSGRESSING THE NORMS OF WAR

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Another scoop for the Patrick Finn Lecture Series in St. Mary's, Haddington Road.

At the risk of boring everyone to tears, I have to again draw attention to this series which has given us very high standard lectures over the past few years. And this is true whether you approach them from a Roman Catholic standpoint, as probably most do, or from a purely secular point of view, as I do myself.

Felix Larkin and Heather Jones

Tonight's lecture was no exception. The lecturer was Heather Jones, Professor of Modern and Contemporary European History at University College London. She is "a specialist in First World War studies and well known for her writings and occasional appearances on television programmes about the War". I learned from her that she is also very much a radio person and that by me is to her eternal credit.

Felix Larkin, who was in charge for the night, gave her a great introduction,

while she patiently waited to take the floor in this magnificent building. I gathered afterwards that she was suitably impressed by its magnificence and I can confirm that she did it justice with her lecture.

Her thesis was that World War One changed the pre-existing norms of war and she chose three areas in which to illustrate this.

First, Prisoners of War and how they were treated. The allies put their German POWs to work at the front instead of simply holding them in camps. The infuriated Germans went one better in their retaliation. They not only kept allied POWs at the eastern and western fronts but worked them hard and used them to deter allied artillery.

On top of that they got them to write home and explain that this treatment was in retaliation for how their own POWs were being treated by the allies. This led to pressure on the allied civil authorities to see that the practice was discontinued and the Germans then responded in kind.

Heather pointed out that not only can norms be transgressed but transgressions can, on occasions, be pulled back.

Second, the use of chemical weapons. This was the first war in which chemical weapons were used on an industrial scale. In fact everything about this war seems to have been on an industrial scale, including the casualties.

Heather pointed out that there were norms in relation to the use of chemicals, particularly in projectiles. Hence the use of canisters to get round this. She pointed out that actual deaths from gassing were "relatively modest" but many more were affected, some for life. And the use of gas horrified the civilian population, particularly after the war was over. This led to great efforts to get chemicals banned altogether. However, as we will see, developments on the third front tended to blunt this somewhat in the subsequent war.

Third, blockades. Heather's point here was that the blockades effectively opened the gates for the targeting of civilians in wartime.

The scale of these operations in WWI meant that whole populations were targeted. Attempts could be made, and were, to justify the scale and extent of the blockades.

With the introduction of conscription, every male of conscriptable age was a potential combatant, and the age range was continuously extended as supplies of manpower ran out.

Then there was the whole industrial scale thing. Anything feeding the "war industries" was a legitimate target for blockading and collateral damage to the "civilian" population was inevitably widespread.

And against all this background, why not specifically target the civilian population as well. And we all know where that led in WWII.

The above will hopefully give you an idea of what the lecture was about but it is only a crude teaser for a wide-ranging and nuanced presentation. I hope the lecture gets into print/online and we can all read and reflect on it at our leisure.

On to the Q&A and the second treat of the night. The questions were short and to the point, provoking extensive and nuanced answers, which when you added them all up, were the equivalent of a follow up lecture.

Themes picked up ranged from how deserters were dealt with, through Irish republican prisoners in Frongoch, to sure hadn't we always got blockades in history, so what's new here?

We were treated to the distinction between insurgents and traitors (hint: a foreign hostile state). We touched on the demands of internees for political status. We nuanced shell-shock into PTSD. And we reflected on going in tough to shorten the war and save more lives in the long run.

As you will gather, a very animated Q&A. And, having mentioned animation, I have to confess to having more photos of Heather in full flight but I can't use them. The are blurred. Not from bad focus but from not being able to capture Heather's animation in the available lighting. The consolation prize was Heather's enthusiasm for her subject and the reflections this provoked among the attendance.

At the end of the day, this lecture is an evergreen. It is dealing with ethics which are still relevant today both in theatres of "war" and outside of them.

I have to confess that my mind wandered from time to time, not from boredom, but from resonances of WWII, Vietnam and Iraq.

In this case, my not paying proper attention in class was actually a compliment to teacher.

Heather and Felix - again

A great night. Thank you Heather.

TOM KETTLE

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There are a few things to be said about St. Mary's church, Haddington Rd.

It is a beautiful church.

It is the only Roman Catholic church in Dublin, and perhaps in the country, that has a quality plaque on the wall commemorating parishioners who died in WWI. We are used to seeing a profusion of these in Protestant churches but this is different.

The church is also host to a series of very high quality lectures, sometimes on church related topics and sometimes less so. They are part of the "Patrick Finn Lecture Series", so named after the, now sadly deceased, enlightened Parish Priest who instituted them.

Tonight (17/11/2016), it was fitting that the talk was about Tom Kettle, who was one of those parishioners who fell at the Somme on 9 September 1916.

And it was also fitting that the talk was given by Maurice Manning, who, incidentally, was one of my tutors in UCD in the 1960s. I have him to thank for giving me access to what was then a restricted access book by Paul Blanchard. Thanks Maurice.

Maurice has a deep understanding of, and empathy with, the history of this country, and in the course of his talk he also demonstrated a nuanced appreciation of this complicated man, Tom Kettle.

There is a fine bust of Kettle in St. Stephen's Green and that is where I first came across him many years ago. I didn't really know anything about him but assumed he was one of our heroes as a result of something or other. In fact, there was very little talk about him since until more recent times when the country started having to come to terms with the twin legacies of the 1916 Rising and WWI.

I am very aware of this as I was brought up on the Rising only to find, in more recent times, that I had an uncle killed on the Somme in the same year as the Rising.

It is this ambiguity that plagued Kettle in the final years of his life. He was essentially a nationalist and had been sent to Belgium to buy guns for the Volunteers. But the German atrocities he saw there convinced him that there was a wider cause to be supported if civilisation was to be preserved, and this is what motivated him to join the British army.

Initially denied the chance to go to the front, for health reasons, he embarked on an intensive campaign of recruiting for the British Army on the home front. For this he was frequently vilified and on one occasion badly beaten up.

He was jeered at for asking others to do what he himself did not, and this stung. So much so that, despite his abhorrence at the British reaction to the Rising, he contrived to get to the Western Front, and died in this, to him, greater cause.

He did his best not to be misunderstood and, as a result we have as part of his legacy, his poem explaining himself to his newly born daughter at home.

The final lines of the poem have by now become a cliché, but Maurice made the point that the earlier lines are a thing of beauty and to prove it he read the whole poem.

To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God
by Thomas Michael Kettle
dated ‘In the field, before Guillemont, Somme, Sept. 4, 1916’.

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,—
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

As to the rest of his personal life and his career. He was apparently both brilliant and good company. He became professor of political economy at UCD, a component college of the newly established National University. He didn't necessarily know any much economics but had an enquiring mind and an enthusiasm that inspired his students.

He became an MP in the UK parliament but found that a bore. He mixed in London intellectual and literary circles. And then he took to the drink which sadly crucified him and his wife Mary from there on in. This flower of Irish youth was reduced to a serial promiser to quit the booze, again. So sad, and a part of his life that has been downplayed by the nationalist tradition. But it was part of him, and Maurice faced it full on. But he also reminded us that he rose above it, hence the quotation of the full poem.

So let us honour him in his full complexity and that of the times he lived in.

Looking for God

Patrick Masterson
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Another lecture in the excellent Patrick Finn Lecture Series in St. Mary's church, Haddington Road, Dublin.

This time it was Emeritus Philosophy Professor Patrick Masterson "Looking for God - a philosophical journey".

He warned us he was not going to give a dry philosophical lecture which we could find on the internet any day of the week. This would be an account of his own philosophical journey in search of God.

Not that he hadn't started out without God in the first place. He was always a believer. This was a philosophical quest to see how close to God we could get through philosophy alone.

He confessed a youthful preference for Acquinas but brought us on a journey in the company of some of the acknowledged philosophers and with the triple compass of metaphysics, existential phenomenology and theology.

They all brought us to the edge of the cliff and posited something beyond.

Masterson then looked at the attributes this overarching "being" would need to have and among other things came up with "infinite goodness".

I think that is where he lost me.

I was raised a Roman Catholic but would now class myself as an unbeliever/agnostic, but with loads of baggage. Separating out the baggage from the rest is not an easy, if not an impossible, task. So it might have been more a question of me losing him than him losing me. But I did detect an unwarranted jump at the end of the journey and didn't quite get a answer to my question.

However, it was a very stimulating and impressive lecture and one of the things that impressed me was that this man, with a whack of experience behind him and a string of qualifications after his name, had the grace and humility to admit it when he didn't know something. Full marks there.

I had a feeling that he was on two parallel journeys here. A philosophical quest and a personal search. And it was very difficult to disentangle them.

He was clearly in a very personal realm when he spoke of his wife who recently died. He felt in his heart and soul that she still existed beyond the mere memory of her. And that was quite evident in the wave of emotion that hit him at this point in his talk. So his quest to define his own set of personal beliefs, in a God and in an afterlife, has clearly been a success, if an evolving one.

The less personal and more academic quest for God seems to me to be still ongoing and may well stretch into that infinity where the conflict between infinite attributes will go on forever.

Incidentally, St. Mary's is currently celebrating its 175th anniversary. You should check it out. It is a beautiful church with many unique features and the lecture series is innovative, top quality, and a fitting tribute to the PP Patrick Flynn (RIP) who initiated and developed it.