Charles TownshendReseñas

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This won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize in 2015, along with a special mention for The Whole and Rain-Domed Universe, by Colette Bryce. It took me a while to get around to reading it, but I found it a tremendous book - a blow-by-blow account of the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War, looking pretty neutrally at both British and Irish records and coming to some interesting conclusions. Like most Irish people with any interest in history, I was pretty familiar with the outlines of the story, which meant that the new details were very interesting indeed.

Going through it chronologically, there are points of interest in each of the long chapters. The British conceded a massive chunk of territory, quite literally, by evacuating small rural police stations as soon as the first trouble began in mid to late 1919. The Royal Irish Constabulary were more of a paramilitary law enforcement agency than a community police force, but even so, the withdrawal to fortified regional redoubts basically conceded the monopoly on the use of force to the IRA. This created space for the Dáil court system to start functioning a year or so later - the received history is that the Dáil courts were a turning point, but in fact they could not have functioned if the police had been, well, policing.

In 1920 the IRA worked out how to fight a guerilla war more or les from first principles, with ultimately the introduction of the Black and Tans, whose violence shifted what remained of neutral opinion in most of Ireland towards separatism, culminating in Bloody Sunday. This is one part of the generally believed narrative that Townshend confirms. But even so there are some interesting wrinkles. The strike of railway workers - or rather, their refusal to carry British troops on the trains - was a serious blow to British mobility. And also, British policy itself was completely unhinged, with no medium to long term goals - if they were to win the war, what next? But they were too poorly organised to have a chance of winning, with lines of control at the top (and indeed middle) deeply obscure.

1921 saw the two sides edging towards a truce, and eventually to the December 1921 Treaty. What's especially interesting is that both sides were motivated to keep talking because neither believed that they could win if war resumed. My father always used to say that most armies are so badly organised that it's just as well that they only ever have to fight other armies. The turning point here, and I guess I knew this but had not seen it that way before, was the election in May. The British commanders had assured the government at the start of the year that they would have crushed dissent by late spring, so the elections were duly scheduled and organised. But in fact Sinn Féin won every seat outside the new territory of Northern Ireland (er, and Trinity college Dublin), unopposed. As Asquith put it (not quoted by Townshend, but I've seen it elsewhere), London gave Ulster a parliament that it did not particularly want, and the rest of Ireland a parliament which it would not have.

1922-23 saw the difficulties in implementing the Treaty eventually spill over into the Civil War. I had not realised quite how quickly the Republican side basically lost the war by default. They assumed that as in 1919-21, the latent support of the people as a whole would sustain them and delegitimise the Collins / Griffith / Cosgrave government; and they controlled large parts of the south and west of the country, and two small but strategic parts of Dublin. But the Free Staters picked off the areas of Republican strength one by one, and retaliated brutally to individual attacks by executing prisoners; meanwhile the Legion of the Rearguard waited for a popular revolt that never happened.

It's a great chronology. I do have two complaints. There is not enough about Northern Ireland / Ulster; Townshend remarks several times that Collins rather ignored it, but is somewhat guilty of doing the same himself. On the other hand, there is too much about political ideology. The understanding of the Republic mattered a lot to many of the participants, De Valera in particular, and not only him. but I find it personally rather difficult to grasp.

Anyway, this is a great book which anyone interested in that place and time should read.

This book is an illustrated collection of essays mostly by experts from military museums. The essays discuss techniques, technology, and other warfare developments from the seventeenth century to the 1990s. Chapters are as follows:

Introduction: The Shape of Modern War
The Military Revolution I: The Transition to Modern Warfare
The Military Revolution II: Eighteenth-Century War
The Nation in Arms I: The French Wars
The Nation in Arms II: The Nineteenth Century
Imperial Wars: From the Seven Years War to the First World War
Total War I: The Great War
Total War II: The Second World War
Cold War
People's War
Technology and War I: to 1945
Battle: The Experience of Modern Combat
Sea Warfare
Air Warfare
War and the People: The Social Impact of Total War
Women and War
Against War
Technology and War II: Postmodern War?

The coverage is very selective and somewhat quirky, and mostly elides over specific battles and individual actors - you won't find much here about Hitler, for example, or even the Holocaust, and Stalin gets barely a mention. Nor can you expect to read much about Churchill or Eisenhower. Neither Ulysses S. Grant nor the American Civil War even merit a mention in the Index. But for aficionados of history who rely on other books for more in-depth coverage of wars, this book has an interesting focus and unusual selection of interesting illustrations.½

I read this as a follow up to Townshend's "Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion." The two books were recommended to me, along with Tom Barry's "Guerilla Days in Ireland," by a bookseller in a great store in Cork City when my wife and I were there on vacation a few years back. I had asked him about the best books to read to learn about the events of those years.

The Republic is very detailed and so is not particularly a fast read. Interestingly, during the course of the narrative, Townshend often compares earlier published histories to demonstrate how knowledge and perspectives about particular events have evolved as attitudes have changed and new information has been uncovered or new interviews given. Townshend also does his best to unravel fact from legend. Probably the toughest job for anyone, like myself, who did not grow up learning this history, is keeping straight all of the factions in the struggle and all of the chief figures. Given all that, my opinion, like that of many others evidently, is that Townshend has done an admirable job of it. In particular he shows the glories and the bravery of the revolutionaries, but also their frequent viciousness and incompetence. Also, the ways in which the English frequently and tragically misjudged one situation after another. In the end, it seems it was more global opinion, and British political exhaustion, than military achievements that got the British to the bargaining table and led to the treaty that created the Irish Home State, less than the full independence the fighters wanted, but perhaps as much as they might have expected given the totality of the Irish ability to carry on armed conflict and the British belief that control of Ireland was critical to their own self-defense.

By the time Townshend comes to describe the Irish Civil War between the pragmatists who wanted to get on with building a government and considered the exit of the English Army from their island victory enough (despite having to live with the dreaded partition of the three northern counties from the rest of the country) and the purists who swore to fight on against whoever stood in the way of a fully independent Irish Republic, Townshend stops describing the combat itself. The reader, after all, has already gotten enough of a picture of what the guerilla combat of the past years had looked like. Townshend focuses instead on the personalities and politics of that conflict.

His short description of the final end of the Civil War is extremely evocative, I think: " . . . {Eamon} de valera issued his order to the 'Soldiers of the Republic, Legion of the Rearguard" declaring that 'the Republic can no longer be defended successfully by your arms.' Military victory 'must be allowed to rest for the moment with those who have destroyed the Republic.' Nearly a month after that, on 24 May, {IRA Chief of Staff Frank} Aiken issued the final command to the IRA to dump its arms. There were no negotiations, no truce terms: the Republic simply melted back into the realm of the imagination."

This is a very good resource for anyone looking for a comprehensive and readable, if not always flowing, account of these fascinating but tragic times. Perhaps at least a bit of foreknowledge about the subject matter might be recommended, though, to keep the details from becoming too confusing. Anyway, four stars from me.

Few events in modern Irish history are as pivotal as the “Easter Rising”, the dramatic seizure of the General Post Office and other parts of Dublin that marked the declaration of the Irish Republic. Yet for decades the event has never received the thorough examination it deserves, due in part, as Charles Townshend observes in his preface to this fine book, to the long-standing reticence to release the oral histories of the event contained within the archives of the Bureau of Military History. Their release in 2003 provides the best opportunity yet to study the uprising, and Townshend has risen to the challenge by providing a penetrating examination of the origins and the impact of the Rising.

Townshend traces the origins of the Rising to the development and definition of Irish identity in the late nineteenth century. Here the breadth of his examination is immediately apparent, as he moves beyond the political to study the role that the cultural movement known as the Celtic rising played in inspiring Irish nationalists to challenge British rule. A key figure bridging between the cultural and the political was Patrick Pearse, the president of the provisional republic claimed in the aftermath of the seizure of the General Post Office. By delving into Pearse’s past as a nationalist consumed with freeing Ireland not only from British political domination but its cultural domination as well, he illustrates just how important the cultural component was in inspiring the nationalists and driving them towards action.

Yet Irish politics in those years was dominated not by nationalism but the issue of Home Rule. Here Townshend focuses on the reaction to the Home Rule measure in Ireland, which catalyzed Unionist resistance in the north to the devolution of Irish government. The formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, in turn, inspired southern nationalists to form their own armed group, the Irish Volunteers, a movement quickly subsumed by the Irish Parliamentary Party into their organization. Yet the outbreak of the First World War and the decision by Irish parliamentary leader John Redmond to support the war split the Irish Volunteers and came to undermine his standing.

The nationalist Irish Volunteers that broke away from main group were themselves divided over the next step, however. As they gained in standing with the growing unpopularity of Redmond’s decision, Pearse and other members sought to take advantage of Britain’s difficulty to throw off her rule of Ireland. Given the attitudes of the Volunteer leadership, such planning had to take place in secrecy, and one of the great strengths of this book is Townshend’s laudable effort to wade into the confused jumble of half-hidden events to detail the evolution of the Rising. What was initially envisioned as a nationwide rebellion quickly became a Dublin-centric event that would take advantage of a planned Easter Sunday mobilization to strike against British rule. The last-minute efforts by the nationalist Volunteer leadership to head off the rebellion, though, resulted in a confused and only partial assemblage of Volunteers on the following day.

The three chapters on the Rising itself form the heart of Townshend’s book, and they recount an event characterized by confusion on both sides. The poor preparations and questionable decisions by the rebels were equaled only by those of the British authorities, whose overreaction in the aftermath of the rebels’ inevitable defeat turned them from extremists into heroes. Townshend concludes the book by looking at the belated efforts by the British in the aftermath of the Rising to craft a settlement in response to the growing nationalist challenge to their control over Ireland – a challenge that in the end they failed to avert.

With its clear prose and painstaking reconstruction of the tangled events of the Easter Rising, Townshend’s book is a masterpiece of the historical craft. The thorough research and judicious analysis contained within its pages is unlikely to be bettered as a guide to the complicated and confused developments that led to this dramatic and exciting event. For anyone seeking a study that will help them understand the Easter Rising, its background, and its consequences, this is the one to read.

This is a fascinating, detailed (to the extent possible) history. It gets frustrating to read sometimes (as I'm sure it must have been for Townshend to write), as the actions of the leaders of the Easter Uprising were often inexplicable, and there was precious little put in writing at the time by the participants. Townshend, though, did have access to a trove of new material. In 1947, the Bureau of Military History began to gather accounts from the uprising's surviving participants. This activity went on for ten years, but then the material "disappeared into government archives" instead of being compiled and released to the public. Townshend, in his Preface, writes, "This 'miser's hoard' was at least opened to the public in March 2003 and suddenly, instead of a few dozen accounts, we have many hundred. They suffer from all the problems to be expected in accounts written thirty years after the event, but there are a remarkable source nonetheless."

At any rate, Townshend does an admirable job of assembling the history of the rise of the fractured Irish separatist movement at the beginning of the 20th century. There was a strong party urging Home Rule for Ireland as a first step toward independence, and several groups urging for a more immediate and total independence from Great Britain, obtained through arms if need be. The history moves through the decision for a country-wide armed rising, the damaging confusion caused when a countermanding order was sent across the counties that caused a day-long delay and sent many potential insurrectionists home, never to re-engage. In the end, the fighting took place mostly, and certainly most famously, in Dublin itself, with the most important and memorable (and horrific) action centered around the Dublin General Post Office.

The uprising was hindered not only by the confusion of contradictory orders, but also by the leaders' general lack of military expertise. In Townshend's account, many of the strategy decisions, in terms particularly of which buildings to occupy and which to ignore, are very hard to explain, and it's frustrating, as mentioned, that primary sources are so scarce. Many of the leaders were sure that the English would never use artillery in Dublin, which of course the English considered part of Great Britain. But the battle was put in the hands of the Army, not the politicians, and the big guns came out. It was the fires set off by incendiary shells that finally forced the Irish fighters out of their strongholds under the white flag of surrender.

Townshend goes on to artfully describe the incalculable damage done by the British military commander's decision to execute the uprising's leaders after only the most summary of trials, and action that created martyrs and ensured that even those Irish who were skeptical or even hostile to the Uprising (and there were many) gained a new and bitter resentment against the British throughout the country. Soon new regiments of volunteers were armed and parading once again, and the British thought it wiser not to attempt to disarm them. (The fact that England was considering an Irish conscription law to try to gain soldiers for the World War at that time raging on the continent was a crucial factor in this, as well.)

Townshend considers the questions of whether or not the Uprising did more harm than good. (One point that seems clear is that the Uprising went a long way to cementing the determination of the Protestant-majority northern counties to cut themselves off from Catholic-majority Ireland and remain within Great Britain, as all possibility of negotiation between the groups was instantly destroyed.) He does not come to a final determination on this issue, though, although it does seem that he considers the uprising in sympathetic terms all in all.

And, finally, Townshend portrays the role that the Easter Uprising has had in the narrative of Irish history and Irish national identity. The book is detailed and very well written. It's 360 pages went fairly quickly for me. For anyone with an interest in the topic, I highly recommend it.½

A serious, sober look at an event which, even now, is seldom discussed either seriously or soberly. It suffers a little, I think, from having greater clarity on the British actions than those of the Volunteers and Citizen Army. Still, here and in other books, [a:Townshend|76617|Charles Townshend|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png] has written about the military aspects of this period of Irish history better than anyone, and this is probably the best introduction to the Easter Rising.

Good survey of warfare through the ages, nicely illustrated.

A surprisingly good VSI. I've come close to losing faith with these things many times, but the cover design and lure of knowledge bring me back. And then things like this justify my decision. Townshend is reasonable and anti-reactionary: his sections on state terrorism are excellent, his sections on non-state terrorists are balanced, and he does a great job of splitting hairs between terror and terrorism, and, most usefully, between war (a coercive, fundamentally physical pursuit) and terrorism (a persuasive, fundamentally mental pursuit). If you use violence to disable enemy combatants, you're at war. If you use it on non-combatants, to change someone's mind about something, you're making terror. If you do the latter, and little or nothing else, in order to reach your goals, you're a terrorist.

Also, Townshend writes well enough, and has a terrific ear for other people's phrases, such as PJP Tynan's "men must be aroused... their eyes wounded with the truth, light thrown in terrible handfuls."

On the downside, the final chapter, 'Countering Terrorism,' isn't all that enlightening.

The author of this general history is at his best when examining the events that led up to the British defeat at the siege of Kut, which was all the more disastrous due to the run of of relative success the British expeditionary force had enjoyed to that point. The roots of failure being a combination of bad organization, bad logistics, and woolly strategic thinking that could not be overcome by relative tactical competence. Call it a case-book example of how simply stringing a series of victories together does not make a successful campaign.

I think the remainder of the book is somewhat less successful once past the climax of the initial British operation, but Townshend continues with his real subject, which is not so much the conduct of a secondary campaign that was won at too high of a price, but the anatomy of the British official mind. This being the examination of a decision-making process which could barely realize that the conquest of what is now Iraq was an exercise in strategic overstretch, and that had little clue as to the nature of the society being manipulated, until it was too late (the Iraqi uprising of 1920); we're still living with the consequences of those decisions. That Townshend doesn't hit you on the head with the obvious parallels to Operation "Iraqi Freedom" is a point in his favor.

Apart from the somewhat meandering nature of the last third of the work (though that is probably a reflection of the events being examined), my single biggest gripe is that this book really needed more than three maps.

A timely (kind of) well-researched book. Great bibliography (but could probably do with some sort of cast list). I have two minor criticsms - the author spends rather too much time for my liking defending General Townshend, to whom he is presumably related, and also there seems to have been some kind of imptetus (possibly from the editor) to make it a topical to the UK's role in the Coalition Provisional Authority after 2003 invasion. And this book is inherently topical, it couldn't not be, but sometimes there feels like the author is making the odd too-awkward stretch in this direction. Only in throwaway remarks though.

A book about the CPA, contrasting it with the original British role in Iraq is still waiting to be written. Would be pretty good.½

This is a fairly definitive historical account of the 1916 Rebellion so in places it is quite hard to read. But as accounts go it really helped me to understand the Rebellion's place in history and how, in contrast to past uprisings which had little or no real effect on history, the effects of the Rebellion rippled out throughout the Twentieth Century and beyond.

I will probably write a longer review of this book at some time in the future. For now, let me just identify the three principal reasons that I did not like it and why I do not recommend it.

First, the author seems to believe that using lots of "big" or foreign words will give a book a certain academic feel. Before going to law school, I graduated from Northwestern with a political science major, so I've read my fair share of academic works in the social sciences. Some are well-written and engaging; some are not. Sometimes, the use of complex vocabulary helps an author articulate a complex or nuanced point; other times, the vocabulary merely serves as a barrier between the author and the reader. Unfortunately, this book fell into that latter category.

Second, the author works so hard to define terrorism (or, more precisely, define what is not terrorism), that, by the end, the reader is left with the impression that terrorism doesn't really exist in any real signifcant way (despite what they see on TV every night). It often seems as if the author has an excuse or explanation for virtually all modern (i.e., post-Russian Revolution) terrorism. Thus, I never felt as if I was getting well-rounded examination of the issue; instead, it often felt as if I was reading an apology on behalf of certain poor misguided people who, in the author's view, never did much real damage, anyway.

Finally (and most troubling to me), was the author's seeming willingness to equate the actions of the US, Israel, and pre-Israeli Zionists to those of Hezbollah and Hamas (in fact, I don't think that he ever even mentioned the PLO, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, or the Muslim Brotherhood). At one point, the author actually praises Hezbollah's "military" campaign and contrasts it to the "indiscriminate" actions of the US and Israel in Lebanon (not the 2006 war). In other words, Townshend appears to live in that alternate universe where wrong it right, evil is good, and blowing up a bus or attacking a Passover seder is acceptable.

For a short introduction to terrorism look elsewhere.

(If I get around to writing a longer examination of this book on my blog, I'll update this review.)½

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I guess most people reading this will at least be aware of what I was brought up to call the Easter Rising (Townshend prefers "rebellion", for reasons which are well argued), most memorably portrayed in the opening section of Neil Jordan's film about Michael Collins (where you may remember that Dev has mysteriously been transported to the GPO from the other side of the river, and the building appears to face south rather than east). A few hundred rebels seized control of central Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916, and eventually were shelled out by the British as they retook the city; while most of the leaders were shot by firing squad, the survivors became the nucleus of the political movement that fought for and then ruled the independent Irish state that emerged in 1921. It is generally regarded as one of the turning points in Irish history; and while Townshend tries to cast some doubt on that assessment, he doesn't really succeed, carried away as he is by the drama of the topic. There's lots of detail here, and some very interesting analysis as well.

The most extraordinary finding for me was the true extent of British repression in the run-up to 1916: specifically, that there was so little of it. MI5 employed 1453 people as postal censors in England, Scotland and Wales by the end of 1915. In Ireland there were precisely ten people doing the job, five in Belfast and five in Dublin. Of course, the Post Office, as it turns out, was pretty heavily infiltrated by militant nationalists anyway, so it might not have done any good; but they simply were not trying. (The fact that the GPO was the headquarters at Easter 1916 is not especially relevant here.) The government had no intelligence capability - or rather, there were a number of intelligence-gathering agencies, but they don't seem to have been reporting to anyone, and no effort appears to have been made to find out who exactly was in control of the various armed militias parading around the place, let alone what their political agenda and concrete plans might be. Even the Pope had been told that an Easter rebellion was planned, but the British were caught completely by surprise. The authorities had given up trying to enforce even the limited extra wartime repressive measures offered by the Defence of the Realm Act within six months of the war breaking out. No wonder that they were caught napping (or, to be more accurate, out at the races) when the rebellion began on Easter Monday. Townshend feels that the liberal character of British legal culture, even in its weaker Irish reflection, was too heavily engrained; I'm inclined to just put it down to sheer incompetence.

The legal theme continues through and after the rebellion. The Lord Lieutenant, desperately swigging brandy (like his first cousin Winston Churchill), declared martial law on the Monday, without any clear idea of what this would mean. This was then the justification for the most memorable and transformational episode of the entire affair - the execution in Dublin after secret court-martial of 14 of the rebels, including almost all the leadership. While this was by far the most drastic measure taken by the British state to defend itself, there were others, combining over-zealous repression with legal tail-spin: the internment without trial, on dubious grounds, of 1600 Irish prisoners (over a thousand of whom were then released because, essentially, there was no evidence against them); the authorities' refusal to publish the official records of the courts-martial at which prisoners had been condemned to death; the cabinet's repeated discussions of Roger Casement's pending execution - Townshend quotes Roy Jenkins, "There can be few other examples of a Cabinet devoting large parts of four separate meetings to considering an individual sentence - and then arriving at the wrong decision." (Townshend then notes that Jenkins was wrong - the Cabinet discussed the matter at least five times.)

Turning to the other side of the story, I also found very impressive Townshend's reconstruction, practically from the historiographical equivalent of trace fossils, of why Easter 1916 was planned as it was. Since all the people who actually knew what was going on had been executed within a few days of the end of the rebellion, and almost all the documentation, if it ever existed, had been lost, this was not an easy task. But he does a good job - significantly, many of the survivors among the rebels had been (or at least later claimed to have been) proponents of the guerilla warfare model that indeed was successful between 1919 and 1921, rather than the urban seizure which Pearse, fascinated as he was by Robert Emmett's 1803 adventure, had fixated on early in his career. Emmett, of course, didn't even manage to lead his rebels to the end of Thomas Street; but for Pearse, and for Joseph Mary Plunkett, who actually wrote the plan for 1916 (such as it was), that was hardly the point. William Irwin Thompson's The Imagination of an Insurrection argues that the entire Rising makes sense considered as a work of heroic literature to waken the country rather than as a military act, and if considered in those terms it must be considered a success. There is a certain desperate poetry in the only document of Plunkett's relating to the Rising that does survive, a notebook found lying in the street after it was all over, which ends with the scribbled notes:

"Food to Arnotts
"Order to remain all posts unless surrounded
"Barricades in front
"Henry St
"Food"

He's also very good on the actual events leading up to and surrounding the outbreak of the rebellion. There had been a scare from a leaked Dublin Castle document apparently planning for repressive measures to be taken in the event of introducing conscription. This led to the ramping up of tension and expectation, and seemed to offer an excuse to start the rebellion on Easter Sunday. Eoin MacNeill, of course, countermanded the orders; but as things turned out, he was not fully in control, and the rebellion went ahead, though on a smaller scale, on Easter Monday instead. A strength of the book is his description of what happened outside Dublin - more than is usually recounted, including relatively successful operations in Louth and Meath, and a dignified surrender with no lives (or even weapons) lost in Cork, for which both the British forces and the Cork rebels were duly chastised by their colleagues.

One of Townshend's more irritating habits is to describe the various military tactics pursued by the 1916 rebels, point out why they were flawed on any serious military analysis, and then wonder aloud why the rebels took this course. OK, so some decisions were indeed blindingly stupid - why the GPO, for heaven's sake (whatever Peter Berresford Ellis may say), rather than Dublin Castle, or the actual phone exchanges in Crown Alley and Store Street? Why St Stephen's Green, surrounded by tall buildings, rather than the citadel of Trinity College? Above all, why was no provision made for, well, provisions, so that by the end of the week the surviving rebels surrendered as much due to starvation as due to military defeat? But the answer, to me anyway, is pretty obvious: military victory was not, in fact, their chief goal. They did have a vague hope that they might hold out until the Germans came to rescue them, but no real evidence for this - indeed, Roger Casement was actually arrested on his way to tell the leadership explicitly that no German help would be forthcoming. (It's not entirely clear why the socialist radical James Connolly chose to unite his Irish Citizens Army with the larger nationalist - but not socialist group. He obviously wanted an armed revolution himself; did he imagine that a) the rebellion would succeed, and b) he would gain control of a post-revolutionary government? But of course he was also deluded enough to believe that the capitalists would not use heavy artillery against commercial property.)

Moving back a bit, I was very interested in the argument in an early chapter that Redmond and the Irish Party had irretrievably lost their credibility as early as 1915. Redmond, as leader of the Irish Nationalists, had taken a huge gamble by committing them to the service of the British during the first world war. He was comprehensively screwed over by two factors. First, the British army (Lord Kitchener in particular) decided not to incorporate the existing Irish Nationalist paramilitary structures into the army, with symbols and regimental identity etc, as was done for the Ulster Volunteers. The Commander of the 10th Division (in which my own grandfather fought) was "described in the divisional history as 'an Irishman without politics', but of course this meant he was a Protestant and an unthinking, not to say pig-headed conservative." Second, the war lasted a lot longer than people expected, which meant that Home Rule was now put off for far longer than the few months originally anticipated and that Redmond's main political role collapsed into being a British recruiting sergeant. Meanwhile the war was not going well. The only news most people were getting from the Western front was the telegram telling them their sons were dead. And while wages were frozen but prices rising all over the United Kingdom, it was in Ireland that wages were lowest and fewest jobs were created on foot of the war effort. In November 1915, Redmond was condemned in unprecedented terms by a Catholic bishop, who declared of the potential Irish recruits heading to America to escape any potential conscription, "Their blood is not stirred by memories of Kossovo, and they have no burning desire to die for Serbia."

It's an interesting and even slightly attractive argument, which goes completely against the orthodoxy that British repression following Easter 1916 turned Sinn Fein into a more credible political force than the tired Redmondites, but that up until then the older political party's position might have been salvageable. Rather to my surprise, after outlining his (to me) revolutionary and innovative analysis of the 1914-16 period, Townshend appears to retreat back into that orthodoxy in later chapters dealing with the 1916-18 period, which made me wonder if he really believed his own argument. He returns to it to speculate that, had there been no rebellion, there would have been a fatal crisis in 1918 anyway over conscription, leading to a political victory for more extreme nationalist forces, as Alvin Jackson seems to suggest in one of those alternate history books. Hmm.

A few other historiographical points. Townshend clearly sees himself as in the "revisionist" camp of Irish history, and will no doubt have been duly delighted by the republican rants against his book that I mentioned earlier. It's all a load of nonsense. Anyone interested in Irish history, of whatever political views, should be grateful to him for pulling this material together and in particular for the wealth of detail about the precise military facts of what happened. Havig said that, I was a bit unsatisfied on a couple of historical points. I was left unclear as to why Townshend believes that Bulmer Hobson was written out of the history of the Rising, in that he doesn't give examples of earlier accounts which omit or minimise him, and my own reading has tended to be from the more recent end of things anyway which counts him in. Likewise I was a little baffled by his defensiveness of the heads of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, W.V. Harrel and Sir John Ross of Bladensburgh (whose botanical correspondence I once riffled through, in a different life), who on any reasonable reading of the facts bore at least some responsibility for the Bachelor's Walk shootings in July 1914.

Three other peculiar little things noted here for completeness. Sean T. O'Kelly believed he had been appointed "Civil Administrator of the Government of the Republic". Almost thirty years later, he was elected President of the real thing. De Valera's surrender in Jacob's biscuit factory - Owen Dudley Edwards suggested that Dev was in the end over-ruled by his officers, but Townshend has him in control right the way through. And he quotes from an account of the defence of Trinity College, published anonymously, though I happen to know that the author was the TCD physicist John Joly.

Anyway, an excellent book. Though I would like to know more about the revolutionary implications of the bicycle.½

940.4