The Last Farewell
For years I have researched, written and published various articles and books about Ireland’s military ethos. I have over the years, read and collected most of the printed material appertaining to it. Some years ago I tried to locate any documentation dealing specifically with the Limerick and Clare involvement in the Great War, but failed to locate any. I searched libraries; archives etc. but to no avail. It had become apparent that these men and women had been forgotten about, airbrushed from history; the only people who remembered them were their own kith and kin. They had gone to war and thousands made the supreme sacrifice. Many of the veterans returning home after the war met grudging acceptance, hostility, or even physical violence. Tom Kettle, who was killed at the Battle of the Somme, a former Nationalist MP and Professor of National Economics at University College, Dublin had predicted after the 1916 Rising; 'These men (the 1916 Leaders) will go down in history as heroes and martyrs and I will go down - if I go down at all - as a bloody British officer.'
Stephen Gwynn was an officer in the Connaught Rangers, a member of the Irish Nationalist Party and MP for Galway. In thinking what lay ahead of these Irish veterans of the First World War, he expresses the hope that one day in the future, Ireland would welcome these men home.
‘It may be, O Comrade, that Ireland, casting a backward glance on the road she has traveled, will turn and yearn in her heart for the valor she once rejected. Will cry to her own sick heart: ‘my faithful, my children, my lovers who never hurt me – you also are Ireland.’
They deserve to be honoured, remembered and commemorated in their own country. I decided to first compile the record of the Limerick men and women who had fought and died in the Great War for my own records. This would turn out to be a gigantic task, but I felt it had to be done. This ended up in my book, The Widow’s Penny. The book contained details of the WW I Limerick casualties both men and women, including the location of their final resting place; the location of the graves, cemeteries and various memorials was I felt, very important.
Each of the Cemeteries and Memorial sites recorded in this book, The Last Farewell, contain the name of those Clare men and women interred or commemorated therein.
Tracing accurate information on the casualties after such a long period of time is extremely difficult. In Rudyard Kipling’s masterpiece ‘The Irish Guards in the Great War’ (1923) he wrote of the heartbreak, in his case, of trying to trace the final resting place of his only son, John.
In August 1914 his son, not yet seventeen, volunteered for the army. He applied for a commission, but being underage and with poor sight, was initially refused. Kipling’s friendship with Lord Roberts was used to gain John a commission in the Irish Guards, the Regiment of which Roberts was Colonel-in-Chief. In 1915 John went to France and his Battalion, the 2nd and was at once deployed in the costly battle of Loos. John Kipling, now aged only eighteen, was among the earliest casualties. During the battle of 27th September, eye-witnesses reported seeing John crying with pain from a neck wound. However, after the fighting his body was never located. For years Kipling tried to trace his son - interviewing survivors and carrying a photograph together with a description of the spectacles John wore on the battlefield. In 1919, during the battlefield clearance which followed the end of the war, an examination of the records relating to St. Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station Cemetery, revealed that one of the unidentified remains recovered was that of a lieutenant of the Irish Guards; found near Puits 14, east of the village of Loos. The body had remained in No-man’s land from 1915 until 1917 where it lay just within the Allied lines. It was exhumed and re-buried in Plot 7, Row D, Grave 2 and marked by a tombstone inscribed:
‘AN UNKNOWN LIEUTENANT OF THE IRISH GUARDS’.
Then in 1992, an observant and a diligent officer of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission researching into officers of the Irish Guards killed or missing in the Battle of Loos, of 27th September 1915, noticed an apparent anomaly in the Commissions’ Records. The body that lay in St. Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station Cemetery was recorded as having been recovered from Block G25 C68. The battle area was mapped into squares and the location given in the records, lies five miles west of Loos, an area where the Irish Guards had not been in action. A simple transposition of H for G would indicate the location where John Kipling had last been seen on the day he went missing. Because the battle of September/October 1915 was the only action involving Irish Guards near Loos and John Kipling the only Irish Guards Lieutenant whose body was unaccounted for from the action, it is beyond doubt that the ‘unknown Lieutenant of the Irish Guards’ must be John Kipling.
Unusually for a man officially classified as one of the 600,000 unidentified British dead in the First World War, John Kipling has two memorials. One is the newly named cemetery headstone and his name has also been left on the memorial to the missing at Loos, under the words Known unto God.
It was at Rudyard Kipling’s suggestion that the words ‘Known unto God’ be used on the Headstones of the unidentified. He himself died on January 18th 1936, not knowing where his son John was buried.
LOCATING THE RECORDS OF THE IRISH CASULTIES OF WWI.
The Imperial War Graves Commission, as The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was then known, held the Service Records of between 6 and 7 million men and women of the British Empire who had served in the First World War. However, German air raids in 1940 destroyed most of them; about 2.8 million service records either survived the bombing of WWII or were reconstructed from pension records. These records were of personal who were discharged between 1914 and 1920. They include regular soldiers who may have enlisted as early as 1892 for 22 years’ service.
Over a period of years, I sifted through and recorded the more than 672,000 records of the men and women who died in the Great War in order to locate the records of the Irish men and women who had perished. The 672,000 records did not include the men and women who had died serving with the Royal Navy, The Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Air Force, the Mercantile Marine, the Australian, American, Canadian, New Zealand, Indian, French and the South African Armed Forces. This involved a further search of public records, newspapers and personal records held by relatives of the men and women who had served and died, this added further to the information I had already accumulated.
The reason I researched the period following Armistice Day 1918, was to include the men and women who had died of wounds etc. after the termination of the conflict, it was I felt, only right and proper to also include and honour them in my work.
Great help was received from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission who had spent years rebuilding their records from the damaged files. It would have been an impossible task to compile my records of the casualties without the use of the information made available to me in their Debt of Honour Register. I am also eternally grateful to the Australian, American, Canadian and the other Allied agencies for granting me permission to use and publish the information they supplied me with, thank you.
When I had completed my research into the Clare casualties of the Great War, I donated my personal 8 volume collection of Ireland’s Memorial Records 1914-1918, to the Local Studies section of the Clare County Library, thus making them freely available to present and future students who may wish to pursue further studies of the subject. Ironically, when they were published in 1923, Clare County Council, for reasons best known to them, was one of the few local authorities in the country who refused to acquire or accept them; it would take over 80 years to finally correct the anomaly; an anomaly I was both honoured and happy to correct
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