On Monday, 24 April 1916, a small group of these Irish Volunteers, along with some soldiers of the Irish Citizen Army, staged an uprising in Dublin. They captured a number of official buildings, including the General Post Office, over which they raised the flag of the Irish Republic. Patrick Pearse, one of the rebel leaders, read out a ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’ to passing Dubliners. He declared ‘the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland’, and added that the new republic would ‘guarantee religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities’.
Pearse called for his fellow Irishmen and women to rise up, yet very few Dubliners showed any interest in doing so. Some felt the rebellion unnecessary with the Home Rule Bill already on the statute book, however uncertain its implementation date. Others considered it an act of questionable opportunism when almost 200,000 Irishmen were fighting at the front. Nearly everyone in Dublin thought the insurrection was doomed to failure. Differences of opinion among the Irish Volunteers had resulted in the participation of just 1,500 men, and the abandonment of plans for a nationwide uprising in favour of one confined to Dublin. The rebels also lacked an adequate supply of arms, after the British navy intercepted a ship carrying German weapons to Dublin.
The British government decided that bullets and bombs would be more effective than a blockade of the Dublin GPO. Heavy artillery was fired from a battery in Trinity College and from a patrol vessel on the Liffey, reducing the square mile around the Post Office to rubble. After a few days of bombardment and bloody street fighting, which saw the death of 200 combatants and 250 civilians, the rebels surrendered. Westminster’s rule in Ireland was restored and martial law was introduced, with military personnel taking control of the government of the country. Almost 200 rebels faced courts martial that were later deemed illegal, because they were held in secret and conducted by men who had suppressed the uprising. Ninety insurgents were sentenced to death; fifteen of these men had their sentences confirmed, including several men who had neither led the uprising nor been responsible for any deaths. The executions were carried out by firing squad in the first weeks of May 1916.
Edward Carson applauded the government’s draconian response. He told the Commons the rebellion ‘ought to be put down with courage and determination, and with an example which would prevent a revival’. Redmond also initially supported the executions, though he later became concerned that they would undermine popular support for constitutional nationalism and urged Asquith to stop the shooting. The prime minister eventually agreed that a ‘large number’ of executions might ‘sow the seeds of lasting trouble’ and ordered that they should cease.
Yet the damage had been done. Nationalist opinion in Ireland was becoming radicalized. ‘Changed, changed utterly,’ wrote the poet W. B. Yeats in his poem ‘Easter, 1916’. ‘A terrible beauty is born.’ The executed men were elevated to the status of martyrs by an Irish population that had been indifferent, ambivalent or hostile to the uprising itself. Some Irish people were stirred by the inhumanity of the executions, others by the rebels’ ‘sacrifice’. The bombardment of Dublin, news of atrocities committed by the British troops during the uprising and the summary justice of British officials after it, inspired aversion to British colonial rule in Ireland. The spectre of conscription also roused nationalist opinion. An unpopular, apparently futile and largely symbolic revolution had succeeded in awakening Irish opinion. The ultranationalist political party Sinn Féin would soon reap the electoral benefits of radicalization; they, rather than the IPP, now represented the nationalist cause.
The executions also outraged progressive opinion in England. One Liberal MP demanded that no more Irish people be put to death without a civic trial; another called for the prosecution of those who first imported arms to Ireland – the Ulster Unionists, with the tacit consent of the Tory Unionists, since it was the arrival of guns that had prompted the Irish Volunteers to arm in 1914. Asquith responded to the criticism by asking Lloyd George to arrange a deal between the Unionists and the IPP that would lead to the immediate implementation of Home Rule. Using all his charm and cunning, Lloyd George succeeded in persuading Redmond, Carson and Balfour to sign up to a plan that would exclude six counties of Ulster for the duration of war, with the promise to review the situation after hostilities had ceased. But the deal broke down when the ‘die-hard’ Tories in the cabinet demanded the permanent exclusion of the six counties, and Law withdrew from the negotiations. In the absence of a compromise in his cabinet, Asquith felt powerless to do anything; nothing, therefore, was done. Ireland was still ruled from Westminster, and nationalist feeling in the country continued to increase.
During the Easter Rising, word reached England that the eastern offensive of the Russians had collapsed. News from elsewhere was no better. At the end of May, German warships attacked the British Grand Fleet off the North Sea coast of Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula. Although the German ship Lützow received twenty-four direct hits, it still managed to sink British ships including HMS Invincible, killing over 6,000 British seamen. When news of the deaths reached England, people were shocked and bewildered. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the Kaiser boasted that ‘the spell of Trafalgar is broken’, yet it was not as simple as that. A full analysis of the battle revealed that the Germans had also sustained serious losses; moreover, they had failed to achieve the twin aims of their mission – access to the United Kingdom and the Atlantic, and the crippling of the British fleet. Henceforth Germany would concentrate on submarine attacks against shipping in, or close to, British waters, a strategy that would have momentous consequences for the outcome of the war.
Meanwhile, on the Western Front, relentless inconclusive battles undermined the belligerents. The number of dead and wounded could not be comprehended, let alone endured. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916), there were nearly 60,000 British casualties, with almost 20,000 men killed – the heaviest losses for a single combat in the army’s history. ‘By the end of the day,’ wrote the poet Edmund Blunden, ‘both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, no road. No thoroughfare. Neither had won, nor could win, the War.’ The battle, lasting for more than four months, achieved nothing. The Allies advanced about six miles into German-occupied territory, but the Germans dug in and defended their new position. The price of the meagre advance? Over 350,000 British casualties, and over a million on all sides, in what was the bloodiest battle in history. No wonder the Somme became a symbol of the mud, blood and futility that characterized war in the West, or that English troops referred to it as ‘The Great F*** Up’.
The endless slaughter prompted English soldiers to ask why they were fighting. The French were defending their homeland, but that wasn’t the case for the British. Combatants also questioned the competence of Britain’s military hierarchy. Were their current tactics productive of anything other than carnage, as German machine guns mowed down row after row of attacking British privates?
Criticism of the army elite was sometimes couched in the language of intergenerational antagonism, but more often it was informed by class conflict. The author J. B. Priestley, who was shot, bombed and poisoned by gas on the Western Front, deplored the fact that ‘The British Army never saw itself as a citizens’ army [but] behaved as if a small gentlemanly officer class still had to make soldiers out of under-gardener’s runaway sons and slum lads … The traditions of an officer class killed most of my friends.’ The class antagonism experienced by the soldiers would be a prominent feature in the post-war political and social environment.