THE SOMME : For God and country.

(From Irish Independent)

defend the shores of Ireland from an unlikely invasion."

Not only was the war a worthy cause in itself, said Redmond, but it allowed Ireland to show it deserved to take its place amongst the grown-up nations of the Earth. He asserted that the Irish race "would feel covered with humiliation if, when this war is over, they had to admit that their rights and liberties had been saved by the sacrifices of other men".

Many nationalists marched off inspired by the slogan that the freedom of Ireland could be won on the fields of Flanders. Many who signed up in the early days of the war did so from a strong sense of revulsion, as the Belgian government pumped out graphic tales of German atrocities against unarmed civilians.

The invading Germans are now known to have slaughtered around 5,500 civilians in the opening weeks. In Ireland, the civilian killings were slanted as the sectarian war crimes of fiercely anti-Catholic German Protestants.

There are other explanations for the high civilian death toll, with some putting the German shoot-to-kill policy down to a paranoid remembrance of the damage done by civilian 'free-shooters' in the earlier Franco-Prussian War. Whatever their true cause, the stories of civilian massacres made a shocking impression, and a powerful propaganda tool, in an era when warfare was still dressed up as an honourable and chivalrous pursuit.

By the time of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, the old fiction of combat as chivalrous had been blown to smithereens, as the terrors of a new type of industrial war were unleashed.