(Text of speech by Padraig Yeates at Wreath laying and Poetry Reading in Memory of Francis Ledwidge, Poet and Soldier, National War Memorial Gardens, Islandbridge, Dublin, 4th August, 2013)

4th August, 2013, is 99 years to the day since Britain declared war on Germany in the conflict that became known as the First World War. It would devastate much of France and Belgium, northern Italy, the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as destroy the Ottoman Empire, give birth to the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement, and facilitate the rise of the United States to super power status.

An estimated ten million people died in Europe alone and it created the conditions that led to the Second World War and the deaths of 50 million more across Eurasia within a generation. Most of the crises and conflicts we face today can trace their roots to the ‘guns of August’.

Francis Ledwidge was one of those millions of combatants who died in the Great War. He was ‘Killed In Action’ on 31 July, 1917, one of a group of Royal Inniskillings designated to work as pioneers on communications trenches and roads in preparation for the Third Battle of Ypres. ‘Killed In Action’ is of course a euphemism designed to obscure the obscenity of industrialised warfare and production line slaughter. He was reputedly drinking a cup of tea and smoking a cigarette when a German artillery shell sent him and four comrades into oblivion. It was probably as good a death as anyone could hope for on the Western Front in 1917, and my father used to say you weren’t supposed to hear the one that got you.

He endured similar bombardments in Italy and described them as the most terrifying experiences of his life. The silence that followed the shells was quickly filled with the screams of the injured and the maimed. The generation that fought in British Army uniform between 1939 and 1945 had far fewer illusions about war and less appetite for it than their predecessors of 1914. Their main objective was to come out the other side in one piece.

Download the full speech here