Outright violence was accompanied by the imposition of the norms of civil government – such as taxation and law courts – on a population faced with rival demands for its allegiance and its money. Rather the war consisted of skirmishes, ambushes and assassinations. There was no full-frontal clash of armies. Ireland now witnessed a bloody and protracted tussle between two governments – the UK and an Irish Republican "counter-state" – each of which pretended to be the legitimate authority for the whole island, and attempted to govern as much of it as was practicable. Instead the party's MPs constituted themselves the Dáil Eireann, the assembly of a self-proclaimed Irish republic. Sinn Féin was an abstentionist party whose MPs were pledged to a boycott of Westminster. The general election at the end of the war in 1918 saw Irish constituencies fall overwhelmingly to the republican separatists of Sinn Féin. The cackhandedness of the British government fatally weakened a parliamentary Irish party committed to home rule for Ireland within the UK. Such was the storm the measure provoked in Ireland that it was eventually withdrawn, but not before it had worked its unintentional effect of further radicalising the Irish population. Lloyd George's coalition rushed the bill through parliament, and Duke resigned. Never mind that the chief secretary for Ireland, Henry Duke, feared that "we might as well recruit Germans". In March 1918 the massive German offensive on the western front panicked the British government into introducing a military service bill for Ireland. However, the martyrdoms of the few were to prove less significant than the general threat of conscription. Irish republicanism had been a fringe phenomenon in Irish politics before the outbreak of the first world war, and the obvious futility of the rising might have kept it on the margins had it not been for the execution of the rebellion's leaders. Townshend's subject is the tortuous road to Irish independence after the abortive Easter rising of 1916. Non-judgmental, even-handed history, it transpires, need not inhibit dramatic storytelling. Surely this is too much information? Do we really need to be told that heroes, too, need clean socks? I think so, yes: bathos provides an effective counterweight to legend, Townshend's deadpan command of detail easing the process by which a warrior mythology is transmuted into a realistic and humane narrative.
Orders were dispatched that company captains should stress the importance of hygiene and ensure that their men "change their socks regularly". In his magisterial account of the Irish struggle for independence, Charles Townshend records the alarm of the Irish Republican Army in the spring of 1921 at the prevalence of nits, scabies and fungal infections among its soldiers. By the same token, the humdrum – but important – underpinnings of military success are also filtered out. The self-sacrificing heroism of a people in arms tends to drown out unwelcome noises off: dissidence, recalcitrance, apathy and cagey self-interest. Wars of national liberation inspire history in a bardic register.
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