THE entry in the priest’s diary was stark: “Ledwidge killed. Blown to bits. At confession yesterday and Holy Communion this morning. RIP.”

Small comfort for his family and friends. Small comfort too for the course of Irish literature.

In his poem In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge, Seamus Heaney calls him “our dead enigma”.

Ledwidge, who died in Flanders, was a poet of the First World War, but he was also a poet of the 1916 Rising.

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Therein lies the enigma, and therein too lies the reason for the neglect of the countless Irishmen who died fighting for Britain in that most pointless of conflicts.

Much has changed since, not least through the determination of Mary McAleese when President to honour Ireland’s war dead.

Speaking on the 100th anniversary of the war, she posed the question: “How do we reconcile the commemoration of those dead Irishmen who wore British uniforms fighting for freedom in Europe, while others sacrificed their lives for our freedom from that same British colonial power with its grim history of oppression in Ireland?”

How indeed?

For Ledwidge, that contradiction was particularly stark. One........

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