Poppy wreath on site of Easter Rising battlefield

Yesterday I was on my way home from town when I saw the following on the railings of Mount St Bridge, Dublin site of a particularly fierce battle of the Easter Rising. There was a note on it which said something like.

"In memory of the soldiers of the Sherwood Foresters who were ambushed and killed here during the Easter Rising and of all civilian victims. Lest we forget."

I only returned today to take a photograph of it and in the meantime the note had disappeared, presumably thanks to the bad weather of the recent 24 hours so the quote above is only from memory.

The engagement at Mount St Bridge is well known. There is indeed a long-standing republican monument to the event just around the corner from where this wreath was attached.

Popular local recollection is that the Sherwood Foresters were rushed over to Dublin as reinforcements after the rebellion started and were unsure where they were. It was even suspected they might have thought they were in France where there was, after all, a World War taking place at the time. Though I doubt even back then in those more isolated times that the Dublin 4 accent was so indecipherable to the stout yeomen of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire that they would mistake it for French or German.

Certainly they were most ineptly led: they kept charging up Northumberland Road at the rebels ensconced in houses on the other side of the bridge and were slaughtered as a consequence. Nobody seemed to think they might hang a left at Haddington Road, scoot up to Hubband Bridge or Baggot St Bridge and outflank the rebels that way.

Miners led by minors, one can't help thinking.

My first reaction on seeing the wreath was "That's a bit cheeky! I wonder is there a memorial, temporary or permanent, in the East End of London to the casualties from the Luftwaffe who were killed in the skies above in 1940." Just to cite one example.

And then I thought that there are plenty of British war cemeteries on the territory of former enemies throughout the world, not least in Germany and Turkey. And surely it's time to acknowledge the courage and sacrifice of the enemy soldiers as well now that bygones have long since been rendered bygones.

Mind you, I don't believe for a second that the wreath was placed by British visitors or distant relatives of the Sherwood Forester soldiers. It's far more likely to have been placed by the type of sycophant who thinks that the soldiers of the British Army were our soldiers, that we were all on the same side and it's about time we pretended that that was always the case. In the name of reconciliation, of course.

And it's a little disingenuous to have linked the deaths of the Foresters with "all civilian deaths" as if they were all caused by the same side. Which side, after all, was most responsible for the destruction of much of central Dublin, so graphically photographed by the newsreels of the time?

To paraphrase Fluther Good in O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, was it more likely to have been the "few hundred scrawls of chaps with shotguns and rosary beads" or their enemy the "thousands of trained soldiers with foot horse and artillery" (and gunboats)?

Lest we forget.