A soldier’s fate

GERALD Morgan (Letters, May 3) salutes the “heroic Irish dead” of the Great War. Yet losing their lives was scarcely the sole sacrificial service.

They killed, as warriors do. However, their victims – Germans, Austrians, Turks, etc – never did anything against Ireland. Rather the reverse. Hence the 1916 Proclamation praises them as “our gallant allies.”

WB Yeats realises a telling truth in his poignant poem, An Irish Airman Foresees his Death (1916):

“Those that I fight I do not hate.

Those that I guard I do not love”.

JA Barnwell

St Patrick’s Road

Dublin 9