Hello,

Of course you are right, Jim and Keith. That was careless of me to use the quote like that. My guess is that the article's author just wants to ignore that foggy dew doesn't originate from "Gaelic" poetry (or it might even be that he doesn't know it). I didn't really pay attention to that so than you for pointing it out.

That's a very interesting conversation you are having about WWI. Although I know quite a lot about it, it's rare to hear debates such as this about it. (The situation is very different here because, as you know, Finland didn't really get very involved in the war - in fact the country didn't exist until 1917. And then Finns had their own bloody civil war to fight.) There are a couple of things I'd like to point out which are true about every war. Firstly, people don't become soldiers just for one reason. I'm sure all of the motives mentioned existed. Some probably joined to get Home Rule for Ireland, some felt that they went to fight against an evil state, some might have just needed a job and some money (remember, that WWI was supposed to be a very short war and all over Europe people were celebrating the beginning of it). It's impossible to explain these kind of things with just one theory. Secondly, you were writing about cruelty in wars. There's a lot of (especially recent) research about different wars that has come to the conclusion that "cruel or unusual" methods such as genocide, other killing campaigns and raping are often more or less a standard method of the army using them. It is very often organized and widely spread. Of course afterwards, the army often tries to find some individuals to put the blame on for claiming them to be exceptions and perhaps psychologically sick etc. As everyone knows, winners write the history and they tend to try to justify their deeds by highlighting their opponents' wrongs. Thus, many people haven't heard about what happened in Rome when the US troops arrived there during WWII: many women were raped by the soldiers. And there's the much more widely known fact, that some of the world's first concentration camps were in Finland after our civil war and the one organizing them was the state.

But now I'm going way too far from Ireland and from the subject so I'd better end this message here. I just needed to point out that there are extremely few black-and-white issues in the world, especially in the wars.

Minna