Huge German guns were a reward for wartime service - whether Antrim wanted them or not

AS a ‘reward’ for the towering contribution Antrim had made to the war effort, it was decidedly odd...

Yet on a sunny March day in 1924 shops closed, crowds gathered and flags fluttered to mark the arrival of two German war guns that had delivered death on the heads of British troops just a few years earlier.

And, yes, some local people did not like it, prompting an urgent rear guard action to sell the notion of the Kaiser’s killing machines to the masses.

Remember, in 1914, their high explosive shells reduced the imposing Belgian fortresses of Liège to smoking rubble. Two years later, they rained continuous and random death on the intrepid French defenders clinging stubbornly to their trenches at Verdun.

Their presence was keenly felt by the 36th Ulster Division on the killing fields of the Somme when they were savagely mauled under their cacophonous hail.

During the First World War, artillery comprised the formidable backbone of the German army’s firepower, and is estimated to have been responsible for up to 70 per cent of Allied battle casualties.

In short they were unlikely landmarks.

The War Office disagreed. The ferocious guns were given in recognition of the sacrifices of Antrim’s homegrown heroes and the close-knit community that mourned their loss.

They were symbols of victory that spoke of the insurmountable odds faced by the 258 Antrim men who volunteered for duty on the Western Front, and the 42 who were cut down in their prime around Thiepval, Messines and Ypres.

The smaller of the two, a light anti-aircraft gun, kept silent watch over Market Square. The other was a hulking behemoth that, during the war, had been capable of lobbing huge shells up to seven miles away. This gun, a mighty 8-inch howitzer, was earmarked to take pride of place at the head of Fountain Street.

They arrived in an Antrim draped in ‘Union Jacks and loyalist emblems’. A procession numbering in the thousands followed the guns from Castle Street onwards, led by the musicians of the Massereene Brass and Reed Band, ex-service men, the Randalstown British Legion Pipe Band and the Dungonnell Flute Band.

The R.U.C marched behind, alongside members of the ‘B Specials’ - ‘those gallant men who have done so much for the protection of our lives and properties since the commencement of the Irish struggle’ - and a contingent of local youngsters under the watchful eye of Scoutmaster Bob Moore.

Town Commissioners Messrs Charles Burrowes, John McCabe, James Baird, James Wilson, Thomas McMaster, James Christie, FT Smith, WD McKeown, Richard Mullan and Archibald McKay were out in force too to welcome the ‘trophy guns’.

Both guns, it was reported, had been diligently ‘cleared of all their Germanic rottenness, repainted and made to look respectable’.

However, for some townsfolk, the War Office’s gift was a confusing one. Why Antrim, and why a pair of cannons that had been serviced by enemy troops? Why commemorate the fallen by displaying the very weapons that had slain them in droves only six years earlier?

Mr Burrowes attempted to explain all. He accepted that ‘very many’ were puzzled by the striking new monuments, so he set out to ‘offer a few thoughts on what the guns were to them, and what they were not’.

And he wanted to make one thing emphatically clear. They were not a war memorial. Oh, no. ‘The trophy guns were in no sense of the word and under no consideration a war memorial to their soldiers, either the living or the dead’.

Any suggestion to the contrary perhaps came from the fact that Antrim was one of the few towns that did not have a memorial to their ‘incomparable soldiers’.

Mr Burrowes acknowledged that some did not welcome them with open arms - but, to his credit, he did his best to bring them on board.

He argued that there were many reasons for the formidable weaponry to move to the county town - ‘reasons noble, reasons patriotic, reasons imperial’.

“In the first place they should portray to every one of them the majesty, the dominion and the power of the great British Empire, whose sons they were and whose sons they were going to remain.”

They were, he said, ‘Antrim’s share of the spoils of the great World War’.

“It was only natural that they should hate their materialism and their use, but they needed a far deeper vision. They wanted to see the bulldog grip and tenacity of the Briton in wresting those implements of war from their enemies.”

It was, he said, a funeral of sorts - putting the guns beyond use forever.

“Never again would their chambers be tenanted with the vehicles of death.”

The world’s need now, said the chairman in conclusion, was peace. And to the people of Antrim, the guns should be an enduring emblem of just that.

The handover ceremony was presided over, on behalf of King George V, by Colonel H.A Pakenham. He told the crowd that he considered himself an honorary Antrim man as he had served with many of their number during the war.

He had commanded a regiment of the Ulster Volunteer Force, which contained an Antrim battalion, and was the first commanding officer of the 11th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles, which had an Antrim company.

Colonel Pakenham said the town had sent 258 men to the front, with roughly the same again from the surrounding district.

The local men, he said, were ‘always cheerful in adversity, took everything as it came and were extraordinarily fine fighters’.

Under his command, the 11th Battalion participated in the deadliest single day in British military history - the first day of the Somme Offensive on July 1st 1916, during which some 57,000 British troops were killed or maimed. Going over the top at dawn and running the punishing gauntlet of No Man’s Land as part of that disastrous advance, the German guns exacted a bloody toll from the sons of Randalstown, Kells, Ballymena and Antrim.

Following this hideous baptism of fire, the luckless Antrim men of the 11th Battalion may as well have been plucked from the frying pan and plunged into the fire. The following year they served at Messines, where the mines detonated beneath the German trenches were so earsplittingly loud their blasts could be heard all the way from London.

Only a few of months later, they waded grimly into the bogged down, muddy mire of the infamous Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders. Shortly thereafter, the Antrim men bore witness to the first mass use of tanks in warfare during the Battle of Cambrai.

He paid tribute to them in his address, and spoke of his pride in handing over the ‘dead emblems of a dead empire’.

“It was those guns and guns like them that day and night were pouring their shots at their devoted heads, and very unpleasant shots they were, but in spite of them they won through and the guns that day were taken from those who tried to stop them but did not succeed.”

He hoped they would remain there for generations to come as emblems of what the might of Great Britain was, and as mute witnesses to ‘the great German defeat and ultimate rout’.

It was, he said, no less than the men of Antrim deserved. Pakenham further added that it had been ‘an honour’ to command them, and that his enduring love of that fighting band of brothers was his ‘lasting remembrance of that Great War’.

In closing, he hoped that the town’s children would ‘treat them with due respect and not make climbing places of them’.

“Instead, treat them as something that was almost sacred, because from their mouths went projectiles that killed many of their friends and relations and those that were loved by them,” he said.

In time the guns would become climbing frames, but certainly not that day. The patriotic fervour was already high as the Massereene Band broke into a rousing chorus of Rule Britannia as Hugh O’Neill, the local MP and Speaker of the new Northern Ireland Parliament took to the platform.

He said that the guns should be a monument to the lives lost - and a reminder of what could be at stake if countries took up arms again.

“Let’s hope…. that these guns commemorate a future era of greater peace among the nations,” he said.

He acknowledged how the same weapons had ‘poured their deadly avalanches’ onto Allied trenches on the Western Front, and suggested that such evocative relics from Europe’s blood-soaked battlefields should imbue the town of Antrim with a justified sense of pride.

“It is an honour to the town to have these guns, and an honour well deserved,” he said.

For all the jingoistic jubilation, the sombre undercurrent to the ceremony was palpable.

‘One could not help, at a time like that, thinking of those who went to war and never came back,” wrote one reporter on the scene.

‘(Mr O’Neill) was sure that there were many there that afternoon whose pride at the acceptance of these guns by the town was mingled also with feelings of memories not untinged with sorrow for those who were dear to them and who would never come back.”

The guns, therefore, were more than mere spoils of war or communal bragging right. They were a powerful reminder of the gaping hole torn into the community when those cheerful, brave young men marched off to that terrible clash of empires.

The sacrifice was then underlined when Antrim man Sam Hannan - who had served in the Royal Irish Rifles in wartime and had won the Carnegie Medal for gallantry helping people from the fire at Antrim Castle two years previously - stepped forward to lay a wreath at the sleeping gun.

He was followed by Mrs James Wallace, who laid flowers in memory of her son Lance Corporal William Wallace, who was killed in action. There was another in memory of Sub-Lieutenant Jack Caton, who died in service with the Royal Naval Division. There were flowers too for Alexander Wallace, who also died on duty.

The final speech of the afternoon came courtesy of Charles McKeen, with comments that, in retrospect, were eerily prophetic.

“In a very few years these fearsome guns will be out of date and if war breaks out again whole countries and towns and communities will be wiped out of existence as by a flash of lightning,” he said.

“Therefore, it behoves all politicians and rulers to see that peace is maintained.”

Such optimism in the finality of the Allied victory soon dissipated when the war to end all wars gave way to the peace to end all peace. By 1939, the clouds of war were once again looming and in time Antrim’s symbols of peace were conscripted to help the war effort.

Ironically, they were melted down for munitions to rain down on German heads.

Mr Charles Burrowes had been correct when he wagered that ‘never again would their chambers be tenanted with the vehicles of death’. That said, nobody could have guessed that their chambers would themselves become vehicles of death just a few short years later..

Today, two small cannons, donated by Greenmount College, mark the locations where their larger German cousins once stood.

It is difficult to visualise the field gun that once presided over Market Square, and bizarre to think of how a seven-tonne steel colossus once called Fountain Street home.

Weapons of war enlisted as symbols of peace - only to be recruited once more as the world plunged into an even more devastating conflict.