IRELAND'S STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE
THE IRISH REBELLION of 1916 was invested with a peculiar gravity and significance by two circumstances which distinguished it from earlier insurrections in the modern history of Ireland. The first was the German connexion.
The national instinct of Ireland has been, historically, francophile, and the German name, throughout the last century, was chiefly associated in the mind of Nationalists with mercenary troops employed to combat the rising of '98. The French tradition dated back three centuries to the time of the rebellion of the great O'Neills of Tyrone. It was continued in the community of arms of Irish and French in the days of St. Ruth and Sarsfield, in the deeds of the Irish Brigade under the French flag at Fontenoy, Blenheim, and Ramillies, when Irishmen by the ten thousand died in the service of France on the battlefields of Europe, and later in Humbert's invasion of Ireland. It persisted even to 1870, when, while Great Britain preserved a frigidly correct neutrality, Irish sympathy took visible form in the despatch to France of an Ambulance Service, and of a combatant Compagnie Irlandaise that, but for the restrictions upon volunteering imposed