What price glory?

I mourn for the great uncle I never knew. An Irish gardener who worked at Dublin Botanic Gardens in 1915, Stephen George Rose loved to take photographs of flowers for Irish Gardening magazine, while all around the rumblings of war and internal dissent were brewing.

In Dublin, many locals were calling for independence from Britain, but Stephen was conscripted to serve in the British Royal Army Medical Corps before the Easter Rising put an end to Irish recruitment. He was killed in 1917 when the ship he was travelling on was sunk by a German U Boat in the Aegean Sea. Hundreds of lives were lost that night as the SS Arcadian splintered and burned before going down.

A war on this scale demands a high turnover of young men and the official imagery of World War 1 presented a romanticised view of the soldier as hero. It’s only in the aftermath of events like these that we can pick through the pieces and attempt to make sense of what’s happened.

What Price Glory seeks to question the romanticisation of war and find a place in the family album for a relative whose existence I only recently discovered.