Falls, Cyril Bentham (1888–1971), military historian and journalist, was born 2 March 1888 in Dublin, elder of two sons of Charles Fausset Falls (1860–1936) and his wife Clare (née Bentham), who also had a daughter. His father was a prominent Enniskillen solicitor and a leading unionist activist and political ‘fixer’ in Fermanagh; he fought in the first world war, was knighted in 1923, and served as MP for Fermanagh and Tyrone in 1924–9. Falls was brought up at the family residence, Little Derryinch House, Co. Fermanagh, where his father kept a racing yacht on Loch Erne; he cherished childhood memories of being taught to salute the memory of King William III (qv) as he crossed the Boyne viaduct at Drogheda on train journeys, and though he spent most of his adult life in England he retained a lifelong fondness for the Fermanagh countryside. He was educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, at Bradfield College, near Reading in Berkshire, and at London University; he also received some private education on the continent, which laid the basis for his lifelong Francophilia.
In 1914 Falls joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, part of the 36th (Ulster) division, in which he served throughout the war. In 1915 he married Elizabeth Heath; they were to have two daughters. After going to the front in that year he served as a staff officer in the 36th and then in the 62nd division, and afterwards as a liaison officer with the French army. Here he formed several lasting friendships and developed an appreciation for contemporary French literature (he was an early admirer of Proust), as is evident from his post-war literary journalism for such organs as the London Mercury, some of which is collected in The critic's armoury (1924). By the end of the war he had attained the rank of captain. He was commissioned to write the official history of the Ulster division. Although he collected numerous recollections from survivors of the division, relatively little of this is quoted directly in the finished text (London, 1922). The book has been described as containing some of the most accurate descriptions of conditions on the western front, and it graphically portrays the horrors of Passchendaele and the plight of civilian refugees; it may, however, appear somewhat impersonal to aficionados of ‘history from below’ and to those for whom the story of the Ulster division culminates with the first day of the battle of the Somme (1 July 1916).
Falls's work on the Ulster division led to his being recruited to the team of historians who wrote the official history of the war; he co-authored the account of the Egyptian and Palestinian campaigns (1928), and was sole author of the two-volume account of the Macedonian campaign (1933) and a volume on the western front in 1917 (1940). He was strongly hostile to the view that the first world war had been a senseless waste of life. Although he declared that ‘the war was a ghastly experience, and everyone should do all that in him lies to ensure that it is not repeated’ (War books, pp xiii), he believed that the allied cause had been just, that no compromise settlement had been possible, and that victory for the central powers would have produced a world even harsher and more oppressive than interwar Europe. He also complained that the anti-war literature produced from the late 1920s, which subsequently did much to shape popular perceptions of the Great War, falsified the experience of men at the front by presenting the most extreme conditions as typical and depicting soldiers as dehumanised and devoid of moral agency. Falls's fullest statement of this view is War books: a critical guide (1930), a catalogue raisonné of English-language books on the war together with some untranslated French and German works. The book includes appraisals of several works by Irish authors or about Irish units. Falls was military correspondent of The Times (1939–53) and Chichele professor of the history of war and fellow of All Souls, Oxford (1946–53). He also wrote extensively on political affairs for the Illustrated London News.
Falls's major publications on Irish history deal with the events leading up to the Ulster plantation. The birth of Ulster (1936), which covers the wars of the Elizabethan period and the early decades of the plantation, expresses indebtedness to Lord Ernest Hamilton (qv); it pursues a more markedly unionist political agenda than do Elizabeth's Irish wars (1950) and Mountjoy: Elizabethan general (1955), which draw on extensive research made possible by Falls's Oxford chair. All three, however, display a certain defensiveness in his view of the crown's treatment of such allies as Niall Garbh O' Donnell (qv), which he posits as an early example of the policy of conciliating Irish enemies at the expense of Irish friends, thus alienating the latter without gaining the former. (There is an implicit comparison with the 1921 treaty, which Falls resented not only as an Irish unionist but also as a military officer whose colleagues had been ‘murdered’.) He also wrote The history of the first seven battalions, the Royal Irish Rifles (now the Royal Ulster Rifles) in the Great War (1925), which contains an incidental expression of respect for John Redmond (qv) (p. 48). Falls welcomed an invitation to contribute a piece on General Sir John Maxwell (qv) to Leaders and men of the Easter rising (1967), edited by F. X. Martin (qv), as a sign of improved north–south relations.
His other publications include The Great War, 1914–1918 (1959), The art of war: from the age of Napoleon to the present day (1961), and Armageddon 1918 (1966). A major theme of his writings is the need to examine war as a factor in history, without either glorification or moral condemnation, and he had a notable gift for clear exposition. Falls exemplifies the links between Ulster unionism of the early to mid twentieth century and a wider British elite, to which it was united by personal contacts, by joint participation in the martial and imperial enterprise, and by a shared though declining sense that the Glorious Revolution saved Ireland from ‘some things [namely ‘Popery and Arbitrary Power’] that in the tolerant cool of approaching middle age and with a growing tenderness for the House of Stuart, I still think we are better without’ (Birth of Ulster, p. xii). Falls died 23 April 1971 at Waltham-on-Thames, Surrey.