Sombre lesson of the Somme still lives on

Country Living with Francis Farragher

The older we get the more we tend to reflect back on our younger days and I remember through the 1960s many references being made at the kitchen table to elderly men still living in the area who had served in the first world war.

They were spoken of almost in hushed tones, as if they had done something wrong or as if there was some terrible blob on their character, but it’s only with the passing of time, that the realisation dawned of what those unfortunate souls went through.

History was really at its cruellest when thousands of young Irish men, many of them just boys, enrolled in the British Army, feeling that it was their patriotic duty to do so and take on a German army that had pillaged its way through Belgium and France, committing some terrible atrocities along the way.

To enlist was considered to be the loyal, manly and even the patriotic thing to do, but through the course of the Great War, the course of Irish history was to change inexorably, with the 1916 Rising and the reigniting of the Irish nationalist cause.

But for a moment, put yourself in the shoes of the young Galway soldier lucky enough to have survived battles like Gallipoli and The Somme, returning home on the run-up to Christmas 1918, shortly after the war had ended.

These soldiers had survived hell on earth and even those who had escaped life maiming injuries were still traumatised. We were told as children that these ex-soldiers were ‘shell-shocked’ and ‘were never right since’ [the war], but if that wasn’t bad enough, they came home as outcasts and as local representatives of British imperialism.

Talk about all your misfortunes landing down on top of you, but those unfortunate survivors then had to try and return to some normality as the Irish War of Independence swung into action, and the campaign began in earnest to at last break away from the clasp of Britannia.

One of those ex-soldiers in my neck of the woods at Ballyglunin, who was given the nickname of ‘Mulligan’, ended up homeless and living out the rest of this days with only the dripping stones of the ‘dry eye’ of a bridge on the River Abbert for shelter.

He had a pension from the war, and drank most of it, with the balance being spent on a few loaves of bread to give him sustenance, and my father on returning from the local on a weekend night, would relay some tale told by ‘Mulligan’ about surviving machine gun fire and exploding shells.