The forgotten heroes who suffered in life and death

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Growing up as a child of the sixties, there were many references to the Second World War or The Emergency as it was known in Ireland, and it was a topic that could be talked about quite openly and without any sense of restriction.

In the shadows though, lurked many ghosts from the First World War . . . the only problem was, that many of them weren’t in fact ghosts, but were now old men living out their latter years in villages, towns and communities where The Great War was a taboo subject.

Very occasional references would be made in our house to men who still lived around the place and who had survived one horrible episode in the history of the world, as four years of slugging it out in the trenches, led to a wipe-out of about nine million people.

Like all children, during conversations of the grown-ups, we would assiduously eavesdrop on what was being said and occasionally the name of an individual would be mentioned who had soldiered during The Great War. One of those incisive but simple phrases we would hear about someone who had taken part in the campaign was: “that they were never right afterwards.”

Another little phrase trotted out here and there was that such ex-combatants were “shell shocked” and we’d also hear of them “never settling again’ and of “taking to the drink”. There was also a tale of one ex-soldier who eked some kind of primal existence, living under the dry eye of a bridge, his only escape from hardship being the few pints of plain he would consume each evening to help him damply sleep under his stone roof.

As bad and all as the physical and mental scars of the war were on the returning Irish soldiers, they then of course had to face back into an Ireland where the entire political and social landscape had changed in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising and the flames of nationalism had again been rekindled. So instead of returning as heroes to Ireland after ‘success’ in the Great War, the Irish soldiers found themselves looked upon as members of the enemy ranks, not to be trusted and often reviled in more hard-line Republican circles. Time slipped by and the old soldiers passed away, quietly and without tribute: in many cases, death an ease to them, in their troubled world of old age, post traumatic stress and semi-ostracism in their own communities.

Given our difficult birth and adolescence as a nation, it has taken us almost 100 years to come to terms with the huge sacrifices made by Irish soldiers and their families during World War 1 and to fittingly acknowledge their bravery and courage as they made their way through blood and bodies in places like The Somme and Gallipoli, waiting for the next bullet to pierce their skulls or chests.

While the biggest blood bath of all during World War 1 was The Somme – where one millions soldiers died in the battle for a net gain of about five miles of territory – the one that’s in the news over the past week is Gallipoli, where 141,000 soldiers lost their lives, 55,000 Allied Forces and 86,000 Turks.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.