This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 25, Number 2 (February 2014), 13.
For
the past few weeks, I have been thumbing back and forth through a massive
hot-off-the-press coffee table book, The
Great War: a Photographic Narrative.
A project of Great Britain’s Imperial War Museums, the book offers a
starkly candid photographic record of the horrific reality of life in the
various “theatres” that constituted World War I: the trenches and the
battlefields of the Western Front, of course, but also the beaches and the slopes
of Gallipoli, the Zeppelin-bombed streets of England, the deserts of the Middle
East, and the high seas. For the
most part, this gathering of images is not for the faint of heart.
Obviously,
the publication of this book anticipates the centenary of The Great War—1914-1918. It thus holds intrinsic interest for
anyone invested in Irish matters: more than 200,000 Irishmen enlisted in the
British forces and more than 30,000 died in combat. No doubt the next four years will see this under-written
chapter of Irish history given its long overdue attention—and appropriate
commemoration—by scholars, by the Irish government, and by the general public.
I
must admit that I have a personal investment in all of this: my Irish-born
paternal grandfather enlisted in the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment in September
of 1914 and served in France and Belgium from July of 1915 until the end of the
war in November of 1918. After he
was demobbed in 1919, he relocated to New York City where he married his Irish
sweetheart, who had emigrated before the War. An Irishman to the core, for the rest of his life he
remained proud of his British military service and of the decorations he
earned—a Victory Medal and a British War Medal, each recognizing general
service during the Great War, and a 1914/1915 Star recognizing specifically his
service in France in 1915.
As
a private in the 12th (Service) Battalion of the King’s (Liverpool)
Regiment, my grandfather was involved in many of the major engagements on the
Western Front: both Battles of the Somme (1916 and 1918), the Third Battle of
Ypres (Passchendaele) in 1917, and the Final Advance in Picardy in 1918. Each of these is represented in The Great War: a Photographic Narrative.
But
of all the photos in the book, one in particular caught my eye immediately—and continues
to hold my focus—as an indelible “emblem” not just of my grandfather’s
experience but more broadly of “the Irish experience” on the Western
Front. The photo, taken in
Flanders, appears on page 373 of the book. Snapped by Lieutenant John Warwick Brooke, an official
British Army photographer, it is captioned matter-of-factly: “Stretcher-bearers
of the Field Ambulance Corps carry a wounded man through deep mud, near
Boesinghe, Ypres Salient, Belgium, 1 August 1917.” The day that photo was taken, my grandfather’s battalion was
in the immediate vicinity, on march from a training camp about 10 miles away in
Proven to bivouacs in Elverdinghe, about a mile short of Boesinghe, en route to
what would be known as the Battle of Langemarck in mid-August.
I
visited Boesinghe (now spelled Boezinge) and environs last year and was
immediately struck by the distinctive character of the landscape there: just as
the photo records, it is unrelentingly flat, stretching out as far as the eye
can see, punctuated only occasionally by small clusters of farm buildings. Standing in the midst of that vast expanse
almost a century after my grandfather, I tried to imagine how he “experienced”
it. Born in Borrisokane, Co.
Tipperary, he grew up in Clara, Co. Offaly: thus, like the large majority of
Irishmen of rural, village, or small-town stock who served in the British Army,
he would have been accustomed to a much more textured and contoured landscape—white-washed
thatch-roofed cottages in rolling fields enclosed by tumble-down stone walls, twisty
roads and lanes overarched by rich leafage, meandering rivers and brooks,
perhaps furzy mountains rising in the distance. The description of Flanders proffered by historian John
Keegan in his book The First World War
underscores the contrast: “There is one of the dreariest landscapes in Western
Europe, a sodden plain of wide, unfenced fields, pasture and plough intermixed,
overlying a water table that floods on excavation more than a few spadefuls
deep. There are patches of
woodland scattered between the villages and isolated farmsteads and a few
points of high ground that loom in the distance behind the ancient walled city
of Ypres. The pervading
impression, however, is of long unimpeded fields of view, too mournful to be
called vistas, interrupted only by the occasional church steeple and leading in
all directions to distant, hazy horizons which promise nothing but the region’s
copious and frequent rainfall.”
Obviously, the emptiness my grandfather saw all around him in Flanders
would have felt truly foreign and utterly disorienting.
It would
have felt utterly hostile as well.
As Mark Holborn observes in his Editorial Note to The Great War: a Photographic Narrative, the heavy bombardment of
the countryside by both German and Allied artillery, a distinguishing feature
of the War itself, altered the already spare landscape: “Landmarks were
eradicated and trees vanished.” In
the summer of 1917, nature too conspired to make the area even more inhospitable,
as weeks of rain combined with the high water table to create the absolute
quagmire captured in the photograph—some of the stretcher-bearers are up to
their knees in mud. According to
some accounts, thousands of soldiers actually drowned in the mud of Flanders,
which in places was ten feet deep.
For my grandfather and his fellow displaced Irishmen serving on the
Western Front, trudging toward battle through those unspeakably miserable
fields of Flanders would have given very literal meaning to that popular
marching song of the day, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary . . .”
But
there is no need to take just my word on that. While my grandfather left behind no written account of his
time on the Western Front and while the stories he told my father and his
siblings have become blurry over time, the sensation of alienation—and of
homesickness—that I imagined for him as I stood there in Boezinge last year has
been registered by others, including celebrated poet Francis Ledwidge. Born in 1887, Ledwidge grew up and was
educated in Janesville, an area on the outskirts of Slane, Co. Meath. (His boyhood cottage is now a museum
honoring his memory.) In 1914, he
enlisted in the 5th Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers
and saw action as a Lance Corporal first at the Dardanelles in 1915 and then in
Serbia (where he injured his back).
In December of 1916, he returned to active duty, this time in the border
area of France and Belgium with the 1st Battalion of the Royal
Inniskillings.
A
prolific poet since his mid-teens, the 29-year-old soldier continued to send
verses home to his literary patron, Lord Dunsany, who oversaw their publication
in book form both during Ledwidge’s lifetime and after his death. Written on February 3rd,
1917, shortly after he arrived at the Western Front, “In France” typifies how
Ledwidge’s poems emphasize the bucolic and the romantic, keeping at literary
arm’s length the horrific realities of battlefields and trench warfare:
The
silence of maternal hills
Is
round me in my evening dreams;
And
round me music-making bills
And
mingling waves of pastoral streams.
Whatever
way I turn I find
The
path is old unto me still.
The
hills of home are in my mind,
And
there I wander as I will.
Clearly,
the memory of those hills around Slane afforded Ledwidge consolation in the
midst of the alien landscape and the lethal environment of the Western
Front. In fact, in “Spring,” a
poem dated March 8th, 1917, he allows a flight of imagination to
transport him back to Meath—to a rural landscape noisy with larks and magpies
and wood-doves and kingfishers and bursting with primroses and daffodils and
water-lilies and daises—until the final two lines bring him back to the here
and the now of the War: “And peace wraps all those hills of mine / Safe in
dearest memory.”
But
the poem of Ledwidge’s that speaks most poignantly to me as I picture my
grandfather passing through Boesinghe in early August of 1917 is titled simply
“Home.” Like “Spring,” it
catalogues pastoral life in Ireland, but in this case the memories of home are
awakened by the singing of a bird in war-ravaged Belgium:
This
is a song a robin sang
This
morning on a broken tree,
It
was about the little fields
That
call across the world to me.
Written
in July of 1917, “Home” was one of Francis Ledwidge’s last poems. The poet was killed at Carrefour Rose,
a crossroads in Boesinghe, in a German shrapnel attack on July 31st,
1917, the day before Lieutenant Brooke took that memorable photograph of the
stretcher-bearers in that same forbidding countryside. A memorial to Ledwidge stands at the
very spot where he was killed. He
is buried a quarter mile away in Artillery Wood Cemetery. I visited both of those sites last year
and paid my respects to the poet.
I remembered my grandfather too.
No comments:
Post a Comment