THE sun shone on the glorious Memorial Gardens at Island bridge last Sunday, a million miles and a thousand years away from the mud of the drab beet field around the sucrerie outside Ginchy in September, 1916. Those who survived that day, and all the other days history despatched them to, are gone, and the memory of what they did that day is all but forgotten.
Perhaps it is just as well. Perhaps people raised to memories of war tinge those memories with false notions of glory, heroism, decency and the abiding virtues of the martial way. Certainly, the Irishmen who emerged from eight days' fighting on the Somme were to be in no danger of being the subject of heroic memory. Quite the reverse the very historical processes which were to raise the 136th Ulster to pious and immortal memory, were to obscure completely the fate of the nationalists of the 16th Irish Division 80 years ago this week.
Was their sacrifice in vain? Yes, we can say with reasonable certainty, it was, as was the sacrifice of the Germans they killed and of the countless millions of other nations called from hearth and field and mill to perish as empires collapsed, old orders vanished, and European civilisation fell upon itself and devoured its children.
Vast Conspiracy
The point is, of course, that they did not know this. They did not know they were part of some vast fraternal conspiracy which reached around the world they assumed that what they did counted and would in due course secure for them and their nation a freedom which had been granted in law, but not execution in 1914.
According to the moral dilemma of the in vain school to have done nothing would have been reprehensible. To have allowed the militaristic oligarchy to have conquered and held France and Belgium in permanent subject ion would have been intolerable to have resisted, we know, it was intolerable. The human condition creates repeatedly creates problems to which there are no solutions and the only outcome is suffering. We know the reason for this. It is mentioned in Genesis. It is The Fall.
Nobody advancing upon the sucrerie outside Ginchy 80 years ago last Sunday would have been in any doubt of the fallibility of mankind, nor of the lunacy in which he can engage. Empires were lined up facing one another over a crust of mud and steel and human flesh, and were repeatedly trying to break that crust with the skin and tissues and bone of their subjects. Many of these subjects were volunteers, impelled by a sense of duty or desire for excitement, or because they were simply professional soldiers.
Reprimanded for Drinking
Tom Kettle was there because he chose to be there. An alcoholic, he could easily have been discharged from the British Army because of his appalling personal record. He was drunk so often that his commanding officer in Dublin reprimanded him, and warned him of the likely consequences. There's no place for you in this army while I'm in it," he told Kettle. "In that case, we'll be sorry to lose you, general," he replied.
Kettle had volunteered for service in France after his brother in law, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, was murdered on the orders of a British Army officer after the 1916 Rising, which was of course to dominate Irish nationalist mythologyin the coming decades. There was no way Kettle should have been allowed near the Front.
Only the extraordinary political circumstances of the time could have justified Kettle's posting on active service. How much he might have contributed to the Ireland that lay ahead is, of course, a matter of useless conjecture. The Easter Rising caused him to go to France, and the Faster Rising caused him to be forgotten, alongside the other thousand Irishmen who were to die on the beet field outside Ginchy.
Some of these men were gentry and their deaths would hasten the end of a demographically and economically doomed caste. Some were middle class Catholics, officering their men in war as they had officered the National Volunteers in their determination to secure Home Rule. Most were the small town and urban poor of Ireland, working class lads from every county in the land.
Total casualties, killed and injured, in the bloody assault across the fields before Ginchy came to nearly 4,500. The youngest I have been able to trace was James Rathband, of Gloucester Square, Dublin. He was 15 years of age. His bones were laid to rest in Delville Wood Cemetery, not far from where he died.
Desperate to live
Tom Kettle, the day before he died, wrote to his brother saying how desperately he wanted to live. He died on the wretched beetfield beside the sucrerie, cradled by a fellow officer of the Dublin Fusiliers, Emmet Dalton. His duty done, Dalton proceeded to other duties, and was to win a Military Cross that day one of the 300 awards for gallantry the Irish were to be awarded. But Kettle's body was lost in the mincing machine which traversed the land where he had fallen, and unlike young Rathband, he has no known grave.
Twenty years after his death, friends sought permission to erect a bust to him in St Stephen's Green. The Office of Public Works did its utmost to prevent this, finally agreeing to the bust provided it made no mention that Kettle was a British soldier, or that he had been killed in France on active service. Visitors even now must guess at the meaning of Died, Ginchy, 1916."
Ginchy has returned to what it was before armies of foreigners camped before it and died before it 80 years ago a dreary, nondescript place. The beetfield is still a beetfield, nourished by the blood and bone meal of strangers. Nearby, at the village of Guillemont, there is a memorial to the slain Irish of 1916. But here at home these men are finally being remembered.
Last Sunday, members of Oglaigh Naisiunta na hEireann for the first time joined others to commemorate the deeds and deaths of their fellow Irishmen. We cannot heal the wounds of four score years ago but we can apply the salve of tolerance to our shared but different histories.