No honor at home

They went off to the Great War, in their hundreds of thousands, leaving farms and hamlets, tenement slums and country houses.
For Barry — whose 2005 novel “A Long Long Way,” was short-listed for the Booker Prize — the 1914-18 conflict was a national trauma that has never been properly addressed.
“It was if I was writing about a few years ago,” he said. “It seemed incredibly recent because of this lack of mourning.”
Phelan — whose just-published novel “The Canal Bridge” is set both in his native Mountmellick, Co. Laois, and the battlefields of Europe — believes that the soldiers are owed more recognition.
“They deserve a retrospective cheer,” Barry agreed.
“They were in their own way fighting for Irish freedom,” he said. Home Rule was on the statute books, he added, and many felt they were consolidating it.
Such was the argument put by Ireland’s main nationalist leader John Redmond, who felt that the common sacrifice of war would help convince Protestants to join them in a united self-ruled Ireland. His influential party colleague John Dillon, in contrast, opposed recruitment and refused to help the British war effort. In any case, Redmond’s National Volunteers was formed in 1914, leaving behind the smaller, radically nationalist and anti-war Irish Volunteers.
“They went off to save small, Catholic Belgium,” said Phelan.
There was for many, though, an economic imperative. In Mountmellick, the soldiers tended to be farm laborers and poorer workers from the town. “Fighting was a job for them,” he said.
It’s believed, though, that recruits from Protestant families (10 percent of the population of the area that became independent) were motivated by traditional pro-British patriotism.
Whoever they were, and whatever their politics, World War veterans from Southern Ireland found themselves on the wrong side of history, said Barry.
When the Irish Volunteers’ 1916 Rising in Dublin was harshly repressed by the authorities, the poet and essayist Tom Kettle said: “I will be remembered as a traitor in a British uniform.”
A nationalist MP for East Tyrone between 1906-10, Kettle died at the Somme in September 1916. Another nationalist MP, Willie Redmond, brother of the party leader, was killed in action in 1917.
Historian Tom Johnstone has said that Irishmen on the Western Front discussed what was happening back home: the Rising, the failure of John Redmond’s Irish Convention initiative of 1917-18, and the resistance to conscription (which was partly fueled by the fact that war had brought a much healthier rural economy and young men were needed on farms). “However painful they may have been to the soldiers, these events never affected either the morale or the operational capabilities of the Irish formations,” he said.
Traditionally, 50,000 Irishmen (some scholars put the figure at 60 percent of that number), from North and South, have been counted amongst the war’s nine million dead.
Often the survivors thought the dead were the lucky ones. “They came back with horrible wounds, no faces, missing limbs,” Barry said.
Those suffering from the long-term psychiatric and emotional impact of war was Ireland’s “secret demographic,” he said. He referred to Sligo’s asylum, which had “nine levels of incarceration.” Barry drew a parallel with post-Vietnam America, which he wandered around as a student in 1973.”In every small town, you’d see one or two men looking exceptionally lost,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say they were ostracized,” said the 64-year-old Phelan of his hometown’s World War I veterans. “But nothing was made of them.”
He saw a different picture traveling with his wife in Britain and France in recent years.
“Before World War I, memorials were found mainly in capitals and other big cities,” he explained. After 1918, each town and village had its Great War commemoration.
“In Ireland, there is nothing like that at all,” Phelan said, but described as “beautiful” Edwin Lutyens’s Islandbridge War Memorial in Dublin, which was restored in the 1980s after decades of neglect.
In contrast, participation in the 1914-18 conflict became a badge of honor for Ulster Protestants and an essential component of community identity, much in the way it was for the victorious French and the defeated Germans.
In the South, “advanced” nationalism rapidly became ascendant during the latter part of the war. In his poem “Easter 1916,” Yeats wrote: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”
The Irish Citizen Army slogan “We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland!” was by war’s end the majority view.
The anti-conscription campaign in 1918 –which united the Catholic Church, the Irish Parliamentary Party and Sinn Fein — further ensured that neutrality would be inscribed in the ideology of an independent state.
When World War II came around, Taoiseach Eamon de Valera and leader of the opposition William T. Cosgrave, surviving officers of the 1916 Rising and bitter Civil War enemies, were agreed on Ireland’s policy of non-involvement.
Barry grew up knowing about the complexity of Irish history. His paternal grandfather was a Cork republican; his maternal grandfather, who lived with the family in later life, was a British army officer. The writer’s great-grandfather was an officer in the Dublin Metropolitan Police, an “uncomfortable ancestor,” he said, given his involvement in the baton charges on striking workers during the 1913 Dublin Lockout. He was the model for the central character in Barry’s most famous work to date, the 1995 play “The Steward of Christendom.”
Phelan, a Long Island resident who has had several novels published in Ireland, was prompted to write “The Canal Bridge” by childhood memories of Mountmellick’s veterans, men who were then in their 50s and 60s, a few with wooden legs, more of them suffering from shellshock.
He said: “They were old men to us.”
Some lived in a settlement of British army-built houses still known as Hill 60 after a battle site in France.
Phelan, who was sent to boarding school at 14 and then went on to a seminary, never had an adult conversation with any of the ex-soldiers.
He remembered in particular Jack Staunton, a laborer who lived in a local farmer’s house and came to his family’s farm during the threshing time.
He recalled also an encounter with the veteran when he and his friends were fishing in the canal, something their elders warned them against. “The water was dead water and people drowned their dogs in it and all that kind of stuff,” he said. Nonetheless on that summer’s day, one of the boys said he was thirsty and they thought about drinking from the canal. “It happened that Jack Staunton came along and we asked him, because we wanted permission from an adult to drink from the water.
“And he said ‘Oh there was a time in Belgium when I was looking for water, and I found a well and I pushed aside a dead man and drank from it.'”
Phelan said that, on another occasion, he got a severe parental scolding when caught with his friends imitating the badly stooped veteran. “My father told us that Jack Staunton had rescued his commanding officer out of no-man’s land,” the novelist said. “Whether he did or not, I don’t know.”
The war poets Siegfied Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and others were also an influence on the Long Island novelist, as they have been on many writers.
The prominent American critic Paul Fussell, who was severely wounded in Normandy in 1944, coined the phrase “Oh, what a literary war.”
He was referring not to World War II, but rather the conflict that ended six years before his birth, and in particular to the war poets, like Sassoon, about whom he’s written extensively.
And the reading public is still fascinated with the 1914-18 war, if the success in the 1990s of the “Regeneration” trilogy, by Yorkshire novelist Pat Barker, and Sebastian Faulks’s “Birdsong” are any measure.
Phelan believes such interest has less to do with morality or the war’s seeming pointlessness and more directly with the poignancy of the loss of a generation of young men and its impact on the society back home.
“There were villages in the North of Ireland that got word that all of their young men had died,” he said.
And there are the sheer numbers involved.
Phelan said that there were 50,000 British army casualties, half of them fatal, between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. He cited, too, the 70,000 who disappeared into the mud near Passchendaele, never to be seen again. Barry said that 800 soldiers of the Dublin Fusiliers died in a German gas attack shortly after Easter 1916.
He added that the scale of the fatalities came to him when he attended an international soccer game in Dublin with his young daughter. Lansdowne Road’s capacity of near 50,000, it occurred to Barry, was roughly equivalent to the Irish war dead. As the teaming humanity poured out into Ballsbridge’s narrow streets, he thought: “So many, so many.”
When his book, described by the Boston Globe reviewer as a “modern masterpiece,” was first mentioned in connection with the Booker Prize, his reaction was: “More people will read about the lads.”
Phelan said official recognition is catching up with the interest of the average citizen.
In August 2004, Ireland’s then defense minister Michael Smith rededicated the Mayo grave of a soldier, Sgt. Maj. Cornelius Coughlan, who won the Victoria Cross during the Indian Mutiny in 1857.
In his speech, he quoted former Taoiseach Sean Lemass, a War of Independence and Civil War veteran: “In later years it was common – and I was also guilty in this respect – to question the motives of those who joined the British forces, but it must in their honor and in fairness to their memory, be said, that they were motivated by the highest purpose.”
Smith said that Coughlan, who died in 1915, had “earned his place among Ireland’s cherished dead.”
Phelan said that Irish soldiers had been fighting with English forces at least as far back as Agincourt, 500 years before the Great War, and had fought in other armies around the world. His hope is that all of them, including the men of Mountmellick, would be remembered amongst “Ireland’s cherished dead.”