What did it feel like to fight?
Authors: Prof. Ciaran Brady Dr Anne Dolan Dr Ciarán Wallace What did it feel like to fight?
What did it feel like to fight?
What does it feel like to go to war? Most of us will thankfully never know. Whether that romanticises or prejudices our understanding of conflict is a question that many historians grapple with, but trying to understand the experience of combat in its various forms has allowed all sorts of questions to be asked of the history of war itself.
The fear, the excitement, the pleasure and the abhorrence of fighting, have become part of how we understand and evaluate the effects and the costs of war for those who fought. Cultural history has allowed the history of war to be far more than just charting the nature and the number of battles lost and won. Knowing how it felt to fight allows us to consider what fighting asked of those who fought, whether their war was in Flanders or Gallipoli, in the GPO in 1916, on the streets of Belfast in 1922 or on the by-roads of Kerry in 1923.
The war of boyhood comics and ripping yarns, the war promised on recruiting posters, the militarised masculinity of pre-1914 days, was shaken to its core by war itself. Wallace Lyon of the 7th Leinster Regiment wrote of the aftermath of a gas attack: ‘When it was over, I had the sad job of collecting and burying the dead. They were in all sorts of tragic attitudes, some of them holding hands like children in the dark. They were nearly all gassed, and I buried about 60 of them in an enormous shell hole.1’ This was not war as Lyon had imagined it would be: ‘I had enjoyed pig sticking in India, and I thought it would be great fun to try my hand at the Uhlans’2. There was no fun in those ‘tragic attitudes’, no sport in a war that left men lying like children in the dark.
This type of war took its toll. The Secretary of the Orange Lodge in Portadown received a letter from the Somme in June 1916: ‘There is no doubt that when you receive this note I shall be dead…The more I brood on what may happen the surer I am I shall not survive it. All of us say, “It’ll be the other fellow who’ll be killed”. I feel that I am one of those other fellows.’3
Irishmen experienced total war in the same complicated and confused ways that all combatants of other countries did. Irishmen died in the same proportionate terms; they fought and experienced the same kinds of war other men did. They knew war’s fears and excitements, war’s reliefs and boredoms, war’s pleasures - just as every other fighting man and they knew them in the same often confused and contradictory ways. One man wrote home of fighting in the trenches: ‘when you shoot a man you never see his face and it is as easy as shooting a fox.’ There was a satisfaction in the accuracy, in the hunt, almost as Wallace Lyon expected when he went to war. But the same man admitted later in the same letter that it was all different face to face: ‘It was the first time I had to kill a man at close range and I did it with a fixed bayonet…as I twisted…the bayonet clear he squealed like a stuck pig. It was not till I was on my way back that I started to shake and I shook like a leaf on a tree for the rest of the night.4’ In the sights and the sounds, in the squealing and the shaking, we begin to see what war asks of those who wanted, and were called upon, to fight.
The Rising’s rebels, those who fought on all sides after 1919, had their own confusing experiences of their wars. For many IRA men war was the boredom and tension of hours of fruitless waiting as elaborate plans of ambush often came to naught. For some of the soldiers they waited for, it was anxious anticipation of an unknown kind of war. Sergeant Bill
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What did it feel like to fight?
Albin tried to restrain the ‘young and nervous recruits, who…would shoot at the least sound’. He recalled farmers ‘turning up with a dead cow or sheep; which had been shot’ by nervous British soldiers in the night.5
While James Kavanagh had ‘a good deal of fun’ during the Rising, it was an awkward kind of admission. He knew ‘fellows were being wounded and, I’m sorry to say, some killed’ at the same time.6 Others faced, in their own ways, the harsh realities of war. Con O’Donovan acknowledged: ‘We were really suffering from the strain of looking for a soldier to fire at, and I remember well the callous and, shall I say, brutal pleasure I felt when I “picked off” one [British soldier] who was crossing Grattan Bridge’ in 1916.7 While Vinny Byrne worked out a way to cope with his war: you prayed for the man you were about to kill but never said the prayer out loud. ‘I said to myself “The Lord have mercy on your souls!” I then opened fire.’8 Elizabeth Bray died because she did not hear a call to halt. The curfew patrol in Belfast felt threatened that night. Anxious, they fired without orders; shot her for running, not knowing she was deaf.9 For Lieutenant Macintyre of the Cameron Highlanders shooting Dan Riordan seemed a more straightforward thing: ‘the third volley killed him…I left him dead’10.
That the combatants of all our wars are dead may lead us to see them as victims not only of what they had to see and do, but also victims of war itself, rather than seeing them on their own often frank and forthright terms. We may rage against war and not want to admit that for some this was maybe the most exciting time of their lives. Like other veterans in other places some revelled in their war, hankered after it and all it had allowed them to be. The IRA man who commented when peace looked likely in the summer of 1921, that ‘we’ll all wake up some morning to find ourselves members of the civil population, with peace made and our occupation and our power gone,11 may tell us more about war than we might care to concede. War might be easier to commemorate, to rationalise, if we conceive of soldiers as brave, ennobled victims of war. But by asking what it felt like to fight we might just see war, and the men who fought it, on their own much more complex and more interesting terms.
References
1 Col. Wallace Lyon, Imperial War Museum (IWM), quoted in Myles Dungan, They shall not grow old (Dublin, 1997), p. 49. 2 Quoted in Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), p. 21. 3 Letter in the possession of R.H. Stewart, quoted in Philip Orr, The road to the Somme: men of the Ulster Division tell their story (Belfast, 2008 edn), p. 185. 4 R.H. Steward, file on the Somme, in Orr, The road to the Somme, p. 183. 5 ‘Bill Albin’s England’, G.W. Albin, IWM, PP/MCR/192. 6 Bureau of Military History (BMH), Witness Statement (WS) 889 James Kavanagh, 24 Sept. 1953, http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS0889.pdf. 7 BMH, WS 1750 Con O’Donovan, 8 Jan. 1959, http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS1750.pdf. 8 BMH, WS 423 Vinnie Byrne, 13 Sept. 1950, http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS0423.pdf. 9 Court of inquiry in lieu of inquest, Elizabeth Bray, 4 March 1921 (died 19 Feb. 1921), The National Archives, UK (TNA), WO35/146a/2. 10 Court of inquiry in lieu of inquest, Dan Riordan, 5 June 1921 (died 5 June 1921), TNA, WO35/158.
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11 Florence O’Donoghue quoting one of his colleagues to ‘G’, 8 May 1921, National Library of Ireland (NLI), Florence O’Donoghue papers, MS31,176 – quoted in Michael Laffan, The resurrection of Ireland (Cambridge, 1999), p. 299.
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