Ireland's Great War by Kevin Myers

Author:Kevin Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: World War I, Gallipoli, Somme, Jutland, Military History, Sinn Fein
ISBN: 9781843516507
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2015-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

10. ‘Billy Gray, Billy Gray, will you not come

to me?’ Ireland and the Somme

Nightfall, 1 July 1916, and 899 Belfast men who that morning had risen from their trenches as soldiers and non-commissioned officers of the British army, lay dead on the single hillside of Thiepval Ridge, overlooking the River Ancre in the greater Somme Valley. One hundred and ninety-one of them were from the Shankill Road, amongst the dead forty-six officers. Another hundred officers and men of the Belfast battalions of the 36th Ulster Division were to die of their wounds in the coming week.

Philip Orr, in his memorable and ground-breaking book on the 36th Ulster Division, has reported hauntingly of the aftermath of the battle. ‘In one part of the B Line,’ one survivor remembered, ‘the trenches near the river, there was a carpet of dead and dying Ulstermen and Germans. Blood lay like a layer of mud, and do you know, you couldn’t tell one blood from another …’

Another spoke of ‘a 9th Inniskilling lying at the top [of a trench] has a bullet through his steel hat. He rolls over into the trenches at my feet. He is an awful sight. His brain was oozing out of the side of his head, and he is calling for his pal. An occasional cry of “Billy Gray, Billy Gray, will you not come to me?” In a short time all is quiet, he is dead. He’s the servant to an officer who is lying on the trench with a fractured thigh, and won’t let anyone touch him, and he is bleeding badly. They die together.’

Private Robb of the Mid-Antrim Volunteers remarked after seeing a clergyman bury a German and two of his fellow riflemen of the 12th Royal Irish Rifles: ‘It still sticks in my mind that a Protestant pastor said the same burial service over the three men. I wondered what in hell we were doing fighting one another. After all, we were all men, only the uniforms were different’ – the refrain of fighting soldiers through the ages.

That night there was a glorious sunset, and the guns fell silent. ‘I heard someone in the reserve trenches start to sing, “Abide with Me”. Then slowly all down the line the men took up the hymn …”

Reality defeats fiction every time, which is perhaps why we have literature in the first place, to remind us that our imaginations will not permit art to match life, because if it did it would put us on a par with the creator. We are not creators. We are created, and not created all that well, to judge from the horrors that Picardy was to bear witness to that July day, and every other day thereafter for three months. Certainly no writer of fiction would ever dare to create a figure like Henry Gallaugher, a farmer who before the war had been a company commander of the Ulster Volunteer Force in Manorcunningham, County Donegal. As an example of who is a planter

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