The Play

A short introduction by Felicity McCall

It’s almost a hundred years since the first among an estimated four thousand young men from the North West of Ireland made the decision to put on a British uniform and volunteer for service in World War 1. Their reasons for doing so were as many and disparate as their backgrounds. Many were only teenagers, though that word had yet to be invented. Most went to a country they had scarcely heard of, let alone visited.

Thirty five thousand Irish soldiers would never come home- and that’s the most conservative estimate. Taking into account those who died as a result of what happened to them, some historians says a more realistic death toll is fifty thousand, or more. For those who did come home, who tried to return to a way of life that had been forever destroyed, life would be utterly changed.

But, for the best part of the intervening years, the life of many of these young men has at best been kept private and, at worst, suppressed or censored. It has not been easy for a nationalist ethos to coexist with a family legacy of British military service. There is also the difficulty of reconciling the need to record and value what is our shared family and community history, with a determination to ensure the mindless slaughter of a generation is in no way justified, or exonerated.

As a writer, all I can do is to try to record them as individuals, as the young fathers, sons, and brothers they were when they walked out the door, to go to their death on the battlefields of France, or Belgium. There was nothing glorious in their sacrifice. By the time enigmatic Major Willie Redmond had won the right for Ulster and Irish divisions to fight together as a combined force, storm Messiness ridge and recapture little Belgian town of Wytschaete, in June 1917, the soldiers were battle weary, disillusioned, politically duped, cynical, and yearning for a home and a future that they must have known instinctively would have no real place for them.

They were right. The British government never did pass the Home Rule bill. By the time of the Armistice in November 1918 the mood was turning away from constitutional nationalism and Ireland would be plunged into a war of independence and a bloody civil war ending in partition. Sporadic violence in the north would erupt into more than thirty years of conflict. It seems that only now, as the first generation of the young people defined as the ‘children of the peace’ grow to adulthood, that the time may be right to remember openly, and with respect.

Messines is important, for it is a microcosm of all that is worth remembering and upholding about this lost generation; not as a triumphant strategic success, but as a remarkable endorsement and vindication of the strength and integrity, the humour and generosity of spirit of these thousands of ordinary men from ordinary homes. For, faced with the unspeakable brutality and waste of life that is war, they were somehow moved to put aside their differences in the cause of a common humanity. Somehow, they found that, beyond political betrayal and manipulation, beyond ties of religion and tradition, culture and creed, it was enough at that time, in that uncharted No Man’s Land, to be Irishmen, and brothers.