Like many artists appalled by the open targeting and deliberate starvation of a civilian population filling our screens over the last couple of years, I’d been casting about for a means to broach the issue of atrocity.
Today’s emotions – the daily sense of outrage, of disgust, of helplessness, of anger sluicing around with each news report – are far too raw for them not to overwhelm any attempt to deal directly with the systematic carnage. Hence I decided to adopt the old stratagem of framing the subject in a historical context.
Early on, I ruled out as too easy the manifold historical parallels in which the native Irish were displaced and put to famine and the sword, in the sort of genocidal policy unapologetically articulated by Sir Arthur Chichester at the start of the Ulster Plantation. It seemed important instead to locate the novel from the perspective of perpetrator rather than victim, and to that extent to explore instances of Irish complicity in the imperial project.
“Who will remember, passing through this Gate,” Siegfried Sassoon rhetorically ponders in his sonnet on the memorial Menin Gate at Ypres, “the unheroic dead who fed the guns?” Chances are, far more than will remember those Irishmen who died at Colenso, Talana and Ladysmith, albeit their names are inscribed under Fusiliers’ Arch, erected at the entrance to Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green in 1907, but dubbed ever since in popular parlance Traitors’ Gate. Be honest: how many have picked up on the following reference in George “Hoddy” Hodnett’s bawdily satirical drinking-song Monto:
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You see the Dublin Fusiliers, the dirty oul’ bamboozlers,
De Wet’ll get the childer, one, two, three ...
Marching from the Linen Hall, there’s one for every cannonball,
And Vicky’s going to send yis all o’er the sea.
For one reason or another, there’s an enduring cultural amnesia in regard to the second Boer War (1899-1902), not just in Irish art and culture, but in British literature also. This may in part be down to the fact that its excesses and reversals were soon eclipsed by the horrors emanating from the trenches of the Great War. But I suspect there’s more to it. By the time it had dragged to an inglorious end, the whole sorry debacle had brought international opprobrium on the British army, which had resorted to scorched-earth tactics against the civilian population of the two republics they were determined to annex in order to bring to heel a part-time guerrilla force less than one-fifth its size.
If I’d always been vaguely aware of it as a nasty colonial business in which Irish fighters had seen action on either side, the first time the true scale of the horror of the Boer War was brought home to me was while watching the opening episode of Andrew Marr’s excellent TV series The Making of Modern Britain. As Marr points out, by the British government’s own contemporary estimates, at least 26,000 Boer women and children died in their “concentration camps” – this after a relentless campaign of destroying farmsteads, crops and livestock in an attempt to starve the enemy combatants into submission. At least as many of the native population are thought to have died in similar detention camps.
One should not, as a writer, look to find precise parallels, militarily, politically or ideologically. That is not the point. And indeed, the protagonists of my novel are naive in that, as far as possible, I wanted the politics of the situation set to one side so that the work might focus on a more specific question, one that envisaged the conscience of a soldier caught up in a military action against a civilian target. Not to attempt an answer to that question; rather – as Chekhov suggested is the true role of the author – to set out correctly the terms of the question.
A scene began to take shape in my imagination. A Boer farmstead, isolated, as they typically were. A detachment of mounted soldiers arrives, to put it to the torch. A shot rings out. It brings down the charger of the commanding officer. Furious, he orders the shooter be strung up from a nearby tree. This turns out to be a youngster – a girl – but at the major’s insistence, the detachment goes through with the hanging. What, I wanted the novel to ask, goes through the mind of a junior officer who witnesses and is appalled by the sequence of events, but has failed to intervene?
For months, without writing a single word, I played around with that scenario. Who was this junior officer? Why was he there? How, in the aftermath, might he deal with his feelings of guilt and inadequacy? What if he were to desert? Return to Ireland? And what of the major? What was his story? How had he come to be so desensitised? How might such a figure adapt to civilian life, once the brutality of the campaign had begun to fade from public memory? What if, years on, fate brought the two together?
Scorched Earth wouldn’t be my first historical novel. Several years ago, Prague 1938 was published by Dedalus Books (Irl), who will be bringing out the new book next month. In the same way as I approached the Prague-based work, in addition to factual research, I binged on contemporary novels, as much for the tone and the mores as for historical accuracy. Ulysses, that almanac of Dublin in 1904, contains several glancing references to pro-Boers and De Wet.
The opening two novels of Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga include one branch of the eponymous family divided over the war – June Forsyte sympathetic to the Boers, her half-brother Jolyon Forsyte and his rival Val Dartie somewhat rashly enlisting, though the saga itself never moves to South Africa. As for historical accuracy, three invaluable resources were Thomas Pakenham’s comprehensive standard on the subject, The Boer War; the BBC’s four-part documentary of the same name screened to coincide with the centenary in 1999; and Kenneth Griffith’s documentary series Against the Empire.
While a number of real-life figures appear offstage in Scorched Earth – Edward Carson, William Martin Murphy, John Edward Healy, William Brayden, Sara Purser, Grace Gifford, Joseph Nannetti, Maj John McBride – the onstage cast are all fictional. They are, moreover, all Irish. Having a pot at the British would have been too convenient; and, after all, Lord Kitchener, who instigated the whole scorched earth policy, was a Kerryman.
In the three months it took me to actually write the novel, as the circles moved wider and wider from the incident at the farmstead, other contemporary resonances became apparent: contested accounts and the provision of alternative “facts”; a deeply partisan press; the recourse to the courts to effectively gag the opposition. But these are for the reader to discover. This is not a didactic novel. There is no moral to be drawn from it. If it fails to engage on its own terms, if it fails to entertain, then it will have failed as a work of art.
Scorched Earth is published by Dedalus Books in October
