You can see them still today, the places named by homesick Irish soldiers during their tenure in the unimaginably vile trenches around Ypres; Clonmel Copse, Armagh Wood, Cork Cottages, Irish Farm. But the most famous Irish placename of all, known to all British soldiers who filed through the devastated wool capital of Flanders into the abominable salient which was to consume half a million lives between 1914 and 1918, is Birr Crossroads.
There was no avoiding that junction, named by men of the Leinster Regiment early in the campaign; to enter the battle zone from the town of Ypres, one passed through a permanent gauntlet of German shells by Hellfire Corner and then Birr Crossroads, two locations a hundred yards and a thousand lives apart. Once beyond that gateway, the soldiers garrisoning the few thousand acres of rutted and entrenched and encorpsed mud knew that they would have to pass back through its horrors before they could start to live again.
The Ypres Salient is dotted with memorials to the divisions which passed this way and fertilised the clay pastures with bonemeal raised in Gloucestershire, Glasgow, Winnipeg or New South Wales. To have served here was to have experienced the very nadir of war, from the slaughter of naive German conscript soldiery in 1914, to the first gas attacks in 1915, before reaching the true abyss of military incompetence during the long and brainless purgatory of Third Ypres in 1917.
The Government's decision to erect a memorial to commemorate the sacrifices of the Irish, North and South, is a belated recognition of the participation of so many thousands of Irish soldiers in this world war. Ireland, after all, was lawfully a belligerent country, whose elected political leaders backed the war. Perhaps as dawn finally breaks through on this amnesia, it is a little ironic to reflect that the memorial is being raised on Messines Ridge, an atypical place of victory, where the two Irish Divisions on the Western Front, the 16th and the 36th, achieved all their objectives - and more - with only marginal losses.
Uniquely for the time, planning for the battle was superb. The German defences were to be destroyed by huge mines, after which the two meticulously trained Irish Divisions, the predominantly unionist 36th Ulsters and the mainly nationalist 16th, were simply to seize the enemy positions. So confident were the Irish of victory that before the battle began, the men of the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers even said a decade of the rosary for the repose of the Germans who were about to die. (It was not done jestingly. The genuine piety of Irish soldiers of both divisions astonished observers.) Such confidence and such a low death toll were not at all characteristic of set-piece battles on the Western Front.
So instead of the thousands of casualties, the assault on Messines cost a few hundred. One of the dead was a 16-year-old Dubliner called Hayes who, despite his age, was a lance corporal in this company of men. At the other end of the age spectrum was the elderly Home Rule MP Major Willie Redmond. Eamon de Valera's victory in the East Clare by-election following Redmond's death signalled the emergence of a new Ireland which, within a few years, would extinguish virtually all memory of nationalist participation in the Great War.
But more than Irish nationalist and Irish unionist served in the Great War and laid their bones together on the rising slopes that run eastwards from Ypres towards the hamlet called Passchendaele.
There is a third, and largely unsung tradition: the tradition of no-tradition, of the men unmoved by national feeling or sense of duty or any of the "loftier" motives, who went for a soldier because they were bored, or liked the idea of military life, or because their friends were doing it, or they needed the money, or they hated their fathers. The three great currents of Irish life meet in Flanders - Orange, Green and Whatever.
Once those three currents passed under the bridge known as Birr Crossroads they became a single stream. This was not an Irish phenomenon. It was the universal response to soldiering in the salient. The world was reduced to the friends a man had around him. Amid such suffering - and hardship quite beyond description - he would probably never have such friendships again. What had originally moved the men to take the shilling was now irrelevant; and, after the war, many soldiers would look back on a time when simple human love transformed the deepest horror into the profoundest happiness they were ever to know.
John Condon hardly had the opportunity to develop any such friendship at all. A well-matured Waterford boy, he had lied about his age when he enlisted, and was dead on a field in Flanders even before his parents knew he was gone from Ireland. He was killed soon after arriving on the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915, and was the youngest British soldier to die in the Great War. He was aged 14.
It was not just his age which gave young John Condon such distinction. He was also one of the first fatal victims of gas warfare, which was pioneered by the Germans on the Ypres Salient and which remained a characteristic of the almost totally static front there until the end of the war. In this first attack the gas, some three miles across and 40 feet deep, came drifting across the Flanders plain, bleaching the grass and blighting the surviving trees, and accompanied by a tornado of shells. The only protection that the soldiers had was to press urine-soaked cloths to their faces.
Two Irish battalions, the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers and the 2nd Royal Irish Regiment, were almost wiped out as they held their positions side by side near the small town of St Julien, just north of Ypres. Few of the defenders' bodies were recovered. John Condon's was: he is buried in Poelcappelle cemetery next to Thomas Carthy, aged 47, of Clonmel, also of the Royal Irish, who died the same day.
But it is not the introduction of gas to war at the Second Battle of Ypres which transfixes the imagination, nor the Battle for Messines Ridge in June 1917, which is to be the focus of the Government's memorial efforts over the coming months; but Third Ypres, an encounter of such mesmerising awfulness that has no equal in Western European war. On its first day, July 31st, the Meath poet Francis Ledwidge was killed by a stray shell as he worked on road-building behind the lines. One month later, in bizarrely midwinter weather in the middle of summer, the two Irish Divisions made their journey past that point of no return, Birr Crossroads. They were to remain on the wrong side of that junction for two weeks, and all who emerged a fortnight later were to insist that the the battle of the Somme the previous year was a mere picnic.
Nothing compares with the experiences of the Irish troops during that fortnight, nothing. One hour of that freezing misery would overwhelm most of us. They had to endure two weeks of it, without respite; and then, in violation of every usage of war that fresh troops only be used in offensives, these physically shattered men were ordered by high command, and against the strongest possible objections of their local commanders, to assault a series of German block-houses which had already shown themselves to be immune to British shellfire.
No more melancholy picture is possible than of these exhausted, shell-shocked soldiers hauling themselves out of the trenches across the corpse-littered swamp of Frezenberg Ridge on the orders of brutishly indifferent or bovinely stupid commanders, to perish in a hail of German steel or to slide into shell-holes and drown. For once the cliches about the first war are right. This was murder.
One story must suffice. Attacking troops under Lieutenant Hickey left the frontline trenches and crawled through the mud, pounded by German shellfire, towards the German positions. At 5.40 a.m. Hickey sent a message back to his commanding officer saying he was held up in front of a German strongpoint, assaults on which had led to the annihilation of all the attackers. It took two hours for his message to travel a couple of hundred yards.
Second Lieutenant Martin was sent with three runners to check on Hickey's position. One runner was seen returning but was killed. A second runner repeated the journey and was killed. The third runner again repeated the journey, with the same conclusion. Then Martin himself returned. He was shot dead yards from the battalion headquarters. A search of his body showed that Hickey's report had been purely verbal.
Later, a single soldier came back from no-man's-land, pleading for reinforcements to help his colleagues. "A" Company was sent out to search for them, but when no word in turn came through from them, two runners from headquarters were sent to look for them. Both were killed. The battle subsided; and the battalion waited - but not one of those men who had entered noman's-land was ever heard from again; not a body found, not a prisoner-of-war recorded, not a wounded straggler found. Shellfire had reduced them to molecular pulp, a mere stage in the local food chain.
The two Irish Divisions suffered 7,800 casualties during these two horrific weeks. The man masterminding this wicked futility was Hubert Gough - who, as his comanding officer General Haig noted in his diary, "was not pleased with the action of the Irish Divisions . . . They seem to have gone forward but failed to keep what they had won . . . The men are Irish and apparently did not like the enemy's shelling, so Gough said." In that vastly rich field of patrician ingratitude for the serf, the slave, the servant, there can hardly have been uttered a more despicable sentiment than that.
At the end of the battle, wrote the English war correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs, the survivors were cast aside "like old shoes . . . No motor lorries were sent to meet them and to bring them down, but they had to tramp back, exhausted and dazed. The remnants of the 16th Division, the poor despairing remnants, were sent, without rest or baths, straight into the line again, down south."
Yet even in this ampitheatre of mud and murder, some decency survived. The legendary priest Willie Doyle, SJ, continued tending to the dead and dying until he was killed. And later in this three-month-long Golgotha, a Captain Devoy of the Dublin Fusiliers came across a Lieutenant Seale of the Dublins in a shell-hole with a terrible wound to the thigh. Lying beside him was a young German, scarcely more than a boy and almost blue with cold, holding together the severed ends of Seale's artery with half-frozen fingers.
Perhaps this image, more than any other, is the one which is worth cherishing from the utterly dismal violation of law and civilisation which occurred on Flanders plain 80 years ago. It is one which might properly be illuminated by the sun's rays which will enter the round tower currently being constructed at precisely 11 a.m. on November 11th next year, the moment of armistice in 1918, just as Newgrange admits the dawn light on its central burial chamber on the midwinter solstice.
"At this distance in time, we must be able to transcend the political divisions of the past and remember our common humanity," said the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, when announcing the joint Island of Ireland War Memorial at Messines. But there can be surely no more eloquent testimony to our common humanity than the nameless young German lying in a shell-hole saving the life of a young Irish army officer. The dead should be remembered, certainly; but that anonymous youngster should be honoured, above even the dead of Ireland. In that shell-hole he guarded civilisation itself.
