WHEN I was teaching in Clontarf in the late 1950s I had and O Malley boy in class. He was an attractive child with black hair and very pale skin. I became aware that he was a nephew of Ernie O Malley when I found him doing sums in a large notebook filled with clear handwriting. Only one side of each page had been written on. The clear writing described the experience of listening to music and looking at certain paintings. A few months before, I had stood among the crowds that lined the footpath to watch the state funeral of Ernie O Malley. Among the cortege that followed the coffin was the President and the Taoiseach, both houses of the Oireachtas, members of the judiciary and the defence forces. O Malley the soldier was being honoured that day, and the notebook his nephew used for his sums has stood for me ever since as a symbol of the disregard shown to the writer. Despite its flaws, Ernie O Malley's autobiography, On Another Man's Wound, is the one classic work to have emerged directly from the violence that led to Independence and the foundation of the State.
He was born in 1895 into the comfortable Catholic middle classes, a class which identified itself with the British administration since Catholic Emancipation. They belonged within the caste system of the Empire. Their house in Castlebar faced the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary, who touched their caps to Father", and priests came to their house for dinner.
The Irish cultural revival was at its height. The folklore and legends of a lost Gaelic past with their kings and heroes and poets and warrior queens, bad been unearthed and popularised. Violence was again being advocated openly as a legitimate means of obtaining political ends. This romantic climate reached the O Malley children through the stories told to them by their nurse. The stories gave glamour to the country people who came into Castlebar and to the wild country outside the town, the mountains and ocean. This influence, I feel, has been exaggerated in order to provide a heroic back cloth to the struggle that was to lead to Independence which is the autobiography's principal focus. During the course of the war O Malley had to live too close to the people for romanticism to be sustained, but landscape is seen in a romantic light throughout and is often a source of solace and healing.
On their father's promotion, the O Malleys moved to Dublin. The boys attended the O'Connell schools, but at school there was no stress on relative wealth brains were shared equally by "rich and poor, but many could not reach the higher grades because their parents needed their earnings".
The ferment of Dublin at the time is vividly recorded the great lock out of the Dublin workers in 1913, the ceremonial nationalist funerals, the marching and drilling in The streets and in the Dublin Mountains, the outbreak of the European war. The O Malley household was as staunchly British as it was Catholic. Frank the eldest brother joined the British army as a cadet. Ernie won a Dublin Corporation scholarship and enrolled as a medical student in the National University, but by the time of the 1916 Easter Rising he was thinking of joining his brother in the British Army.
The whole atmosphere of that Easter Monday is caught beautifully the sense of holiday there was about and then, walking into O'Connell Street he saw from the flag staff on top of the General Post Office a new flag, a tricoloured one of green white and orange, the colours running out from the mast . . Behind Nelson's Pillar lay dead horses, The Lancers horses, and old man said."
The Uprising Was as decisive for O Malley as it was for many others, especially when the rebellion was followed by the execution of the leaders. He joined the First Dublin Battalion of the Volunteers and began to drill with broom handles in halls that doubled for classes in Irish and dancing, mixing with workmen as well as intellectuals, paying a few pence each week towards the purchase of a weapon. As his involvement in the movement increased, it became more difficult to account for his activities at home, but once his secret was in the open he reacted with typical decisiveness. He volunteered for full time duty, and was sent north, where he was given command of the Coalisland Company, with the rank of second lieutenant. He gained rapid pro motion, and in the remaining years of the war he was sent all over the country to organise, train and command the companies and brigades of several areas.
On Another Man's Wound becomes the story of that war through O Malley's eyes. Upbringing had combined with temperament to make him half an alien among his own people. A quixotic code of honour was brought to what was mostly a mean struggle. When confronted in Galway by a sergeant and a constable with a warrant for his arrest, he could not bring himself to fire first and was wounded while escaping. In Clare he allowed a police patrol to go by unharmed, and often when a planned operation failed he was "at heart relieved". He feared failure, but once the fighting began he never worried about the result. There are vivid accounts of the seizing of arms, the taking of military barracks in towns, the constant fear of being surprised by the enemy during training sessions or in the safe houses where they slept.
WHEN a provisional government was set up in opposition to the British civil administration, at little more than 20 years of age O Malley found himself the first president of a land court in Tipperary. Soon afterwards he was captured, surprised by British soldiers in a safe housed He was interrogated, tortured tied with ropes, thrown into freezing cells, and threatened with execution but he did not break or yield his identity. In the morning he was brought outside. Blind folded, put on a lorry and taken to the house he was captured in, which had been razed to the ground, he prepared himself to face execution by the roadside. I know of no more powerful expression of that spirit which turns revolt into revolution that this passage "I was not afraid of death now. Faces I knew came up, my brother Frank's, Sean Tracey's then I felt at peace. It was hard to pin anything down, to think I was going to die on the roadside. I would tell them that they were fools, that they could not win dead men would help to beat them in the end."
There are moments of comedy and flashes of grim humour in the book. After the capture of the military barracks in Mallow they come upon an unfinished letter on an officer's desk Mallow is a very quiet town nothing ever happens here He is alert to how the character of people changes within the space of a few short miles, and there are long, loving descriptions of the countryside in all seasons and weathers. (There are also sentences on which the dead hand of English composition lies heavily, but the observation is mostly close and excitingly accurate.) Memorable portraits of leaders such as Collins, de Valera, Cathal Brugha, and Erskine Childers are scattered throughout the book, as well as stray intellectuals like Darrell Figgis Figgis was not popular it was thought that he was too vain. His manner, his insistent focus of attention for his words . . . He was egotistical it could be seen in his face and mannerisms his image was reflected in the half suppressed smiles of his listeners. He had come from another life he would find it hard now, I felt."
THE most affectionate portrait is of Paddy Moran, who was in a cell close to O Malley's in Dublin Castle. To keep up their spirits, in their minds he and Moran used to walk down the right bank of the Shannon from Lough Allen to Carrick, and in the evenings come back up the opposite side, each time adding fresh details along the way.
Eventually, his presence in the Castle became known to Collins and the leadership. A revolver and bolt cutters were smuggled in. Paddy Moran refused to join the escape at the last minute. He believed his innocence would be proved at his trial (of shooting British under cover agents), and did not want to let down the witnesses who gave evidence for him. A few months later he was hanged. O Malley was then given the command of the Second Southern Division and started preparing his men for a long struggle, but the war was winding down. One of his last duties was to oversee the execution of three British officers who were being shot as reprisals for the execution of Republican prisoners. This melancholy duty he carried out with his usual punctiliousness. It is probably the most moving single scene in the whole of this memorable work.
Controversy surrounds O Malley's name to this day. Historians in particular label him intransigent and accuse him of changing facts to suit his own purpose. It is true that he had little sense of the complications of history, the necessary compromises. When young, he had absorbed a myth and was prepared to follow it, like a single flame, no matter what the cost was to himself or to others. I can say that the few short sections of the material that I know well are accurate. The work as a whole has imaginative truth. What is so extraordinary is not the material itself but that, most of it is so well written. For far too long its right to a permanent and honoured place in our literature has been denied.