The almost legendary IRA figure Martin Meehan was on radio the other day, discussing the Irish soldiers of the Great War. Here was a republican who had spent his entire life fighting the British and the unionists, talking sympathetically about the motives of those thousands of Irish nationalists who volunteered to defend the rights of small nations, specifically Belgium, but by extension Ireland.
It was eerie, listening to a man like him using such words and sentiments: he could have been paraphrasing any one of a hundred columns on this subject in this space. All credit to him. It takes some generosity of spirit and some leap of the imagination for a man of his age, and his experience, to view with so much compassion the men of a vanished generation who once took the King's shilling, and who wore the uniform he took arms against. But of course, as the British army would be the first to admit, Martin Meehan never lacked courage.
Camillus Clarke
Martin Meehan's maternal grandfather, Camillus Clarke, was born in Ligoneil just outside Belfast, the son of Patrick and Mary Clarke. He married a Mary too, and they made their home in 12, Parkview Street, Old Park Road. Then war came.
Initially, Camillus joined the Leinsters, but he was transferred to the 8th Battalion Inniskilling Fusiliers, in the 16th Irish Division. In early 1916, the 16th was stationed at Hulluch, near the dreary colliery town of Noeux Les Mines, in northern France. The trenches here were perfectly filthy, the heavy soil and the poor drainage ensuring that the men were always cold and wet.
At dawn on April 27th, 1916 (with the Easter Rising just under way in Dublin), and favoured by an eastern breeze, the Germans launched a ferocious gas attack on the novice Irish soldiers at Hulluch. The men donned their gas masks, but these were primitive affairs, unable to resist the heavy concentration of phosgene and chlorine.
The effects were catastrophic. Hundreds of men were poisoned by the vast, dense clouds of gas released from thousands of cylinders along the front. The most difficult part of the British line was a place called the Kink, where 30 Inniskillings stood to with their gas masks on. They never wavered as the clouds of gas rolled over their position. When the battle was over, the 30 men held their position still, lined up along the trench, their bayonets at the ready; but all of them were dead.
Living hell
The 16th Irish Division did not break, but they passed through a living hell. "It was a ghastly sight," reported Lt Weld of the Leinsters. "Hundreds of men who were gassed lay three deep in the firing step. They had died in terrible agony with their faces all purple from the gas. Many others not yet dead were gasping out green foam."
The slain were buried by the hundred in mass graves, and reburied after the war at the cemetery at Philosophe East. The less fortunate - the injured - were taken off to 33rd Casualty Clearing Station, Bethune, where many of them perished after indescribable suffering. One of these was Camillus Clarke, grandfather of Martin Meehan. He was 38.
Many men of the battalion survived that battle, only to perish in later battles; one of these was Robert James Sproule, son of John and Mary Sproule of Gortin, Castlederg. What relation was he to Ian Sproule, of Killen, Castlederg, shot dead by the IRA 75 years later? Another was Albert Weatherall, a remarkable 17-year-old who at the time of his death had already won the Military Medal. He was a son of William and John Weatherall, of 10 Kendal Street, Belfast, and presumably a kinsman of Stormy Weatherall, one of Belfast's hard men during Martin Meehan's childhood in Belfast in the 1950s; and no doubt he shared the same tough genes. Another was Francis Walker, a Ligoneil man like Camillus, possibly his friend, one of 14 men from the village to die in the Great War.
In the 1920s, Martin's mother, the youngest of nine children left fatherless by Camillus's death, told a man selling poppies that her daddy had been killed in the war, and he gave her a poppy. Just a little girl, by Martin Meehan's own account, she was verbally abused on the streets of the nationalist Bone area because of the poppy, and when she got home, her brothers became absolutely incensed at what she was wearing.
A strange nationalism
This is a strange identity indeed which rebukes a young girl for commemorating her father, killed doing his duty; a strange nationalism which could repress all public memory of the thousands of young Irishmen who died similarly, even scorning those who attempted to commemorate them; and a strange set of values that allowed one community in Belfast to commemorate its dead with extravagant ceremonial, and the other, with equal vigour, to forget its own comparable losses.
Paradoxically, almost as if they had suspected this might happen, the men of the 16th Division raised a subscription of £250 in 1916 to erect a stained glass window to Our Lady of Victories in Noeux les Mines church, to honour their fallen comrades.
Though just about all else of the Great War was forgotten here, the poisonous violence of the time became embedded in the political cultures of this island. Can Martin Meehan not look back on these past 30 years, and on the decades of republican violence that formally began the very week his grandfather was fatally injured in France, and see how utterly and palpably futile it has all been?