"Deep calls to deep," wrote the psalmist, "in the roar of the waters." Watching the assault on Baghdad from the safe haven of my armchair I have heard deep calling to me from places that can't be shown on any television channel, writes Denis Tuohy
Those places are in the hearts of Baghdad's children, huddled in their homes for weeks amid the thunder of bombardment. The calls have connected with a place in my own heart, deeper than consciousness, which was invaded more than 60 years ago by a similar though shorter nightmare. It hides there still.
On the night of Easter Tuesday, April 15th 1941, a fortnight after my fourth birthday, Hitler's air force launched its deadliest raid on Belfast, a blitz that began before midnight and lasted almost until dawn. The bombers had paid a visit the previous week, attacking the docks and shipyards but causing few casualties. Second time around was different. The Easter Tuesday raid inflicted carnage on residential Belfast, killing around a thousand men, women and children. In the course of the second World War no other city in the United Kingdom, apart from London, suffered so heavy a toll in a single night.
One of the worst-hit areas was the north side, where my family lived. This may have been because the old Belfast Water Works was located there. A target file for Wasserwerk Belfast was later discovered among Luftwaffe documents. One theory is that the attackers mistook its reservoirs for dock basins and assumed that what lay next to it were important industrial sites. Then again, on a night of variable visibility perhaps they were aiming for the port area but missed. And kept on missing, hour after hour.
Had continuous television coverage been possible in those days the targeting question would surely have been picked over by studio pundits, linking up perhaps with an "embedded" reporter. But there was no television and no reporter was embedded with the overstretched civil defence workers and firefighters nor, on the other side, among the 150-odd Heinkels and Junkers overhead.
Under the stairs in our family home, wearing our gas masks, we prayed. The siren's wail which had roused us - my mother, father, elder sister, baby brother and myself - was followed by half-an-hour of deceptive silence. Then we became aware of the drone of incoming aircraft. Years later, the distant sound of an approaching train would remind me of it. I would run from the station platform, my fingers in my ears, trying to hush the memory of what had come next.
Bombs, land mines, incendiaries, all merged into fierce cacophony. Our house shook, the place that meant security, happiness, peace. The back door was blown in. Beyond the garden, beyond the apple tree I loved to climb, the night sky, framed by the empty doorway, was incandescent. Another blast. There had been a direct hit just up the road. We lifted our heads from our arms to see an open space where the roof had been.
Around dawn, soon after the all-clear, a family friend with a doctor's driving permit took us through wrecked and burning streets to the train for Dublin where we would stay with grandparents. There was pandemonium at the station, with other survivors scrambling to escape to the Free State, like ourselves, or the Northern Ireland countryside, or any available refuge from further raids. Over the next three days 25,000 people left by rail, part of an eventual exodus, by whatever means, of more than 100,000, about a quarter of the city's population. Their absence was probably the main reason why the Luftwaffe's next attacks, in early May, killed fewer than 200 civilians, compared with a thousand on Easter Tuesday night.
So my family was homeless; but we were alive, we were lucky. I didn't feel lucky, though, far from it. I had learned for the first time what real fear was and I had learned that death was not just something that happened to you when you got to be old. It was close to everyone - to my parents, to my sister, to my brother and myself - and it could reach out and grab you whenever it wanted. Maybe in tomorrow's raid, or the one after that. You had no right to believe you would ever get the chance to grow up.
But what you must do, you said to yourself, was to somehow make the hated Germans pay. Somehow you must take revenge for the killing, for the wrecked homes and for your own humiliation, for the tears you had been forced to shed, for the terror and despair that even the enfolding arms of your mother could not comfort. This urge for revenge, which, after all, was beyond a four-year-old boy's competence, faded soon enough, but I was in my teens before I could stop hating Germans.
What hatreds will be nursed by the bombed children of Baghdad, and for how long? Will grown-ups manage to convince them, or even try to convince them, that the Americans whose weaponry has killed and maimed their relatives and fellow citizens, and scared them out of their wits day after day, night after night, should be hailed as liberators? Yes, there will be pictures of children smiling in the company of victorious troops. Smiling, in such circumstances, is the prudent thing to do. But their hearts and minds will house a nightmare that may never be put to rest.