On September 25th, 1915, 90 years ago tomorrow, thousands of men were fighting a battle that has long since been forgotten. It was a battle characteristic of many fought during the first World War - a costly and ineffective adventure that did not live up to the hopeful expectations of the generals. It has been named the Battle of Loos after the northern French town whose capture was the only significant achievement of the two-week assault.
On the evening of that first day, a stretcher-bearer of the London Irish Rifles peered up the main street of Loos. It was a "solemn, shell-scarred, mysterious street where the dead lay amidst the broken tiles". These scattered soldiers reminded him tragically of the thousands of dead littering the battlefield. Against this multitude, the stretcher-bearer felt the enormity of his duty. All day he had been aiding the wounded, but his efforts were as those of "a mere child emptying the sea with a tablespoon". The stretcher-bearer was Patrick MacGill, who was in the process of writing The Great Push one of the finest and most forgotten novels of the War.
Born in Glenties in 1890, Patrick MacGill left for Scotland to work as a potato picker at the age of 14. Later he worked as a general labourer, a navvy, on the railways. Though modestly educated, he wrote poems about the life of Irish immigrants in Glasgow. The self-publication of a collection of poetry brought him positive reviews and a position at the Daily Express. Though his condition was now radically altered, he continued to write of the bleak lives of the Irish poor in his two novels Children of the Dead End and The Rat-Pit. When war broke out, however, he promptly joined the ranks of the London Irish Rifles.
Joining a nominally Irish regiment was MacGill's only nationalistic impulse. Like many Irishmen he seems to have been untroubled by the potential moral dichotomy of fighting for the British. Francis Ledwidge, another Irish manual labourer turned soldier-poet, displayed a similar disregard for this dilemma, though his attitude, unlike MacGill's, would change over time. In reality, the London Irish were defined far more by London than by Ireland and MacGill noted that he and his colonel were the only two real Irishmen in the battalion. MacGill was more interested in the condition of the common man, of whatever nationality, struggling to survive.
The Great Push is MacGill's third war novel. It forms the final part of a trilogy which begins with his training in The Amateur Army and moves with the soldiers of his platoon into the trenches in The Red Horizon. MacGill's view of the war develops significantly over the course of the trilogy. He wrote of events shortly after he had experienced them, thus lending his novels an unmistakeable ring of authenticity and honesty. Yet he manages to communicate a perspective of the war that shares more with the memoirs of Sassoon and Blunden, written over a decade later, than with his contemporaries.
Unlike other soldier-novelists, such as Ian Hay and Sapper, MacGill does not gloss over the more gruesome realities of the war. Nor does he comfort and excite his readers with noble deaths or glorious bayonet charges. There is the boredom of trench life, the enjoyment of drunken camaraderie, the exhaustion of constant work, the anxiety of death. His soldiers may be heroic and simple, but they are also at times savage, cowardly and heartless. Ultimately he reveals and shares their feelings of impotence in the face of impersonal mechanised warfare. As he sees it, the history of the war is a "history of sandbags and shells" in which the individual matters little.
As a stretcher-bearer, MacGill becomes obsessed with the fate of the individual in wartime. The wounded man "has only his own pain to endure", but the stretcher-bearer sees "all the horror of war written in blood and tears on the shell-riven battlefield".
He is doubly wounded. He must bear witness to the suffering of both his comrades and his enemies. Remote from the "ungovernable fury" that drives his comrades' actions, he becomes a traveller on the battlefield, both terrifyingly involved and futilely distant.
In late October, when the battle had long since been given up, MacGill was wounded in the arm as he walked one night in Loos. He was invalided home, "a passenger on the Highway of Pain", to recuperate. He never returned to the Western Front. Although not discharged from the Army, he spent the remainder of the war in London.
The Great Push was well received by soldiers and civilians alike, selling 45,000 copies in the
six months following its publication. After the war MacGill continued to write plays and novels, but he was never to repeat the success of his war books. Ill health, partly attributable to the effects of poison gas, marred his last years and he died on November 23rd, 1963 in Miami.
For the past 25 years Glenties has hosted the Patrick MacGill Summer School, which attracts many renowned speakers. Though its inception was inspired by MacGill's pre-war novels, its focus is now more fixed upon Irish political debates than upon MacGill or his contemporary Irish and Scottish writers.
This weekend memorial services commemorating the 90th anniversary of the
Battle of Loos are taking place in the town itself. The current London Irish Rifles will attend to remember those who died and those who, like Patrick MacGill, fought over the town.
He and his comrades deserve to be remembered, but he has written their epitaph more completely in the pages of his novel, which is now sadly as forgotten as the battle it records.