Last Tuesday, Damien McGuinness of Messines Park in Derry was remanded in custody on charges of riotous behaviour. Does he know why Messines Park is so named? Probably not. In which case, he merely shares the general amnesia about Messines and the events in Flanders 80 years ago this week, in which unionist Ireland and nationalist Ireland shared a forgotten Calvary together.
Messines Park is named after the village in Flanders taken by the 16th Irish Division in June 1917. It was one of the great victories of the Great War, though, as with most great victories, it was followed by greater defeats, greater losses, and greater suffering. But for those few weeks after the battle, in which the 36th Ulster Division had served alongside the 16th and shared in its victory laurels, it had seemed - spuriously - that Irish soldiers on a foreign field might bring themselves closer to a national understanding.
German bomb
Thousands of Northern nationalists were serving in the 16th Irish division, even in regiments ostensibly recruited from elsewhere in Ireland. It was in recognition of the many Derrymen at Messines that Messines Park in Derry was so named and ex-servicemen were housed in it after the war was over. Four of those ex-servicemen and eight of their family members were killed when a German bomb demolished 5561 Messines Park on the night of April 16th, 1941.
Those four ex-soldiers - John Richmond, William Murray, William McFarland and James Collins - could have told a story about what happened to them in the aftermath of Messines, if anybody asked them. I doubt if anybody did. It is one of the enduring shames of our history that the symbolism of the purposeless yet heroic sacrifice on Frezenberg Ridge in the Third Battle of Ypres could have been so forgotten. For nothing so terrible has ever happened to Irish soldiers of the two traditions, simultaneously, and side by side, as happened on that slight rise towards Frezenberg in August 1917.
And few troops have ever been so shamelessly used and subsequently so shamefully traduced by their army commander as were the men of the 16th and 36th Divisions in the Third Battle of Ypres by General Hubert Gough - an Irishman of the insecure, hyphenated variety, quick to blame, quicker to despise and truly loyal to nothing save me fein. Field Marshall Haig wrote of the those divisions after they had suffered 7,800 casualties - more than half their number - for no gain whatsoever:
What Gough said "[Gough] was not pleased with the action of the Irish Divisions. . .They seem to have gone forward but failed to have kept what they had won. . .The men were Irish and apparently did not like the enemy's shelling, so Gough said." So Gough said. . . And if words deserved to win a man a place in the eternal flames of everlasting hell, the words are those and the man is Gough. It was he who sent the thousands of Irish soldiers to hold swamplands around Frezenberg ridge for two full weeks, using them as trench-diggers, stretcherbearers, working parties and as frontline troops while the battle raged about them.
Rains had begun to fall on July 31th as the two Irish divisions, nationalist and unionist, arrived; it rained throughout their stay, and by August 15th they were completely exhausted. The 16th Irish Division had lost 2,000 casualties merely holding the line in that appalling fortnight, in which soldiers floundered and drowned in the mud and under intense and incessant artillery fire.
One hour of such conditions would exhaust most of us; these men of Ireland had to endure them, without respite and without departing from that front line, for two weeks.
And then, despite the desperate pleas of their local officers, the order came down for these exhausted men to leave the vast muddy baths rejoicing in the name of trenches and to advance to take the German blockhouses which heavy British artillery fire had merely managed to bounce off. Irish battalions which should have been attacking with 750 fresh, fit men in fact managed at best to number some 330 exhausted men as they began their weary scramble towards those German concrete fortresses of Bock Farm and Berry Farm and Vampire Farm; and there they vanished, mown down by intersecting fire of machine guns or by the massed artillery fire of German batteries awaiting their arrival, or simply drowning in the tides of mud.
Treated abominably
One Irish battalion was reduced to a single wounded officer, and no formed body of men. Their brigadiers in despair denounced the operation as murder; and even in withdrawal, the Irish soldiers were treated abominably: the men of the 16th said afterwards that "they were cast aside like old shoes, no care being taken of the men who survived." They were forgotten then; and have been forgotten ever since. But maybe those four ghosts that survived the German bombs of 1917, only to fall victim to one at home in Messines Park in 1941, will remember the men of Ireland who laid their bones together on that shallow slope of deep mud before Frezenberg, 80 years ago today.
Possibly a kinsman of Damien McGuinness served on that slope. Maybe a kinsman of his namesake Martin did. But one who did serve in the war, and who survived, returned to Derry and had a family. His son is one of the most famous men in Ireland, but he never speaks about that shared experience of nationalist and unionist Ireland on Frezenberg Ridge. Why, John Hume?