Tipperary (44 page)

When the war broke out, he talked and talked of asking for a commission. He wore me down. At first he went to London in September, in the first few days, when there was scarcely any fighting. He came home, said they weren't ready for him, he was to go again at Christmas. But when Christmas came, he was too drunk to pull himself together, and he finally got to London at the end of January. They gave him some sort of assignment at a desk, and he chafed at it. Four weeks ago, they let him go to France.

I had a letter from him. He was delighted with himself—how can a man be happy at war? And he told me about a song. They were all singing it, he said, and he was the only one from Tipperary.

On the tenth of March, a Wednesday morning, I woke up here with a dreadful headache. And I knew that Stephen had died. I told nobody, but I got Helen, the maid, to drive me to the station. I took the boat to England, went to London to the war authorities, and they had no such dispatch. As far as they were concerned, Captain Stephen Somerville had gone to Béthune with the Royal Irish Rifles.

I caught the train to Dover, but I was stopped there by officers, who would not let me go to France. Back in London, the authorities told me that Stephen was in Armentières. Day after day, I went to the military offices. “Do you know of a Captain Stephen Somerville,” I asked over and over; and I used all my old friends and colleagues to try and get news of Stephen.

One afternoon, an officer to whom I had been introduced by a family friend sat at his desk and pulled lists from his attaché case.

“Madam,” he said to me, “all I can do is look at this list. If his name is not on it, you can call yourself lucky.”

But of course his name was on it, very high up. They told me that Stephen was one of the first to die on the first morning in Armentières— one of the first of thousands. And it was on the morning of my dreadful headache. I said to him, “Thank you.” This officer was about twenty-one. I must have said “Thank you” many times, because he took my hand and offered to help.

“Can you find Stephen? Can I take him back to Tipperary?”

He shook his head. “Madam, they must rest where they fell. Until things settle—until matters are clearer.”

I began to walk. No idea where, or for how long. That was when I heard the song, that dreadful song, in the night; they were singing it, because I walked past British soldiers outside public houses, and they had this song that Stephen mentioned in his letters, and I have the words in my head and the tune; I can't bear it.

Everybody born in Tipperary has been saddled with that song. When my wife and I traveled, we always got the rejoinder “It's a long way” when we said where we came from. It was written by an English music-hall song-and-dance man who had never set foot in Ireland—Jack Judge. He had Irish grandparents.

Somebody in an English pub after a matinee made a bet with him one afternoon. Could he write a song for the evening performance? Nearby, he overheard a man giving directions to someone, saying, “It's a long way to Lancaster,” and he won his bet. Everybody born in Tipperary knows that story.

But the song haunted the men of that frightful war, young men who came back aged, came back gassed and shattered, came back splintered and lame. I knew an old Great War soldier here in Clonmel. He told me that he had stopped going to pubs.

“Mr. Nugent,” he said, “now and again, with drink on him, some fellow will start a singsong. And sooner or later someone'll sing that bloody oul' song and I'll start crying. I hate it.”

As I think I've made clear, when I walked the Treece land, and then found the “leprosy” entry in that 1864 newspaper, I sensed that I was being enchanted a little by Charles O'Brien and his world. Very shortly after that, I recognized that I was irretrievably caught up. I embraced it with open arms. And, as is now clear, I told myself, “Follow every stream to its source.”

Béthune lies not much more than an hour from the English Channel coast, southeast from Saint-Omer, which lies southeast of Calais. This is old Picardy, where, in another old war song, roses are shining in the silvery dew. I went north from Béthune, up toward the Belgian border, looking for the country before Armentières. Now the cemeteries began, rows upon serried rows of white crosses, and I was asking myself, Why are you here?

The answer had several components. I had agreed with myself to dig into the story as deeply as I could. Already I knew that Charles O'Brien was an unreliable witness—and, indeed, that he meant to be. He deliberately left out significant information. What else can you say of a man who puts an entire life change in parentheses, and in seven words: “(I was bound for the New World)”? Above all, I have a powerful belief in the spirit of teaching.

Teaching is about the truth. It's about the truth of the knowledge that you're conveying. And it's about the truth of the effect that such knowledge can have. When I was teaching Shakespeare, I wanted the boys to know that Hamlet behaved in an ugly fashion to Ophelia. But I also wanted them to know that he had been, as we say, “blackguarded” by his own father and mother. His father asked him to become a murderer. And his mother married the man who killed his father.

I'm merely citing this as an example. In the same spirit, I went to France. I felt I needed to see Stephen Somerville's grave, to hear the bolt click home. If Charles, in his text, was less than forthcoming, I would compensate for that. Teaching is—or should be—about the whole truth.

To put it in a more concise way: I knew that my reason lay somewhere between checking on a man who had told me to “be careful” about him and getting a deeper grip on this slowly unfolding drama.

Stephen Somerville is buried in the military graveyard at Estaires, among Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders. His inscription is simple: “Captain Stephen Somerville, Royal Irish Rifles, La Bassée 10th March 1915.”

Official sources say that Captain Somerville died when the Germans returned fire. They had been holding firm on the La Bassée ground for some time and were not about to be driven out. The English bombardment that aimed to shift them was the biggest ever in any war up to that point (soon, of course, to be exceeded by excess in the three years still to come).

Some of the local oral history will tell you that many of those who died in those three hellish days in March were killed by their own shells that fell short or malfunctioned—today's euphemism is “friendly fire.”

Around these villages, if you ask, the local people will show you little hills out in the fields that seem no more than ordinary mounds of earth thrown up eons ago by glacial deposits heaving across the world, as the ice slunk back to the poles or the oceans.

But they have before and after photographs of these hills. And they will point out to you how more than a few were twice, three times bigger after the war than before. When you look puzzled and ask them, they shrug and say, “
les corps
”—the bodies buried inside those hills.

Incidentally, nobody could be more interested than an Irish history teacher in the fact that the general in that battle was Sir John French— the same man who later took disastrous charge of the British campaign against the Irish Republican Army.

Back in Ireland, the widow Somerville had several choices. She could sell the estate and return to England. Or go anywhere, rich for the rest of her life. Or she could lease most of it and hope to collect rents. Or she could stay; she had enough capital to restore and develop the place.

Each option posed problems. If she sold and left, what would she do with her life? Become the quarry of fortune hunters? If she stayed and leased, would she be able to collect all the rents due to her? By now, tenancy of any kind had made the Irish irredeemably truculent. And if she stayed—how would she handle such a huge project?

April closed her mouth firmly as she finished speaking of the song. She had become a little frantic as her story gathered pace; now she held her head higher, and I saw that she looked at Mother with almost a stare. Would she likewise look at me? She did not; she was trying to gain control of herself, and she made herself be still. In a moment, her eyes again began to fill with tears, until they held shining pools—which then began to slip in sheets down her face. When next she spoke, her voice had calmed.

“Papa had a saying; he spoke it every day.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
Of the dead say nothing but good. I speak it every moment to myself. And I am trying to let the next thought take me over and stop the worst thought, the
nil nisi
thought; there's so much that I want to say, but
nil nisi
won't let me. And so I try to get to the next thought, but I can't. Is that how grief works?”

Mother said, “We lost Euclid. He was the dearest boy. Since then I have made errors every week in the farm accounts. For months my letters bore the date on which he died and I didn't even know it.”

I had not known of this. Mother had never mentioned it—indeed, we spoke not at all to each other of our grief. I said, “Since he died, I go out into the world every day without my watch and have to come back for it. It's as if I wished Time itself had halted so that he could still be with us.”

As I had not spoken until now, my words seemed to echo, and I recalled how much I had liked overseeing this building, and speaking aloud to myself, and hearing my words boom.

Mother looked over at me. “I did not know about your watch.”

I replied, “Nor I about your farm accounts.”

Mother turned to April, who was regarding me closely for the first time. “So you see, here we are, all in pain and grief. The best we can do is move on to the next thing.”

April threw out her hands in a hopeless gesture. “I do not yet know what the next thing must be.”

Mother said, “It will choose itself—and it will come and tell you.”