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A brave boy will be honoured, 90 years late
Kevin Myers -- The Sunday Telegraph
(Filed: 14/03/2004)
Last Friday, I had the great honour of being invited to open the fund-raising campaign for a memorial in Waterford, Ireland, to Private John Condon, who was the youngest British soldier to die in the Great War. Aged 14, he was killed during a German gas attack near Ypres on May 24, 1915. He was not alone - a thousand British soldiers died that day - but his death was especially tragic, not merely because of his absurd age, but because his parents thought he was still in Ireland.
The first they heard of his fate was the telegram announcing that he was missing in action. Another six years passed before his bones were found near Mouse Trap Farm outside Ypres, identifiable by his regimental number on a fragment of boot.
John Condon had probably been sent to the front line because his regiment, the Royal Irish Regiment, had already lost 500 men killed in action, many in the new gas attacks by the Germans. Within a couple of days of the new drafts arriving, the Germans sent chlorine gas slinking downwind towards the British trenches. Sixty men of the Royal Irish died alongside young Condon; the same number again were mortally injured, their lungs boiled into an oedematic, bloody froth: deaths too terrible for words.
In the coming years, a country which usually revered its martyrs in other causes then managed consummately to forget this poor lad, and those thousands of other Irish nationalists who were killed in the Great War.
Indeed, the process of commemorating the Irish dead of 1914-1918 really only started in the Irish Republic after IRA bombers massacred a dozen unionist worshippers at a Remembrance Sunday service in Enniskillen in 1987. Irish nationalists began to ask themselves serious questions about their past and the way they had forgotten the war: was the atrocity just an extreme version of their own identity, which had gone a stage beyond an amnesiac disdain for remembrance of the war-dead to actual murder?
It was a salutary example of the power of deeds over words: I had been writing with fruitless obsession in Irish newspapers about the forgotten Irish dead of the Great War since 1978. Moods, however, are not made by pens, nor politics seduced. What shapes political life more than a million words is a single discernible deed, one which halts people in their tracks and causes them to think far more than printed words ever could.
One of the most dismal discoveries of all young journalists is how little they can actually achieve by their work. To their astonishment, that first, world-shattering by-lined article changes absolutely nothing. Occasionally, we might, with a turn of phrase, raise the odd smile, cause a heart to race with anger, or another to melt with emotion, or a politician to bow gracefully. Mere ephemera. Journalists do not do: we say, and words are a distressingly thin medium, uttered with vapidly authorial pride one moment, and lost the next in the ceaseless babble that surrounds us.
All societies forget what they need to. They conceal the inconvenient, the socially disruptive; thus young independent Ireland set about forgetting those hundreds of thousands of young men who had served under British colours in the Great War - far more then had ever served with the IRA from 1916 to 1922. In other words, people told lies about themselves and their history, in a vast and informal conspiracy, in order to create a new social and political cohesion.
Lies invariably come to be revealed, and nationalist Ireland recognises now that the Troubles from the 1960s into the 1990s in part resulted from chronic amnesia and a politically falsified history. The IRA took variants of these lies, and cross-bred them with its own mutant strain of murder-worship. I imagine the same is probably true in Spain, which for years resolutely rejected the truths of its Civil War, thus allowing the Basque fascists of Eta to create their own evil mythology, their own murderous fantasies, in the state-created vacuum.
This is the enduring truth. The past retains an almost divine ability to revisit the present, and completely unexpectedly. Thus the people of Waterford, a small city in the south of Ireland, have now come together, almost without dissent, to commemorate a tragedy of so long ago.
It was one of the proudest moments of my life to be present for this: so that, finally, nearly 90 years after his death, and 20 years after I discovered his fate and wrote about it for the first time in The Irish Times, a memorial is being raised to honour that long forgotten boy-soldier, Private John Condon (14), Royal Irish Regiment, RIP.
Kevin Myers -- The Sunday Telegraph
(Filed: 14/03/2004)
Last Friday, I had the great honour of being invited to open the fund-raising campaign for a memorial in Waterford, Ireland, to Private John Condon, who was the youngest British soldier to die in the Great War. Aged 14, he was killed during a German gas attack near Ypres on May 24, 1915. He was not alone - a thousand British soldiers died that day - but his death was especially tragic, not merely because of his absurd age, but because his parents thought he was still in Ireland.
The first they heard of his fate was the telegram announcing that he was missing in action. Another six years passed before his bones were found near Mouse Trap Farm outside Ypres, identifiable by his regimental number on a fragment of boot.
John Condon had probably been sent to the front line because his regiment, the Royal Irish Regiment, had already lost 500 men killed in action, many in the new gas attacks by the Germans. Within a couple of days of the new drafts arriving, the Germans sent chlorine gas slinking downwind towards the British trenches. Sixty men of the Royal Irish died alongside young Condon; the same number again were mortally injured, their lungs boiled into an oedematic, bloody froth: deaths too terrible for words.
In the coming years, a country which usually revered its martyrs in other causes then managed consummately to forget this poor lad, and those thousands of other Irish nationalists who were killed in the Great War.
Indeed, the process of commemorating the Irish dead of 1914-1918 really only started in the Irish Republic after IRA bombers massacred a dozen unionist worshippers at a Remembrance Sunday service in Enniskillen in 1987. Irish nationalists began to ask themselves serious questions about their past and the way they had forgotten the war: was the atrocity just an extreme version of their own identity, which had gone a stage beyond an amnesiac disdain for remembrance of the war-dead to actual murder?
It was a salutary example of the power of deeds over words: I had been writing with fruitless obsession in Irish newspapers about the forgotten Irish dead of the Great War since 1978. Moods, however, are not made by pens, nor politics seduced. What shapes political life more than a million words is a single discernible deed, one which halts people in their tracks and causes them to think far more than printed words ever could.
One of the most dismal discoveries of all young journalists is how little they can actually achieve by their work. To their astonishment, that first, world-shattering by-lined article changes absolutely nothing. Occasionally, we might, with a turn of phrase, raise the odd smile, cause a heart to race with anger, or another to melt with emotion, or a politician to bow gracefully. Mere ephemera. Journalists do not do: we say, and words are a distressingly thin medium, uttered with vapidly authorial pride one moment, and lost the next in the ceaseless babble that surrounds us.
All societies forget what they need to. They conceal the inconvenient, the socially disruptive; thus young independent Ireland set about forgetting those hundreds of thousands of young men who had served under British colours in the Great War - far more then had ever served with the IRA from 1916 to 1922. In other words, people told lies about themselves and their history, in a vast and informal conspiracy, in order to create a new social and political cohesion.
Lies invariably come to be revealed, and nationalist Ireland recognises now that the Troubles from the 1960s into the 1990s in part resulted from chronic amnesia and a politically falsified history. The IRA took variants of these lies, and cross-bred them with its own mutant strain of murder-worship. I imagine the same is probably true in Spain, which for years resolutely rejected the truths of its Civil War, thus allowing the Basque fascists of Eta to create their own evil mythology, their own murderous fantasies, in the state-created vacuum.
This is the enduring truth. The past retains an almost divine ability to revisit the present, and completely unexpectedly. Thus the people of Waterford, a small city in the south of Ireland, have now come together, almost without dissent, to commemorate a tragedy of so long ago.
It was one of the proudest moments of my life to be present for this: so that, finally, nearly 90 years after his death, and 20 years after I discovered his fate and wrote about it for the first time in The Irish Times, a memorial is being raised to honour that long forgotten boy-soldier, Private John Condon (14), Royal Irish Regiment, RIP.
