Image: Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour of ‘Irish soldiers and peasants’ (1521). (Kuperferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen, zu Berlin)
Gallóglaich*
Wealth of wayfaring, my mud-smeared
halberd slashes off necks at the root,
mounts them over hearths, toasts them with mirth.
Blood rinses my beard; I breathe rot,
slog about the day’s trudge, air stilled by death,
corpse-carpeted fields smudged silent.
Lifting keepsakes from pockets, I snuff flames
on my sword’s notched iron, note each face
before crows swoop on haggard wing to munch eye,
gnaw jowl. Heaven’s amber glow is a heap
of bodies smoking, in still-warm breastplates.
I no longer flinch from decomposition’s fizz.
Each dead, staring lip is indifferent to frostbite.
I’ve had the run of ditch and glen, valley, borough;
no enemy may slip from my slight, smell or sight.
Lying in ambush at Antrim, I charge Knockdoe
hillocks, limbs sweat-sopped. Enemy anthems swirl
in my ears; their pyres conjure ashen whirls of snow
and shadow. I won’t be swayed by priestly pleas
nor will I fall at the feet of some perfumed pontiff
and beg clemency. Nor I will not yank God’s apron-string.
sleeping instead through each drab sermon,
uncaught from a bishop’s craw, like a dove sent
to persuade me to defect my warring self.
For, from what do I need salving? The road
where the death blow misses me by inches?
The yesterdays, the tomorrows? Yoked neither to God
nor home soil but a chieftain’s bidding, I am
scriptured in this life of palisade and charge,
ground-holding and glassy rock to dam
fords in hurdle. As for the cavalry, they call
my name as if I were commonage to rack or rent,
or one of their hunting bitches beckoned to heel.
Disobedient, I cut and run across their continent,
repeat axe-bashings, splinter apart
meadows of frozen water and the dent
in my skull bends bone like a glass chalice,
handblown and raised, mead-filled, clinked
to heed good health. Price my loyalty.
I flee from no war-heat; I dare to die at the point
of a javelin’s lunging arc-hiss, or retreat through underbush
where no armoured horse can follow. Nor will I ever
kneel before a blood-blind banner; hoist no monument
for me. Bar my name from speech. Let my bones
smolder and crack, sink into my skin’s flaking ash;
let my grave vanish, my cairn crumble, my soul
smudge like a bloody thumbprint;
a lick of black smoke against a storm-steepened sky.
*In a 1732 letter addressed to Charles Wogan, Jonathan Swift wrote admiringly of the legions of displaced Irishmen who served in various European continental armies following the 1691 Treaty of Limerick (known to history as the ‘Flight of the Wild Geese’), praising in particular the bravery of their decision to enlist: “I cannot but highly esteem those gentlemen of Ireland, who, with all the disadvantages of being exiles and strangers, have been able to distinguish themselves by their valour and conduct in so many parts of Europe, I think above all other nations.”
It is true that the Irish have a long history of fighting other nation’s wars, from the galloglaigh or ‘gallowglass’ corps of elite mercenaries deployed to assorted conflicts across mainland Europe througohut the late-medieval period, to the 40,000 documented Irish ex-pats who fought for the Union and the 20,000 who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, the Republican and Blueshirt volunteers who signed up to fight one another in the Spanish Civil War, as well as the thousands who swelled the British Army’s ranks in WWI (and indeed, the countless more who wore a British Army uniform down the centuries), not to mention the 5,000 members of the Defence Forces who enlisted to fight in WWII, following Ireland’s officially neutral position in that particular conflict, and who were later branded deserters by the Irish government of the day upon their return. This isn’t even including the pioneering work undertaken by Irish-born war correspondents such as Peter Finnerty and Sir William Howard Russell, who covered the Napoleonic wars and the Crimean war respectively, as well as Samuel Beckett, who volunteered with the French Resistance in WWII and was awarded a Medaille de la Resistance for his efforts.
The nuance and increasingly complex gradations of Irish identity that resulted in this mass involvement with the military affairs of other nations is perhaps best summed up by Christopher St. Lawrence, the 10th Baron Howth and a captain in the Earl of Essex’s army during the Nine Years War, who, frustrated by the ridicule he received as both an Irish-born peer and a loyal follower of the Crown, declared: “I am sorry that when I am in England, I shall be esteemed an Irishman, and in Ireland, an Englishman. I have spent my blood, engaged and endangered my life, often to do her Majesty’s service, and do beseech to have it so regarded.”
In the case of the Gallóglaich (anglisised as ‘gallowglass’, meaning ‘foreign warrior’), there is something quite unique about their situation. Originally a corps of elite mercenaries from the Hebridean Isles in Scotland, commissioned by Gaelic chieftains to aid in the fighting against Norman invaders during the 1200s. Over the ensuing centuries they were deployed almost continuously to Ireland and mainland Europe as a mercenary force, right up until the early 1600s. Their prowess in battle earned them a fearsome reputation overseas; even Shakespeare referenced their ferocity (albeit anachronistically) in the opening act of Macbeth, while the German Renaissance painter Albrecht Durer sketched an image of them in 1521. My poem is written from the POV of one such combatant, adrift on the battlefield after the fighting’s done.
This poem has undergone several iterations over the years; this is its most recent (and hopefully final) draft. It could not exist without the the editorial skills of Pittsburgh-based poet Rachel McCarren, whose friendship and collaborative endavours have been a boon to me throughout the latest iterations of lockdowns.