New Poem: Ghosts of the Deserters

Dedicated to the members of the Defence Forces who enlisted to fight in WWII, ignoring Ireland’s officially neutral position in that particular conflict, and who were later branded deserters.

“It appears that very large numbers of Irishmen have joined H[is] M[ajesty’s] Forces since the outbreak of war ….This is their own spontaneous and unsolicited act, since owing to Ireland’s neutrality there have been no agencies where they could enlist at home and no recruiting campaign. It is a pity that the fact—well known as it appears to be in Ireland—is not more widely realized here, as it is valuable evidence that Irish neutrality is not a mask for a hostile spirit towards Britain and the Commonwealth at war.”

- Gen Sir Hubert Gough, letter to The Times, September 26th 1941.

I.


You ate government rations with livid urgency.

The blood’s gooey vinegar lathered our arms.

I chose the war over your Emergency.



You pinned a white feather to my lapel,

A reward for my cowardice.

I kept the peace we never meant to repel.



I showed you the photo of my battalion:

Snapshots from a life you had no place in.

I live alone now, and am proud of it,



Wear my medals in secret. They hang

Heavily beneath my shirt, like silver grenades.

No wreaths were laid for the unguarded dead.



We returned home, unsung by marching bands.

You laughed off Auschwitz as propaganda,

Our clotting wounds as war-time artifice.



II.



May a tapestry of dead Irishmen curdle your dreams:

Haematic platoons, trying to march with a semblance



Of martial pride, ready to be chewed and spat

Into the oven of gunfire, mouths foaming with gore,



Crimson constellation of bullet-wounds varnishing

Arm and rib, hands plugged with congealing blood,



Eyes ballooned by the sight of kamikazes,

flesh peppered with Axis steel.



How many of us had to ignore the Chief-of-Staff’s

Neutral duty before the Reich’s deluge was stemmed?



How many skulls had to redly erupt before

Europe could rest easy? For how many years



Did our families flounder in jobless neutrality

When we returned home, denied the right to work?



How many of our children did the State claim were

Abandoned before sending them off to industrial



Schools, home-grown prison camps,

To lap up their anointed brutality like milk?



How many of us faced seven years’ starvation,

Seven years’ unemployment, after the war



Wound down to a stop, forbidden to work

By court-martial for our unpatriotic efforts,



Or faced the stigma of our countrymen, who stayed

Relaxed in the neutral freedom we safeguarded?



And how many of us, fathers, brothers, comrades,

Men who became gunners, corporals, operators



Of searchlights among London’s shelled streets,

Drivers of artillery trucks in Burma, never returned home?



Some of us left for the adventure, enticed by the lure

Of foreign lands and the frontline, others left for pay,



Ensuring our wives and children ate and lived

Into another decade, yet more to escape



The unemployment stretching tight over this country’s

Spine. The rest, because they had to;

they were needed at the front.



Dead or alive, we were veterans of Bergen-Belsen

And Normandy’s coast, Ardennes’ snowed-in ferns,



The Burmese sun and Kohima heat: the name

Of every milestone abattoir we collided through



Meant as much here as five thousand prodigal fighters

Who left the Defence Forces without a flag to salute.



III.



But when you walk down the military road,

Away from gunfire and the mortar blast,

From men who lay face-down in their dugouts,

Radioed commands, and choirs of cordite,

Scorched ghost and bullet-kissed stomach,



From white feathers strewn amid the soot,

You’ll see a chain of bullet-holes pocking

The blank page, unrecorded chapter

Of our history book: residue of wounds

We still carry, unhealed, hidden and heavy



As the medals anchoring our disfavoured necks

To shame, medals that you stripped us of.

Sent down as traitors of our young homeland,

The court-martials rounded us up, big game

For the national blacklist, leaning on the coldness



Of death’s shoulder. Before mortality carries

The last of us away, know that our pardon

Was given too late, know that fear governed us

Long enough, know that remission is futile here,

For we alone saluted the value of mercy.