Poem called Recruit, and an essay on the Spectre of War*

War, corruption and the staying power of hope

‘‘Je vois l'avenir. II est la, posé dans la rue, a peine plus pale que le present. Qu'a-t-il besoin de se realiser? … C'est ca le temps, le temps tout nu, ca vient lentement a l'existence, ga se fait attendre et quand ga vient, on est ecoeure parce qu'on s'apercoit que c'etait d’ja la depuis longtemps.’

- Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (1938).

There is a sense, one that I suspect has been ongoing for decades, and has only been revealing itself with ever-greater starkness by the month, that society is teetering on the brink of an especially sheer precipice.

A dramatic opener, I know, but I think the notion is merited. Nor do I think much elaboration is required; a cursory glance at one’s newsfeed, never mind consulting the day’s headlines, yields a chaotic sense of freefall coming from all angles, whether from global political strife or evergreen reports on the resurgence of a conflict that I believe represents an ultimate moral litmus test for our times. After a 60-day ceasefire, Gaza is once again by the Israeli military, with as many as 400 Palestinian deaths and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promising that more bloodshed will follow.

What this massacre will lead to, and the countless moving parts it will affect, I cannot tell.

I was once an obsessive news junkie, my feed constantly giving me updates and fuelling my brain with yet more digestible outrage. Now, while I try to keep abreast of contemporary issues and remain as updated as possible, even I’ve had to admit defeat. “I won't avert my eyes,” says Rust Cohele in True Detective. “Not again.” A noble vow in its simplicity, but of course, also far easier said than done. One feels becalmed in place.

Of course, the sheer relentlessness of the news is partly to blame for this ceaseless din of updates, and there’s nothing stopping me from putting certain apps and sites on hold for now. But Putin continues to make inroads in Ukraine, and Trump’s touting of denuclearisation appears to be having the opposite effect than is intended, as well as refusing outright to aid Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in a crucial hour of need, as well as his most recent executive order dismantling the US Department of Education, effectively stripping many poverty-stricken K-12 schools across the States of much-needed funds, are all just morsels of an especially despairing ongoing news cycle that seems designed to plunge any and all spectators into a quagmire of unmitigated rage and unshakeable despair. O tempora, O mores, indeed.

The doomscrolling does not inform.

The noise must stop sometimes - if I can help it.

And I simply cannot keep thinking the end is nigh.

I force myself to be optimistic for my partner and child’s sake.

I do not know how strong the likelihood of WWIII is. But its spectre has loomed increasingly large at the back of my mind, and I suspect I’m alone. Had I the time and sufficient energy marshalled into studying in-depth the lead-up to that savage epoch, I’d do what I could to make sense of it all. The troubling resurgence in far-right attitudes across Europe, with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party gaining traction in Germany with the dubious support of Elon Musk and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy), and a recent noticeable uptick of the same here in Ireland, lead me to think conditions are falling into place for another Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment. The direct violation of ceasefire lines from Israel and the concentrated attacks on Palestinian civilians will only worsen matters until the violence escalates into something even worse.

But, as with everything, I am confronted repeatedly by my own gaping dearth of expertise and understanding. My formal education ended at the undergrad level, and while it was for an English degree and I’ve made leaps and bounds using it since, I’m by no means an expert or even exceptionally knowledgable.

Thus, I keep myself busy.

On a somewhat lighter note, I am busy, as I am always busy, but I have felt greater satisfaction with my work in recent months than I have in a long time. Perhaps I am simply casting about for reasons to hope, and clutching any that I come into contact with.

As I write this, I'm currently tied up with completing my new novel, redrafting a play that's proven to be several years in the making, waiting to hear back from an editor on a new poetry manuscript as well as a proposal for a television pilot I have co-written, in addition to having to not only adapt Wake of the Whale for the stage with my partner but also perform in the final production (neither of us are actors, but necessity prevails).

This is on top of day-to-day living, trying to fit in time to spend with my family and maintain a consistent workout schedule, in addition to the dust-swathed stack of books I've left unread - books to read for pleasure rather than business - you know, the work-life balance with its ever-shifting freight).

As I said, I am not a qualified historian; my enthusiasm for history is strictly that of the hobbyist and the amateur, not the specialist. It was always a favourite subject in school, though not one I’d ever given much thought to studying properly for. I certainly didn’t begin writing with an aim towards specialising in historical fiction.

Nonetheless, history has become a feature of my work; many of my poems grapple with moments and individuals from across the timeline that resonate with me. My first novel, A Land Without Wolves, is set in the late 18th century, during the leadup to the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, whilst Wake of the Whale, co-authored with my partner, features the interplay between historical whaling practises in early 20th century Ireland and the imminence and ramifications of global ecological collapse along our westerly coastline. Meanwhile, I am currently working on a play set in Renaissance Florence that specifically addresses the topic of cults, religious fanaticism, and volatile group thinking, both of which require the (unwitting or otherwise) assent of the vulnerable, first and foremost, as seen through the zealously galvanizing effect of the Florentine population under the firebrand preacher and social reformer Girolamo Savonarola. It is a play that, I hope, despite its historical setting, will have some resonance for modern audiences, should it ever have the good fortune of being staged and performed.

For each of these projects, a surfeit of research was required, and I tried to do my due diligence and maintain as much fealty to the facts as the aesthetic, dramatic and narrative demands of the writing process would allow. I certainly did not take the easy access to many source materials provided by the internet and the invasive whims of the algorithm for granted. Expediting the task of mining historical detail was not a concern and was possible only due to the wild technological advances which have become a part of daily living - the same technology that, as I mentioned at the start of this essay, can also lead one’s brain to grow unhinged.

None of which is to say it was an easy process, and my study system (simply reading any and all relevant texts to the subject at hand, with inevitably tumbling down an entire constellation of rabbit holes in the pursuit of some obscure fact that may not even have been used in the final draft), if you could even call it that, was far from rigorous. In Zola’s masterpiece, Germinal, the protagonist Etienne Lantier, an impoverished but righteous young itinerant miner in the northern French town of Montsou, memorably begins his self-taught socialist education by engorging himself on as many books as he can get his hands on:

It was at this time that Étienne began to understand the ideas that were buzzing in his brain. Up till then he had only felt an instinctive revolt in the midst of the inarticulate fermentation among his mates. All sorts of confused questions came before him: Why are some miserable? why are others rich? why are the former beneath the heel of the latter without hope of ever taking their place? And his first stage was to understand his ignorance. A secret shame, a hidden annoyance, gnawed him from that time; he knew nothing, he dared not talk about these things which were working in him like a passion—the equality of all men, and the equity which demanded a fair division of the earth's wealth. He thus took to the methodless study of those who, in ignorance, feel the fascination of knowledge… He had books sent to him, and his ill-digested reading still further excited his brain, … without counting treatises on political economy, incomprehensible in their technical dryness, Anarchist pamphlets which upset his ideas, and old numbers of newspapers which he preserved as irrefutable arguments for possible discussions. … The shame of his ignorance left him, and a certain pride came to him now that he felt himself thinking.

During these first months Étienne retained the ecstasy of a novice; his heart was bursting with generous indignation against the oppressors, and looking forward to the approaching triumph of the oppressed. He had not yet manufactured a system, his reading had been too vague. … he walked as if in a dream, assisting at a radical regeneration of nations to be effected without one broken window or a single drop of blood. The methods of execution remained obscure; he preferred to think that things would go very well, for he lost his head as soon as he tried to formulate a programme of reconstruction…

This passage is essentially how I approach historical research in my haphazard but hopefully productive way. Inevitably, in reading about major conflicts of the past, one can’t help but draw comparisons to the present and discern how entire generations were shaped by the mismanaged whims of a ruling class whose names, naturally, are recorded in the history books whilst the anonymous majority who were at their mercy are consigned to monolithic erasure.

*

I myself was born at the tail end of the Troubles when bombings and retaliatory strikes were ubiquitous across the North; the words ‘ceasefire’ and ‘IRA’ were frequently uttered by the adults around me throughout my childhood. I’d only just entered primary school when the Good Friday Agreement was signed - though I wasn't observing much then, being only five years of age. 9/11 occurred five years later, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq shortly after. I am aware that 2025 marks the end of WWII. I was still in my teens when the 2008 financial crash hit. I am, therefore, of a generation not moulded by global conflict, but by the recession that followed the crash. My 20s were characterised by economic uncertainty and a succession of jobs wherever I could find them; I also turned 30 just after the pandemic and its aftermath. Currently, a cost of living crisis, marked by inflation and price gouging, increasingly seems like a feature rather than a bug that dominates contemporary Irish life.

One of our most lauded poets, William Butler Yeats, declared that: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’.

I’m sure most of you will agree that, given the myriad crises of the last decade, whether political, cultural, social or economic, Ireland has been in a state of quarrel with itself for quite some time now. And there is little poetry to be found in such a state.

In Ireland, as in much of the West, an economic order that no longer serves the majority has begun to fray. The property market is a grotesque carnival of speculation and political self-interest, pricing out the young while landlords—many of them legislators—grow fat on desperation. There is work to be had, certainly - in fact, Ireland is at full employment as I write this - but work without the means to build a life is nothing short of a cruel joke. And so, for many, existence is not a matter of living but of scraping by, of measuring out their days in rent receipts and anxieties over the future.

Clearly, something is rotten in the Irish republic. It has been festering for years. National policy is skewed for the few at the expense of the many. Our political system is crippled by cronyism, ineptitude and venality. Institutional abuse, it seems, is the rule, not the exception. And time and again, we do not see it punished, but rewarded. The majority of Irish citizens find themselves saddled with a debt not of their making but of the making of a select few individuals who made outrageous gambles with their private monies and who, through a political system that rewards such behaviour, were let off scot-free as the country was flung into economic turmoil. Corruption persists only in a system that is itself corrupt.

And, like it or not, these are the sort of epoch-defining events that mould entire people’s understanding of the world, colouring their way of moving forward in it. Ireland, once and seemingly always a nation of emigrants, has been grappling with the complexities of immigration for decades now. My younger sister has relocated to New Zealand; I have cousins scattered across the globe, from Australia, Canada, Bulgaria.

This, in itself, is no tragedy—until one observes the tenor of the response, the growing resentment among its people, and the increasingly febrile atmosphere in its streets, especially in the face of government failings. That a country so well acquainted with exile and displacement should now cultivate a nativist backlash is, on the face of it, a bitter irony. The racist fury underpinning the riots in Dublin in November 2023 was as despicable as it was shocking.

But history, that merciless instructor, teaches us that irony is no safeguard against cruelty, nor does past suffering necessarily breed wisdom. When people are abandoned by those who govern them, they will seek answers wherever they can find them, even in the rhetoric of demagogues - Conor MacGregor, with his cack-handed aim of running for president, is merely the most visible and vocal of these here.

It is fashionable among the bien-pensant to recoil in horror at the first stirrings of extremism, as though such sentiments emerge ex nihilo, unprovoked and unbidden. But they are not merely the product of malevolence, but in fact, the offspring of despair. When a government fails in its most basic duty—to provide the conditions for its people to build lives of dignity—resentment will seek an outlet, and rarely in directions that the liberal mind finds palatable.

To decry the rise of reactionary politics while ignoring the conditions that nourish it is a self-indulgence of the elite. When families watch their children depart—not for lack of work, but for lack of shelter—when they see the ruling class hoard its privilege under the guise of economic prudence, they will, in time, come to view even the most unsavoury solutions as necessary. There is, after all, only so much hardship a people can endure before they decide they have nothing left to lose.

I wonder if these are the seeds of a great war that is due to erupt upon us, and I hope I am wrong.

But the ruling class, across any historical period, has a habit of sacrificing its young.

*

I desire no great war; peace can be striven for, its longevity ensured, difficult as it might be. Though, it beggars the question: did the relative material comfort I have come of age actively not equip me for whatever cataclysm is waiting in the wings? When the great

My great-grandfather, William Kellegher, and Sgt. Patrick Dunne, my grand-uncle, served at the Somme with the British Army during WW1, as many Irishmen did then.

The former, who was a gardener by trade, sustained injuries from mustard gas attacks at the Somme and had health issues for the rest of his life because of it. He was also quite reticent in talking about his experiences, presumably for two reasons: the horrors he witnessed in the trenches, combined with the widespread stigma levelled at ex-servicemen in the nascent Irish Free State.

The latter was a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He lied about his age to join up and was later invalided from the hostilities. He eventually died of battlefield-related illness in Cork Street at age 19. By then, he'd been promoted to the rank of sergeant.

At 33, I am now much older than he would ever be.

There’s nothing very heroic about either of them, really. There are no astonishing deeds on either of their records or acts of bravery or sacrifice you might find chiselled on a monument. At least, none that I know of. Neither of them stand out in the grand scheme of things, or within the rising sweep of history, against which everyone, no matter how eminent or anonymous, ends up being dwarfed by anyway. (And the Irish nationalist in me is grimly aware of their membership in an army that historically did much to brutalise and subjugate the nations that were subsumed as states of the British Empire over the centuries.

I’m a century removed from them, so I have no idea how either of them viewed the conflict, or why they volunteered for service. Their reasons for doing so could be myriad. Were they just young men looking for some adventure, a chance to see the world, perhaps even a stab at glory, their youthful folly leading them to the trenches of Flanders in pursuit of a chivalric ideal already rendered obsolete by machine-gun fire? Did they feel duty-bound to the Empire, or in aiding Catholic Belgium (as was propagandised to many potential Irish volunteers) from German inroads, or in stemming the conflict in mainland Europe before Ireland, too, was engulfed by it? Or, as two working-class Irishmen, did they simply view the army as a means of earning a regular wage?

I don’t doubt they were brave to enlist. Nor were they a minority in doing so: an estimated 210,000 Irishmen swelled the British Army’s ranks during the war. It is, therefore, a curious and tragic irony that many of these men, having survived the trenches, would return home to find themselves cast as pariahs in the land for which they had believed they fought.

Nor do I doubt that WWI was a senseless, brutal waste of life conducted at the whim of several muscle-flexing imperial powers. As with many grandiose imperial enterprises, it ran on lofty rhetoric but delivered only disappointment, suffering, trauma and death on an industrial scale. It was a conflict waged under the banners of duty and honour, yet conducted with an indifference to human life that was staggering in its cruelty. As Thomas Kettle, who himself perished at the Somme, observed with tragic prescience: “History will write of us that we began nobly, but that our purpose corrupted. The Great War for freedom will not, indeed, have been waged in vain; that is already decided: but it will have but half kept its promises. Blood and iron will have been once more established as the veritable masters of men, and nothing will open before the world save a vista of new wars.”

The hellish conditions of trench life as portrayed by Owen, Sassoon, Gurney and Thomas Kettle, both in their poetry and letters home, was no exaggeration - they were there, they took part in the fighting and saw it all first-hand; therefore I’m inclined to give their accounts the most credence. No doubt they also felt dread as well excitement before battle, and endured the hellish conditions of the trenches, the cold, rats and disease, and seeing their mates dying in the mud. The idealism that had carried so many young men to the frontlines disintegrated amidst the mud and carnage. Yet war, in its perversity, does not operate solely on fear and misery; for some, the experience was as exhilarating as it was traumatic—a fact that makes it all the more unsettling.

Yet, writing about them and tending to their memory has kept me grounded and my perspective on history intact. There is no single, sanitised way to remember the war, nor should there be. The jingoism that so often accompanies commemoration is as distasteful as the wilful amnesia that sought, for decades, to erase Ireland’s participation altogether. If one chooses to wear a red poppy, it is a personal choice; if one refuses, that too is within their rights.

I, however, like to think that, with this poem, I gave them some measure of respect that they didn’t receive in life. Their legacy is a very small one, but even small legacies deserve our consideration, I think.

This poem, featuring music by Brien O’Brien, offers some small recognition of what they endured:

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Because even after a ceasefire is called and peace declared, wounds can take forever to heal. That’s as true of an individual life, moored to a certain point in history, as it is for entire generations. It is naive to believe, as I once did, that WWIII is an impossibility - and I suspect many are past that thinking now. Complacency engendered by decades of peacetime and a poor understanding of history can catch many offguard.

That is why I force myself to hope. To believe that there is much to look forward to still and strive for, even in the face of despairing conditions.

Last month, I published a poem on this site meditating on the heroic efforts made by Irish civilian merchant sailors during WWII (officially known as the ‘Emergency’ in by the Irish government of the day, which took a neutral stance on the conflict) to bring vital supplies to Ireland following the shutdown of trade routes to Britain and America due to the presence of U-boats in the Irish Sea.

This month saw the death of Irish airman John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last survivor of the Battle of Britain. Ten Irishmen served as pilots during that particularly crucial battle, some of the 5,000 plus Irishmen that volunteered for service with the Allied forces during WWII and who saw themselves blacklisted for desertion on their return home. The nature of this blacklist included these men being, according to Joseph Quinn, ‘deprived of all pension and gratuity rights, and legally prevented from obtaining any form of publicly remunerated employment for a 7-year period’.1st

I do not think their heroism should be dismissed.

I cling to hope, however naively and however much my more cynical

For a more in-depth take on their stories, here is a good place to start.

All this has prompted me to carry that theme on throughout May. I'll post some WWII-related pieces here, as well as the full text of ‘Recruit’, over the coming days.

Speaking on ITV News, historian James Holland has asserted that Hemingway's death now signals WWII slipping out of living memory and fully into history.

Whenever this happens, education in history becomes ever more crucial.

Those who do not learn history are indeed doomed to repeat it. I’ll leave you with ‘Recruit’:

Recruit
i.m. William Kelleher, died 1967, Veteran of the Somme
i.m. Sgt. Patrick Dunne, died June 30th 1916, 5th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers

Here are the hallmarks you try to disown:
Each confirmed kill, your raw prize
And dried blood, a civilian’s powdery bone.
Your soldier’s stride slack in the glare,
The service rifle propped on your shoulder.

You want a shoulder to cry on.
I have two shoulders.

You’re still a boy, draped in a man’s disguise.
Reeling off your sham spleen, waving a torch
From the scarred parapet, marching where you’re
Told to march. But you don’t yield or adjust
To a ceiling of sandbags, or a floor of body lice.
Your choler leaks from a blackened cast.

You want a shoulder to cry on.
I have two shoulders.

Blood-sodden bandages grow for you to scorch.
A Celtic cross unveils darkness for the brigade.
The sergeant major starts smoking:
“The best cancer is one that infects slowly.”
He exhales and sweats in a heat-wave’s prism,
But carnage won’t make him a martyr, or even holy,
Nor will it graft him in a licit heroism.

You want a shoulder to cry on.
I have two shoulders.

The Islandbridge memorial, gritted by rainfall
And infamy, excludes your name.
Your rifle lost its voice, as you lost your fortitude.
You were a war hero, pocked with shame.
Mustard gas was the dreg of every battle,
Grinding your lungs for the next five decades.
Your ammunition pouch thinned down, shellshock
Leapt from your throat in deathly coughs.

You want a shoulder to cry on.
I have two shoulders.

How to remember you, a dead man I never met?
As a Royal Dublin Fusilier, 10th Brigade, 4th Division,
With an ammunition pouch, gas mask and helmet?
Or as an expert gardener, planting apple trees,
Living your final years on a British Army pension,
Believing you were a traitor to everyone?
Did a Victoria Cross decorate your mantelpiece?
Were you threatened with conscription,
Or did massacre, and shellfire, enthral you?
Were you taken in by the emblems of blood?
Did your rifle make you feel like a man,
Standing heroic in in the barbed, war-torn mud?
Or did you want three square meals, and a wage?
Whatever the reason, I pray your stony fate
Is bloodless, free of bullets, and war’s waste,
As I commemorate you here, a century too late.

You want a shoulder to cry on.
I have two shoulders.

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Joseph Quinn. “The ‘Desertions Crisis’ in the Irish Defence Forces during the Second World War, 1939–1945.” War in History 28, no. 4 (2021): 825–47.