An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  I sat on the floor of the farmhouse parlour with several other prisoners – civilian truck drivers whose trucks had been commandeered for the campaign and were now standing outside in the farmyard. The woman of the house brought me dinner, but the look of the fat bacon made me sick. I wasn’t a drinker, but just then I needed a drink badly, and the senior enemy officer, whose name seemed to be Mossie O’Brien, promised to buy me a flask of whiskey at the first pub we passed. He had the same sort of good humour as Deasy, and I liked him as much as I disliked his truculent second-in-command.

  At last his column, having collected all the local gossip, prepared to return into exile with their prizes; the engines of the trucks and cars were started, and I was actually being helped into one truck when a couple of shots rang out and we all dashed back to the farmhouse for cover. Our front-line troops had returned from Mass, indignant at what they regarded as a coward’s blow, and the enemy were cut off from their base. At least I fervently hoped they were cut off. I was beginning to have my own doubts about our front line.

  Back in the front room the enemy soldiers barricaded the little window with bags of meal and a can of pitch. The first blast of machine-gun fire from our Particularly Fierce Armoured Car knocked the pitch right over my driver’s head. The realization that we had an armoured car at all depressed the defenders greatly. Except that it was top secret and had been withheld even from me, I should have told them that we had a Big Gun and nine shells as well. There were rifles stacked against the wall behind me, and several times I thought of grabbing one and turning it on the garrison – not because I was particularly brave but because I realized that they were even more scared than I was. At the same time, I knew that there was no help to be expected from my fellow prisoners. They were just saying their prayers. All I could do was to spread alarm and consternation before our men got cross and blew up the house. O’Brien came in and muttered to the other officer that a man had been killed upstairs, and I passed it on. I had to yell it at the deaf man who was reclining on my chest, and he shared my views of the gravity of the situation.

  ‘Will we surrender now, Mossie?’ he asked O’Brien, who was going out.

  ‘Not till the last shot is fired,’ O’Brien said shortly.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked the deaf man.

  ‘Not till the last shot is fired,’ I repeated with regret. I liked O’Brien, and I wished he wouldn’t be quite so soldierly. I was tired of war and wanted to go home. I felt my first expedition into the heart of Ireland had brought me quite enough material to go on with. I knew that in Cork they would now be coming back down the Western Road after a walk along the river, and I longed to be there with Hendrick, telling him the story without waiting to see what might really happen. The deaf man too appeared to have an urgent engagement, because he began to unload his bandoleer into my coat pockets.

  And after all the nonsense I had read about the excitement of one’s baptism of fire, I was finding it intolerably dull. It just went on and on. The trucks and cars were still roaring in the farmyard, but one by one, as the petrol gave out or a bullet hit a petrol tank, they fell silent like the instruments at the end of Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ symphony, and at last nothing was to be heard but occasional bursts of fire. It drew on to evening, and with the little window barricaded, we were almost in darkness. The disagreeable officer was firing his revolver dispiritedly out of the window and singing ‘You Called Me Baby Doll a Year Ago’ in a voice of agonizing tunelessness. The deaf man fell asleep on my chest and breathed nice and evenly at me through it all.

  Then came a noise that woke even him, and then a silence, and then a hysterical voice upstairs shouting ‘Rifle grenade!’ This was followed immediately by another voice shouting ‘Mossie is kilt!’ and at once everyone began to wail ‘We surrender! We surrender!’ Someone took out a large handkerchief and pushed it through the window on a rifle barrel, but it went unnoticed and renewed fire filled them all with despair. They were arguing about what they should do next when I grabbed the handkerchief myself and ran out. A soldier opened the door and closed it fast behind me. I waved the handkerchief, but though shots continued to go off all round me there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Everything was blended in a rich, moss-green watery light, while from a mile away over the Limerick grasslands came the distracted lowing of cows who had gone unmilked and were sure the end of the world was coming. The first man to climb the fence and approach the house was an old neighbour, Joe Ryan, but the look on his long, pale face was that of a man drunk with noise and tension, and I realized that I was in great danger of being shot myself, through pure excitement. Once more heavy firing began from some distance away, and everyone bolted for cover, convinced that it was all a trap. I had a terrible job persuading both sides of the general good faith, all the time steering round behind me a group of prisoners who were in a highly nervous state and determined on regarding me as an old and intimate friend from whom they could not possibly be separated, and as proof of their affection they loaded me with rifles and bandoleers. Once I did have to intervene when a man with a drawn revolver attacked one of the prisoners whom he had recognized. As an example of the classic peripeteia soldiers after a surrender are remarkable: at one moment lords of the world dispensing life and death, at the next begging for their lives.

  At the back of the house O’Brien, who had been shot through the mouth, was coughing up great gouts of blood while an old priest knelt beside him. Two soldiers brought downstairs the body of the young man who had been killed. He had been shot through the nostril, and the dried blood made a mocking third eye across his cheek, so that he might have been winking at us. Someone put a cap across his face; I saw that it was mine but I left it with him. I saw another civilian cap on the ground and I picked it up; caps cost money, and I knew if I came home without one I should hear about it from Father. It was only later that I realized I had picked up the dead boy’s cap, which was drenched with blood. An old man and his daughter emerged from a cupboard under the stairs and asked: ‘Is it all over now, sir?’

  Having seen the prisoners safe into Buttevant Barrack, I made my way home to Cork by the first car. I wanted to get my story into print and, besides, I felt I had seen quite enough of the war for the time being. Nowadays I merely wonder at my own behaviour and remember with revulsion that I once wore a dead boy’s bloodstained cap. It was not merely that I couldn’t afford to lose a cap. I fancy the truth is that nothing of it was real to me, and it never once occurred to me that the boy whose cap I was wearing had that day been as living as myself, and perhaps loved his mother as much as I did mine. It was all as if I had read about it in War and Peace.

  I doubt if most other people found it very real either. A few days later I accompanied Childers again to the ‘front’, as I was now beginning to think of it. At Buttevant Barrack I met his cousin, David Robinson, who was in charge of the cavalry, such as it was. Robinson was another ‘damned Englishman’, but of the sort I get along with. He was a typical British cavalry officer of the old school with a wide-brimmed hat, a coat that was old but elegant, well-cut riding breeches and top-boots. He had a glass eye, a long, pale, beaky face and the rather languid manner of a hard-boiled, softhearted gambler.

  Childers wanted statements from our wounded, so he and I and a third man visited the Military Hospital where, as usual, I disgraced myself, for inside the door with his head in bandages was a young enemy officer and I gave one startled look at him and then wrung his hands and said: ‘Mossie O’Brien!’ I am, as I have said, a natural collaborationist, and O’Brien must have had the same weakness, for when he left hospital it was to join one of our columns. He was captured by his own side and sentenced to death, but escaped from the prison and lived to run a garage in his native town. On the other hand, my driver, for all his old guff about eating the despatches, was reported to have ended up on the other side. That was how things happened. What, after all, do you do when a well-established synthesis blows up on you but wonder whether you are re
ally riding in the right compartment?

  Childers also wanted to see the front line for himself. We had to walk along a road and across a railway bridge that was covered by enemy machine guns, and when I saw the officer in charge take cover and run I did the same, but Childers walked coolly across, studying the country and apparently unaware of danger. This, of course, was partly the attitude of the professional soldier who always knows by instinct when and where to take cover, but I felt there was also an element of absent-mindedness about it – the absent-mindedness of the old schoolmaster or parson who is so worried about what to do with Jones Minor’s peculiar habits that he has no time to worry about himself. That night I watched him again in Ashill Towers, where the same country boys whose military genius I no longer had faith in occupied the upholstered chairs and studied their maps. There being no chair for Childers, nor anyone who valued his advice on military matters, he sat on a petrol can by the open door, his cap over his eyes and his mackintosh trailing on the floor, and went on scribbling his endless memoranda, articles and letters, like some old book-keeper who fears the new directors may think him superfluous. A tall, good-looking young American war correspondent who interviewed him on the petrol can congratulated him on Corkery’s poem ‘Old Town of Gaelic Saint’, which Hendrick and I had just published.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Childers with a worried air, ‘but have you seen Mr Brennan’s poems – “Churchill Gave the Orders but England Gave the Guns”?’ He always liked to keep conversation on a serious level.

  My last experience of the front was when I was sent back to Buttevant Barrack to collect the Big Gun and the nine shells. The enemy had ensconced themselves in a substantial parsonage and could not be dislodged by rifle- and machine-gun fire. When I reached the barrack, the armourer, who had brought his beloved gun all the way from Dublin with him, was still working on the tenth shell and didn’t want the gun fired till the shell was finished. But my orders were peremptory, and we loaded the little weapon and its shells on the back seat of my car. A mile or two from the parsonage we were intercepted by the officer in charge of the attack, and I was sent back to Buttevant with fresh instructions, so that I never really saw the weapon in action. Next day, however, I heard that after the first shell had been fired the enemy rushed out of the parsonage with their hands in the air but, as in Kilmallock, this gesture had gone unnoticed. When the second shell sailed over their heads they came to the conclusion that they were to be massacred whether they surrendered or not, and took to their heels across the country. But this too went unobserved, and the whole nine shells were fired at the parsonage, without hitting it once.

  I am not reporting what I saw, merely what I heard, but I do know that stranger things happened.

  17

  Childers was at the front when Cork was attacked from the sea – a possibility our military geniuses had overlooked. Technically, a landing from the sea is supposed to be one of the most difficult of military operations, but as we handled the defence it was a walkover. Hendrick and I had just got out our mimeographed news-sheet, describing the total defeat of the enemy; the newspaper boys were crying it through the streets, and Hendrick had fallen asleep on a pile of newsprint when I noticed the victors tearing through the city at forty miles an hour in the direction of the western highlands. We went to Headquarters at Union Quay to find out what we should say in our next number, but when we saw what was going on there we didn’t even bother to inquire. There was a crowd of bewildered men in the roadway outside and a senior officer was waving his arms and shouting: ‘Every man for himself.’ We were both rather shaken. I was quite good on the Retreat from Moscow, but it looked as though the Retreat from Cork was going to be serious. Everybody was in a frenzy; it was no use asking for instructions or trying to bum a lift, so we locked up our office and set off on foot up the Western Road. Corkery had a little cottage in Inniscarra, five or six miles up the River Lee, where he was having a painting holiday, and we made up our minds to walk there and ask his advice. We never doubted but that he would know what to do in any emergency, literary, social or military.

  In spite of our bewilderment, it was an enchanting walk on a summer afternoon, climbing gently with the river till we passed the little abbey graveyard where my Grandfather O’Connor was buried, and we didn’t mind the cars and lorries that tore past us literally in hundreds. Corkery favoured our pressing on to Macroom to find out if we were still wanted, and after he had given us a meal, we stood in the roadway with him, trying to halt one of the vehicles that went by. Childers was hanging frantically on the running board of one car, and he waved gaily to us as it passed. Naturally, nobody had thought of offering the ‘damned Englishman’ his seat. Finally a truck came by at a crawl and it stopped at our signal and Corkery saw us aboard. When we had been travelling for a few minutes Hendrick suggested to the driver that he might put on a little more speed. It was only then we realized that we had got on to a lorry of explosives. Hendrick began to sing the poem O’Faolain had given us to print. It was to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’ and began: ‘In Clareside and in Kerryside we’ve buried fighting men.’ When he finished, the driver asked for another song, and I decided that our situation must be desperate indeed.

  Neither Hendrick nor I had been in Macroom before, though it was the capital of the Irish-speaking west, but we got little chance of seeing what it was like because Corkery was there almost as soon as we were. Having seen us off, he had decided in his gentle, fatherly way that we were incapable of looking after ourselves, abandoned his painting holiday, and set off on our tracks. How he got a ride I don’t know unless he actually shot one of the drivers, but there he was, and he dragged us back to Williams’s Hotel, where he was staying. Childers was there as well. In the middle of the night some noisy men, pleading fatigue, began to hammer on our doors with rifle butts and demand our beds. We told them to go to Hell, but Childers got up at once and spent the rest of the night wandering about Macroom.

  Next day the army was disbanded, all but special units like the engineers and ourselves. The staff had apparently realized that keeping an army in the field entailed too much work and had decided to revert to the sort of fighting it was accustomed to, sleeping in farmhouses, dropping down to the local pubs for a drink, and taking an occasional shot at a barrack or a lorry. The army was furious – naturally, since some of the poor devils were faced with an eighty-mile walk home – but Hendrick and myself, regarded as indispensable, felt complacent. David Robinson, who had retreated in excellent order from Ballincollig with horses and field kitchen, gave us lunch on the lawn before Macroom Castle. It was a queer party before the medieval castle with its crude Renaissance doorway; David Robinson putting everyone at his ease exactly as though he owned the place; members of the hungry disbanded army looking on; and exotic-looking women with queer accents arriving from Dublin with despatches warning us that the members of the Free State Government were determined on killing Childers. He was talking to Hendrick and me when one of them came up and said earnestly: ‘You know they will kill you if they catch you, Mr Childers,’ and he turned away and said wearily: ‘Oh, why does everyone tell me that?’ Robinson was the only one who took the report seriously. He realized, as we didn’t, that in a family row it is always the outsider who gets the blame. He took Hendrick and myself aside and asked if we would join him in hiring a fishing boat at Bantry and putting Childers ashore in France. France! To me it sounded like all the adventure stories of the world rolled into one, and even Hendrick, who made a point of not being demonstrative, looked enthusiastic. But we got a cold reception when we tried to explain Robinson’s fears to members of the staff. ‘Staff-Captain Childers is under my command,’ said one of them, pulling rank on us, and though probably no one but Robinson suspected it, Childers’ fate was decided that afternoon. The only man who could have saved him was De Valera, and he was somewhere in North Cork.

  Instead, we commandeered a printing machine from the local job printers and had it carried to the
schoolhouse at Ballymakeera, an Irish-speaking village in the mountains west of Macroom. To me, who had never seen the wilder parts of Ireland, Ballymakeera looked dry and cold, and the stones stuck up through the soil. Corkery, having seen us settled, went off to finish his painting holiday in the inn at Gougane Barra at the other side of the mountains. He had also probably asked a half-dozen people to keep an eye on us, though that didn’t occur to me till I learned he had been hearing slanders about me. I don’t deny that I may have given grounds for slander. It was the first time I had found myself in a purely Irish-speaking neighbourhood, and the phonetics went clean to my head. One day I sat for a full hour in the parlour of the little farmhouse, listening to a small boy outside playing numeral games and letting the sounds sink into my memory. My grandmother, of course, had spoken excellent Irish, but her teeth were not so good. I became very attached to the farmer, who also spoke excellent Irish and sometimes sat with me in the front room, talking or tapping out on his knee little rhymes he made up about me, like:

  My son, Mick,

  My son, Mick,

  My son, Mick,

  He is a fine man.

  As one can see they were not very good rhymes, but they were in good Irish and, anyway, I can stand any number of rhymes in my own praise. I also fell in love with his elder daughter, whose gentle, blond, lethargic beauty was as breath-taking as her Irish, and she spoke that as I had never heard it spoken before, with style. Unfortunately, I had no notion of how to make love to her, because she appeared to me through a veil of characters from books I had read. Most of the time she was Maryanka from The Cossacks.