Finn was glad to be on the move. Bedding girls, pleasant though it was, was not really what he had joined the army for. Whatever awaited them in France, he told himself as he marched alongside Christy that autumn morning, so early that it was barely light and icy damp air caught in the back of his throat, he was well enough trained to deal with it.
Despite the inclement weather and the early hour the people of Folkstone lined the way, cheering and waving, wishing all the soldiers well.
The autumn winds had set in by the time they reached the harbour. The relentless waves crashing against the sides of the troopships made them list drunkenly from side to side as the soldiers climbed aboard.
As they pulled out into the open sea, Finn looked back. ‘Look at those white cliffs,’ he said to Christy. It was a sight that neither of them had seen before.
‘That’s Dover, that is,’ one of the British Tommies remarked. ‘By God, won’t them cliffs be a great sight to feast your eyes on when we have the Krauts beat and we are on our way back home again?’
Christy agreed. Finn didn’t say anything at all because he was too busy vomiting over the side. Nor was he alone. He could only be thankful that the crossing was a short one.
Once across the Channel, Finn soon perked up. He was surprised by the landscape, which, even in the murky gloom, he could see that the fields were as green as Ireland. The region itself, however, was as unlike craggy, mountainous Donegal as it was possible to be, for the whole area was so flat that he could see for miles. Now he understood the reason for fighting in trenches.
‘At least we are in France at last,’ he said to Christy, ‘though my family probably think I have been here this long while.’
‘Why should they?’
‘Well, I thought when we were paraded in front of City Hall that time that it was embarkation for us and so did they. I could tell by the tone of the letters they wrote, urging me to keep safe, keep my head down and stuff like that.’
‘Didn’t you put them right?’
‘I tried to, but the censor cut out any reference to my location, which means most of the letter was unreadable. Point is, to tell you the truth, I feel a bit of a fraud.’
‘Why on earth should you?’
‘Well, we joined up not long after this little lot started,’ Finn said, ‘and yet, for all our training, we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the enemy. Yet look at the injured we saw getting unloaded at Folkestone.’
‘I heard they’re saving us for the Big Push.’
‘What Big Push?’ Finn cried. ‘And how do you know that when they tell us nothing?’
‘One of the chaps at Shorncliffe overheard a couple of the officers talking.’
‘And where is this Big Push to be?’
‘He didn’t catch that.’
‘Well, I hope it comes soon,’ Finn said, ‘otherwise I will feel that I have joined up for nothing.’
‘You told Tom that was the most exciting thing that had ever happened you,’ Christy reminded him.
‘It was,’ Finn said, ‘but it all falls flat when nothing happens.’
‘Well, something is happening now,’ Christy said consolingly. ‘Let’s see where we end up tonight.’
The family, back in Buncrana, did think Finn had been involved in the battles in France for some time and hadn’t been able to make head nor tail of the letter he had sent telling them where he really was. In the newspaper they read with horror of the machine guns that could rip a platoon of soldiers to bits in seconds and the new naval weapon—the submarine that floated below the water.
They’d been horrified by the bombs that had landed on innocent people in the coastal towns of England in December 1914. And that wasn’t all, for in May of 1915 they read about air raids on London from something called a Zeppelin.
Unfamiliar words and places became part of the Sullivan language as 1915 unfolded, words like Gallipoli and Ypres and the Dardanelles, and the battles in these places and the terrible casualty figures. One hundred and twenty-five thousand Irish had volunteered for war, and by the summer of 1915 some of those whose bodies had not been left behind in a foreign field began to arrive back on Irish soil. People were shocked to see many of the young, fit men who had marched off return with missing limbs, blinded, shell-shocked or wheezing like old men, their lungs eaten away with mustard gas.
Each day, Thomas John woke with a heavy weight in his heart, waiting anxiously for the letters that told them that Finn was still alive.
Finn’s letters to Tom and Joe were in a different vein altogether. Remembering his time in Folkstone he described the camp followers offering a man everything for a packet of cigarettes, and he couldn’t help boasting about it all to his brothers, who had thought him a young boy the day he had left home. This would show them he had become a man. Finn knew they would think he was talking of French girls but he couldn’t help that. He couldn’t mention where they had been for the censor would cut it out and so he just wrote,
You scoffed at me, Tom, but you wouldn’t scoff now, for these girls that hang around the camp are wild for it, if you get my meaning. God, I didn’t know what I was missing when I was in dear old Ireland and the Catholic Church had me seeing sin in even thinking about a girl. I wonder what they would do to me now, when it doesn’t stop at thought. If I was ever daft enough to confess it, I would spend the rest of my life in prayer, I think.
Tom folded up the letter with a smile. Finn was sowing his wild oats right and proper, a thing not even Joe had ever had the opportunity to do. He was glad, though, that his young brother had something else to focus his mind on sometimes, ‘distractions for the fighting man’, he had described it before he left, and God knew distraction of any sort had to be welcomed because the death toll continued to rise. It was estimated that as many as 250,000 men had died by the summer of that year. In Ireland there were many Masses said for those serving overseas, or for the repose of the souls of those who hadn’t returned, and Tom’s constant worry about Finn was like a nagging tooth.
The soldiers camped that first night at a place called Boulogne-sur-Mer, not far from the coast. However, the following morning Finn and Christy were part of a sizeable section that was detached from the original company and marched off without any indication of where they were heading or why.
Once they had set up camp beside a wide and very picturesque canal, overhung with weeping willow trees, and had a meal of sorts brought to them, which mainly consisted of bully beef and potatoes, they were free until reveille the next morning.
‘Fancy going into the town and having a look about the place?’ Christy asked Finn.
‘Hardly much point is there?’ Finn replied. ‘We might be better hitting the sack. We’ll probably be off tomorrow before it’s properly light.’
‘No, I think we’re set here for a while,’ Christy said.
‘How the hell d’you know that?’
‘Well, I was talking to one of the other men here and he told me that he had volunteered to be a machine gunner,’ Christy said. ‘Apparently this town, St-Omer, runs a school here to teach them, and I don’t suppose you learn to be one of them in five minutes.’
‘No,’ Finn conceded.
‘And they’ve set up a cookhouse,’ Christy went on. ‘The meal was at least warm. Anyway, he said that there are some mechanics here as well, and they will be working in the repair shop because it’s the major one in this area. He told me they send the broken stuff down by canal.’
‘Yeah,