Anna McPartlin – Best Selling Author & Writer

My pal John Goodman is a World War 1 buff. He’s been passionate about WW1 since I’ve known him and this passion began when he discovered that between the years 1914 & 1918 three of his long lost uncles were killed in combat. Since he learned of his forgotten family he’s made it his mission to find them and find them he did. And in finding them he learned the tools to help others find the lost members of their family.

He approaches each mission with the requisite voracity required to investigate the circumstance and whereabouts of a man or boy lost amongst  47,000. Because 250,000 Irish men fought in WW1, did you know that? Until yesterday I definitely did not. 250,000! Of those 250,000, 47,000 died. 47,000 Irish men died in the space of 4 years fighting in a war that Ireland chooses to remember as someone else’s battle but 47,000 dead Irishmen suggests to me that is was our battle, after all it was a world war and as Michael Jackson put it so eloquently in the year 1985 we are the world.

John travels to France and Belgium every few months on his mini fact finding and relic collecting missions and when he decided to set up a company to bring Irish people on trips to visit the monuments and graves of the fallen Irish and of course the remaining trenches, tunnels and the fields where they died my husband and I agreed to be his guinea pigs alongside Joanne his long suffering wife.

So here I am sitting at a computer in a hotel in the beautiful rebuilt town of Ieper (Ypres) or Wipers as the troops used to call it back in the day. I’m sitting with a Belgian beer and typing in my jacket because having spent two days in graveyards and trenches and tunnels and cellars it may be May but November has set into my bones.

We started our journey in Beauvais airport yesterday morning around 8:30am and if France had an arsehole Beauvais would be it. We collected our car from the unfriendly AVIS man and made our way to our 1st stop on the tour, Beaumont Hamill – Newfoundland Park which is remembered and celebrated as the Canadian troop trenches but the reasons we were there was to remember and celebrate the Irish men who died there whilst trying to take The Somme. The Royal Dublin Fusiliers were amongst the 1st wave in a war that was supposed to last only 6 weeks. (Iraq anyone?…) We walked amongst beautifully tended gravestones, cut grass, flowers and John talked about the 1st day of the battle of The Somme. It was massacre 60,000 casualties in 1 day and 19,000 dead. He talked us through the reasons why and the strategies didn’t work and how the generals had got it so wrong. He talked about the men who were left lying in no mans land in agony lying next to rotting corpses whilst their comrades waited until nightfall to risk their own lives in a bid to try to retrieve them while enemies took pot shots at one another.  I was starving. We all needed to pee and it started to rain so we got in our nice warm car and headed for Thiepval and the Ulster Tower where there was the promise of hot coffee and a few mars bars. There we munched while looking at the bombs that went by the nicknames whiz bangs, and crumps for the sounds they made or toffee apples, flying pigs because of the way they looked.

Lunch was had in a village called Auchon Villiers or Ocean Villas as named by the lads. We ordered hot food and while it was being cooked the woman of the house Avril took us down to the cellar under her house. This cellar had been used as many things during the war, not least of which was an aid station. On the walls and using a flashlight she pointed out the etchings made by men like Private Malone a casualty of war or J. Crozier who was a boy of 19 held in the station when he wandered off following a shell attack. For leaving his post he was later shot at dawn. It was weird in that cellar, not in a heeby jeeby scary Mary way just dark, dank, depressing there was a piece of metal sheeting hanging above a old makeshift bed which was supposed to protect the eviscerated or limbless men from chalk, dust or clay falling on them from the roof above. The HSC isn’t looking so bad anymore is it kids? And the trench that took us out of that cellar was even more off putting, corrugated iron walls and intermittent ceilings, which were rusted and sharp and you had to bend low to go through so that you were facing the ground and mud underneath. Someone joked to watch out for rats which was more frightening than funny.  My husband was so on edge that he nearly shit himself when we emerged from the trench onto Avril’s working farm and he was set upon in a surprise attack by the current most fearsome weapon on the western front, Dolly The Sheep.  He yelped and practically jumped on Joanne’s back. Joanne has since named him Bah, Bah McPartlin and is taking the piss at every opportunity.

Yesterday we finished our day in Vimy Ridge and it was there while walking through the perfectly recreated trenches and tunnels that John explained the day to day agonies endured by the men and the tricks they employed to simply function never mind stay alive. He talked about the tined food, the sleep deprivation, the mud and the cramped conditions. He told us that to stay awake while on sentry duty the lads would rest their chin on their hand which rested on the point of the bayonet protected only by a piece of cloth usually a folded sandbag. If they dozed, the bayonet would prick their hand ensuring they woke and avoided being shot by either their enemy or their superiors.  He talked about being able to listen to the other side that were astonishingly mere meters away enduring their own kinds of hell albeit in slightly better and more elevated trenches. He talked about the night raids, the barbed wire, the constant shelling and these men and boys sharing their muddy holes with a population of rats who’d make China’s density seem low to medium and who were so fat from eating human remains that they were the size of small dogs. He talked about the heavy clothes they wore, the boots that were always wet and heavy and covered in thick muddy clay, the diseases that were rampant and the lice that was so prevalent the men would spend their time ‘chatting’ and this chatting is not engaging in gentle conversation this chatting refers to the burning of lice eggs out of the seams of their clothing using candles or simply crushing them between their fingers for temporary respite!!!!!

So just another pleasant evening in the trenches then…

 Donal wondered half way through the German trench what the lads did when they needed to do twosies. He actually said the word twosies this sent Joanne into a mini convulsion and while Jo and I laughed it up John explained how and where the lads did their twosies and I just don’t want to go there. After that we drove the 50 miles that brought us into Belgium and the beautiful rebuilt town of Ieper which initially appears like the town is named after a person with a horrifying flesh eating disease but that’s not a small L it’s a capital i and the place is pronounced eep as in weep without the w. Adding that W to eep would be apt bearing in mind the place was decimated between the years 1914 and 1918. There wasn’t even a tree left standing never mind a beautiful old town. Over dinner John discussed his plans for his tour company. He wants to keep the tours small limited to 7 people and he will customise them to accommodate those looking for a lost family member if requested. of course he’ll spend time doing all the investigation work before the tour even happens, he’ll pinpoint where the man fought and fell and he’ll find any and all documentation available on the man from articles to letters to certs and then he’ll find where that soldier is buried and if he is one of the thousands and thousands simply known as an unknown soldier. He’ll find the wall that bears the man’s name, his age and unit. I don’t know if anyone from my extended family ever served in World War 1 but today walking on field after tortured field, amongst craters from shellfire so large they could be swimming pools there were times I felt so terribly sad. And as we walked over crater after crater, concrete bunker after concrete bunker and by cross after cross I was reminded that although we were walking on lush grass and were surrounded by 99 year old trees and wild flowers abound every step we took was on the body of a man or boy who was blown apart, shot, gassed, knifed or suffocated and they had breathed their last on a barren, muddy, devastated moonscape. And although the scars are still evident the true horror of their last moments lie beneath pretty flowers and well worn tracks.

Last night over dinner we talked about what John would call the tours, The Great War Tours? Nobody really liked that. Or The World War 1 Tour? We all pretty much hated that. Joanne came up with ‘The Forgotten Soldier.’ And it’s good because that’s what John does he finds our forgotten soldiers. We didn’t like ‘The Forgotten Soldier Tour’ so if anyone has any suggestions for a peppy word that replaces ‘Tour’ and yet describes the business best we’d love to hear your ideas. John has a good job and this part time business is clearly not about making large profits so after dinner and after about 5 Belgian beers I asked John why is he is so invested?

“Because we left them here. We forgot about them and this is my way of bringing them home.”

And today having stood over the fallen from passchendaele to Langemarck I understood his passion. As his pal it made me proud because these people may have lived and died 100 years ago but they are still our people, the UK’s people, Germany’s people, Australia’s, New Zealand’s, India’s, Asia’s, Canada’s, America’s, France’s and the list goes on because The World War was after all a world war. And these people deserve their often short and treacherous lives to be remembered.

This is a poem that was written by a Private Tom Kettle from the 9^th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, it can be found written on stone in the Island of Ireland peace Park and I think it sums up the Irish and our role in WW1 best.

So here with mad guns curse overhead,

And tired men sigh, with mud for coach & floor,

Know that we fools, now with foolish dead,

died not for flag, nor king, nor emperor,

But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed,

And for the secret scripture of the poor.

And on that note I’m heading off to dinner, grateful for the life I’m living and sorry that after 100 years the world is still at war.