The Child Left Behind

‘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, but I have no wish to fire a machine gun and neither of us is a mechanic,’ Finn said. ‘So what are we doing here?’

Christy shrugged. ‘Can’t answer that. The general neglected to discuss all his plans with me,’ he added with a grin. ‘Now are we going to explore the town tonight, or have you a better idea?’

‘No, not really,’ Finn said. ‘And if we are here for a bit, it would be better, I suppose, if we could find our way about.’

So, side by side, the two men left the camp and crossed over the bridge into the town, noting the strange-sounding street names. They tried pronouncing them and pointing out the little alleyways between the buildings.

‘I don’t know if this is typical of a French town or not,’ Finn commented, ‘but I bet you that it’s a thriving place in the daytime when all these shops are open.’

‘I’d agree with that,’ Christy said. ‘And I’d say half as big again as Buncrana.’

‘Rue Dunkerque,’ Finn read out the road name as they turned into it.

The night was still and quiet, and there were few people about. Their boots sounded very loud as they tramped along the cobbled streets.

‘Rue must mean road,’ Finn said. ‘God, we’ll be speaking French like natives if we stay here long enough.’

Christy laughed. ‘I doubt it. I think I’d have to get by with sign language and gestures.’

‘I know the type of gestures you’ll be making,’ Finn said, giving his friend a dig in the ribs. ‘And they do say the French girls are very willing.’

‘Have to go some way to beat those trailing around the camp just outside Folkstone, I’d say,’ Christy said.

‘Yeah, but we can have some fun finding out, can’t we?’

‘Don’t you ever think of anything else?’

‘You can talk. Are you any better?’

Christy didn’t answer because just then the road opened on to a square ringed with shops, closed for the night, and bars, which were open. There was a large building on one side of the square, looming out of the darkness, and they went forward to have a closer look. In the light from the moon they could see arched pillars holding up the second storey, and Christy said he thought he had seen a dome on top but he wasn’t sure in the darkness. The name was written in the archway over the main entrance.

‘Hôtel de Ville,’ Finn read. ‘Least I think that’s what it says.’

‘So it’s a hotel then?’

‘Maybe not,’ Finn said. ‘Probably “hôtel” means something different in French. I mean, it doesn’t look much like a hotel, does it?’

‘No,’ Christy agreed. ‘Not like any hotel I ever knew, anyway.’

‘I’d like to see it in the daylight,’ Finn said.

‘Well, until you can do that, we can always try our chances of getting a decent pint in one of those French bars,’ Christy said. ‘I have a terrible thirst all of a sudden.’

‘Don’t think you stand a chance,’ Finn said. ‘People say they drink wine in France.’

‘Not all the bloody time, surely,’ Christy said. ‘Anyway, you can please yourself but I am going to see if any of these places serves anything at all that’s drinkable Are you coming?’

‘Course I am,’ Finn said. ‘It isn’t as if I’ve had a better offer.’

The next morning, Finn and Christy were assigned as porters to help the medical corps with the wounded that came into St-Omer on the troop trains. For some of these soldiers, the town was just a clearing station and they were later sent on to the coast and taken to Britain. ‘Like the poor sods we saw off-loaded at Folkstone,’ Finn whispered to Christy.

For others, though, from Canada, Australia and New Zealand, St-Omer was the end of the road, and the sight of those wounded young men sobered Finn. For the first time he experienced the nauseous smell of blood in his nostrils, the putrid stink of scorched human flesh and the repulsive odour of festering wounds. Though the sights and smells shocked him to his very soul, he never allowed himself the luxury of being sick for too many were relying on him.

He wasn’t pleased then that after a week he and Christy were among those taken from hospital duty. They were told to report the following day to the BEF Headquarters, also in the town, where they were to be employed as temporary batmen to the officers stationed there.

‘Playing nursemaid to a crowd of toffs,’ Finn said disparagingly as they were leaving the hospital. ‘At least here I felt I was doing something useful.’

Christy was more philosophical. ‘One thing I have learned in my time here is that you do as you’re told, when you’re told. Anyway, we might find this is all right, especially if the officers are the decent sort.’

‘Huh…’ Finn began, then suddenly jabbed Christy in the ribs. ‘Will you look at that,’ he said softly, jerking his head to the other side of the street. ‘Isn’t she the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in your life?’

There were two girls walking with a man Finn presumed to be their father. At Finn’s words, the elder raised her head and their eyes locked for an instant. Finn, his heart knocking against his ribs, lifted his cap and grinned broadly. The girl lowered her eyes, but not before Finn had seen a tentative smile touch her lips and a telltale flush flood over her cheeks.