Pól Ó Muirí, born in nationalist Belfast, visited the Somme to find a great-uncle killed in a bloody first World War offensive
It's odd how history can startle you. In a piece on the first World War, Barrscéalta, Raidió na Gaeltachta's magazine programme, mentioned soldiers from the Donegal Gaeltacht who were killed in various campaigns, among them a "Murray from Dunlewy".
My paternal grandfather, Patrick Murray, was from Dunlewy. Like many of his generation, he set off to Scotland to be a migratory worker. Indeed, family lore has it that he spent the first World War there searching for work and trying to avoid conscription. He eventually made his way to Belfast and contented himself with seasonal journeys home to his native county. Still, we were the only Murrays in Dunlewy; the soldier must be one of ours.
A couple of phone calls later and my aunt Kathleen confirmed my suspicions: "Yes, uncle James, your great-uncle, was killed on the Somme." As an aside, she added: "I have a letter he wrote from France. Would you like to read it? I'll pass it on to your father." He in turn passed it on to me - and there it was, a tangible piece of writing from a relative I never knew I had, a family ghost forgotten simply through the passage of time.
The letter is the key to James's story, providing his serial number and his regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. The original date on the correspondence is July 1916. July is stroked out and August has been put in its place. (Did he add to the letter or did he simply forget to post it?)
The letter is addressed to his mother, my great-grandmother back in Donegal. It is full of general chit-chat, asking after his father and neighbours at home. The writing is neat; reading it almost 90 years later it's difficult not to be moved by its simple, heartfelt emotion: "I suppose you are thinking about the harvest in Dunlewy now. With God's help, I might be there for the finishing of it yet. You never know."
It was a harvest he was not to see. He was killed on Wednesday September 6th, 1916, a matter of weeks after writing home for the final time.
The website of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association (www.greatwar.ie) revealed a few more facts about James. He was in the 9th Battalion of the regiment.
Among the battalion's officers were Tom Kettle and Emmet Dalton. Kettle, nationalist MP and poet, was killed on September 9th, three days after James, while leading an attack on the village of Ginchy.
Dalton was awarded the Military Cross for his efforts that day. He survived and went on to take part in the War of Independence and the Civil War, and lead a career in the Army.
James, like so many others, is a number rather than a figure in the history books, but he fell at Ginchy; that much we knew. And it was to Ginchy that I found myself travelling earlier this year in the company of a team from RTÉ television's Léargas series, under the guidance of director and producer Pat Butler. We were looking not only for great-uncle James but for other Donegal soldiers who died in the war.
Butler had done his research, and what began as a personal journey for me became a much larger undertaking as we criss-crossed the Somme and, eventually, headed to Flanders Fields, to trace the last moments of other Gaeltacht soldiers.
I was astounded that these men had been remembered at all - and how ironic that it was in the Irish language that they were returned to memory. What community other than a Gaeltacht one could have held their familiar names in folk memory for so long and call them out of darkness?
The history of the first World War in Ireland has two opposing narratives - green and orange. Searching for James, however, I found myself being part of a third narrative, a personal, quieter one that simply sought to honour my own flesh and blood.
While Butler and the crew were filming the physical landscape, I began writing a play about the interior landscape of motivation, all the while walking dumb among headstones and memorials. Many of the graves have no names: "A Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God" became an all too familiar and saddening sight.
The first thing that strikes the visitor to the Somme, and Ginchy in particular, is its banality. Even to the untrained military eye there is obviously nothing worth fighting over: no vital bridge, no important rail junction, no key industrial centre. There are just fields, dull, boring fields, and men fought and died over them because that is where they found themselves.
James was one of the thousands who died during the Somme offensive. His body was never found, and so our journey took us to the Thiepval Memorial, where his name is inscribed among more than 72,000 others. Row upon row upon row of names chiselled into mute stone numb the imagination. That so many people were obliterated to such a degree that no remains were found simply defies the senses. The scale of the loss is traumatic even after such a long time.
We found James's name, Murray J. My mother had given me some holy water with which to bless it, but his name was so far up I couldn't reach, and I found myself having just to splash some on the wall and offer a prayer.
I was the first one of his family to have made the trip. Without doubt, his mother, father and siblings felt his loss, but they couldn't afford to make the journey.
Butler had been struggling to devise a title for the programme. He finally found it on the Somme: Ná Lig Sinn I nDearmad, or Lest We Be Forgotten. My radio play, Fómhar Na Fraince passed muster and will be broadcast, appropriately enough, on Armistice Day. I'll not be wearing a poppy, but I'll certainly have a prayer for James and his friends.
Ná Lig Sinn i nDearmad will be broadcast, with subtitles, on Léargas on RTÉ 1 on Monday, at 7.30 p.m. Fómhar Na Fraince is on RTÉ Radio 1 on Tuesday, November 11th, at 8 p.m.
