`The farmers still find bones when they're out ploughing. Beneath those fields is effectively a mass grave." Alan Gilsenan, right, is talking about the infamous fields of northern France and Belgium, which swallowed countless bodies during the terrible battles of the first World War. Shells, fragments of skeletons and bullets still drift to the top of the earth in this part of the world in a perpetual memento mori.
By Armistice Day on November 11th, 1918, more than 50,000 Irish soldiers were numbered among the war's ghastly toll. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the ending of the first World War. On Monday, RTE will screen The Green Fields of France, an hour-long programme of commemoration directed by Gilsenan.
"I didn't come at this from any personal background," he explains. "Nobody in my family fought in World War One." About a year ago, he began journeying to northern France, filming those battle-site locations and the war graveyards. He used grainy, Super 8 mm film for these shots - the kind that worked so effectively in his series Home Movie Nights.
"Usually, when you film, you go with a big crew, but I went alone over a period of time, which made it easier to get a sense of the place. You do feel the landscape is kind of haunted. Empty. There's a tangible atmosphere there, a melancholy."
From this starting point of filming the sites, The Green Fields of France began to take shape. Gilsenan visited the Imperial War Museum in London and went searching through its extensive archives, viewing rarely-seen footage of Irish soldiers in the first World War. "There hadn't been anything like as much interest in the Irish angle over the years as there has been from the British side, which is why a lot of this footage wouldn't have been seen before. All the soldiers you see in the programme are Irish soldiers."
Watching archive footage years after the event, from the place of knowing what happened next, is inescapably poignant. In the programme, there are scenes of soldiers assembling in O'Connell Street, the tram lines underfoot, and Nelson's Pillar in the background. It looks like a festival, because everyone seems so ecstatic. There is even a child dressed up in a miniature uniform, as if for some grotesque fancy-dress party, beaming into the camera as he salutes and raises his tiny cap.
Then a dog appears from nowhere and goes scampering through the ranks, tail wagging; cartoonishly out-of-place. The soldiers laugh, their brand-new uniforms still clean, their faces still unmarked with what they will so shortly experience. To look at the footage is to realise the dog probably outlived them all.
The Green Fields of France is a powerful montage of archive film and Gilsenan's own footage. The pictures are overlaid with songs either of, or commemorating, the period, which are played as backing tracks. These include pieces by John McCormack, June Tabor, John Field, and Arvo Part.
Sometimes, though, there is no music; the pictures appear on the screen to a background of deliberate, unsettling silence, conveying a time and place for which no words are adequate. "It's very hard to express the horror of war through film - impossible," Gilsenan says intently. "How do you express the emptiness that lies at the centre of it?"
In one of the Imperial War Museum's pieces early on in the programme, soldiers are shown digging trenches at the front. We know they are Irish. Unlike the scenes in O'Connell Street, they don't look at the camera this time. There is no laughter. There are sandbags everywhere. The soldiers stand knee-deep in muddy water and methodically shovel thick mud and stones.
Towards the end of the programme, we see more scenes of digging, of mud wastelands and relentless shovelling. But this time, the soldiers are not creating trenches in which to fight. They are digging graves for the broken bodies that lie all round them.
Interspersed with all this are photographs of some of those Irish soldiers in the 10th, 16th, and 26th Irish Divisions who went off to fight. The camera focuses on individual faces in these sepia photographs, which seem to disintegrate the more they are enlarged. We are told their names, their rank, their fate. Extracts from their simple, often painfully clumsy, letters home are read out. We see first the one-line last wills and testaments, made out before the Battle of the Somme, and then the inevitability of the formal telegrams, announcing the news of death.
Among those who died in that terrible war were three Irish poets: Francis Ledwidge, Patrick McGill, and Tom Kettle. Extracts from their work are read with sensitivity by three contemporary writers; John Banville, Peter Fallon, and Frank McGuinness.
But at the end of the programme, it is the words of the plainly-written letters home of ordinary men which resound most strongly; the voices of Everyman. Unlike the prose of their more famous contemporaries, these letters are not experiences of war transformed into literature. They simply record bewilderment and fear, and from a distance of 80 years, they still have the power to invoke shivers.
The Green Fields of France will be shown on RTE 1 on Monday at 8 p.m.