How many ghosts will finally re-assemble in the National Concert Hall next Saturday to celebrate a return to their native land? Sons of the gentry and sons of the soil, policemen, farm labourers and titled earls have shared a common exile which comes to a long overdue and symbolic end this day week, when the Irish Guards Band will finally play alongside the Army Number One band - the first time that a British army band has played in independent Ireland.
And who will be there, this coming Saturday, in that silent pallid throng, gazing from the gods of the National Concert Hall? The Hon. G Morris, perhaps, killed in action at Landrecies on September 1st, 1914, leading his men into action on a white charger, his wife at home in Galway, pregnant with the child who would one day be Lord Killanin. And look, there is young Second Lieut Andy Bain, who had only just joined the 1st Battalion when he was killed by a stray mortar shell seven days before the Armistice in 1918. By then, thousands of men - most of them immediately Irish, and the vast majority of Irish extraction - had passed through the ranks of the Irish Guards.
Officer corps
The names, to be sure, speak of an officer corps which came from the ruling classes of the United Kingdom and beyond. What illustrious forebears in Imperial Russia had Lieut Rodakowski, killed in the mud of Flanders in the vile month of October 1917? And may we safely conclude that Maj Hon. J.F. Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis was not one of the Forbes who ran the smithy in Stoneybatter?
But not all the officers were by any means grandees. Lieut Daniel Joseph Hegarty, Lieut Patrick Redmond, Lieut Joseph Barry, Lieut Lawrence Murphy - their names suggest more modest origins. And one of the Irish Guards officers to survive the war, a youngster named Brady, joined the RIC, serving in Sligo. As District Inspector, he banned reprisals against Sinn Fein/IRA homes after attacks on policemen.
But his humanitarianism did not save his life; he was killed by dum-dum bullets in an ambush on his car. His gravestone in Glasnevin cemetery records that he was killed doing his duty. A kinsman went on to serve in the new Civil Guards, and his son in turn was to write the first history of the Garda Siochana nearly 30 years ago, before joining The Irish Times, which he has the signal honour today of editing.
Some lives are traceable; most are not. Twenty-nine Kellys, 27 Murphys, 11 O'Neills, 22 Byrnes, 18 O'Briens fill the rank and file of otherwise nameless soldiery, culled from glen and mud cabin and RIC barracks. Hundreds of policemen of 1914 were by 1915 in the uniforms of the Irish Guards. By 1919 the survivors were back in the police; and many of those who managed to survive that experience were hunted down in their homes in a post-ceasefire orgy of killing of ex-soldiers or ex-policemen (for which they were of course doubly qualified), or were forced into exile.
Southern regiment
The Irish Guards of 1939 was again a predominately southern Irish regiment, its members overwhelmingly Catholic. It participated in the debacle of Norway and fought a rearguard action at Boulogne, just over 60 years ago. It served in North Africa, Italy, Normandy, Belgium, Holland and Germany, hundreds of free men from both parts of Ireland freely joining in the war against Nazism. For years it was believed that one of these was Lance-Corp John Patrick Kenneally VC, whose exploits are even celebrated in a museum in his home town of Cashel. Yes, John Patrick Kenneally was from Cashel; but he didn't win a VC. As Richard Doherty and David Truesdale describe in their book Irish Winners of the Victoria Cross (Four Courts Press, and quite invaluable for people interested in this subject), the real Kenneally met a Birmingham Jew named Leslie Robinson on a building site, and they swapped identities. The new Kenneally went on to win the VC with a spectacular display of bravery in Tunisia; but what happened, I wonder, to the new Leslie Robinson? Is he now Levi Rabin in a kibbutz, who makes sure he is never seen naked in the shower?
German artillery
Who can say what Ireland lost in these engagements? One illustrious son was Maj John Kennedy, whose story is told in the privately printed account by Robert Jocelyn. With war's end a few weeks away, Kennedy, a much loved and fearless officer, was ordered on an unsupported clearing-out operation under the noses of German artillery. It was folly of prodigious proportions, which cost the Irish Guards, within spitting distance of peace, 175 casualties, including the life of the gallant John Kennedy MC of Bishopscourt, Co Kildare.
In terms of public memory and official acknowledgement, these men were in a way banned from Ireland. Next Saturday in the National Concert Hall the ban is formally lifted, as the Army's Number One Band, and the band of the Irish Guards, play together under the batons of Comdt John Ryan and Maj Andrew Chatburn, all proceeds to charities aiding ex-servicemen from each tradition; and in some cases, and more than a few, that means both. Tickets for the corporeal are available from the NCH; as for the grey and silent throng in the gods, why, they paid the price of entry years ago.