CHAPTER VIII
THE IRISH SOLDIER'S HUMOUR AND SERIOUSNESS[ToC]
STORIES FROM THE FRONT, FUNNY AND OTHERWISE
The memorable words of an Irish member, speaking in the House of Commons during the South African War, on the gallantry of the Irish regiments, come to my mind. "This war has shown," said he, "that as brave a heart beats under the tunic of a Dublin Fusilier as under the kilt of a Gordon Highlander."
The saying may be curiously astray as to the anatomy of the Scotch, but the truth of it in regard to Irish courage has been emphasised by the victories and disasters alike of the great world war. On all the fields of conflict east and west the Irish soldiers have earned the highest repute for valour. "They are magnificent fighters," says Lieutenant Denis Oliver Barnett, an English officer of a battalion of the Leinster Regiment, in letters which he wrote home to his own people. A public school boy, with a high reputation for scholarship, he became a soldier at the outbreak of war instead of going to Oxford. Courageous and high-minded himself—as his death on the parapet of the trenches, directing and heartening his men in bombing the enemy, testifies—his gay and sympathetic letters show that he was a good judge of character. He also says of his men, "They are cheerier than the English Tommies, and will stand anything." Cheeriness in this awful war is indeed a most precious possession. It enhances the fighting capacity of the men. Where it does not exist spontaneously the officers take measures to cultivate it. As far as possible they try to remove all depressing influences, and make things bright and cheerful. I have got many such glimpses of the Irish soldier at the Front, and their total effect is the impersonation or bodying forth of an individual who provides his own gaiety, and has some over to give to others—whimsical, wayward, with a childlike petulance and simplicity; and yet very fierce withal.
I met at a London military hospital an Irish Catholic chaplain and an Irish officer of the Army Medical Corps back from French Flanders. They told Irish stories, to the great enjoyment and comfort of the wounded soldiers in the ward. "Be careful to boil that water before drinking it," said the doctor to men of an Irish battalion whom he found drawing supplies from a canal near Ypres. "Why so, sir?" asked one of the men. "Because it's full of microbes and boiling will kill them," answered the doctor. "And where's the good, sir?" said the soldier. "I'd as soon swallow a menagerie as a graveyard any day." Another example of a quick-witted Hibernian reply was given by the chaplain. He came upon a man of the transport service of his battalion belabouring a donkey which was slowly dragging a heavy load. "Why do you beat the poor animal so much?" remonstrated the priest; and he recalled a legend popular in Ireland by saying, "Don't you know from the cross on the ass's back that it was on an ass Our Lord went into Jerusalem?" "But, Father," said the soldier, "if Our Lord had this lazy ould ass He wouldn't be there yet." One of the inmates of the ward kept the laughter going by giving an example of Irish traditional blundering humour from the trenches—a humour due to an excited and over-active mind. "Don't let the Germans know we're short of powder and shot," cried an Irish sergeant to his men, awaiting the bringing up of ammunition; "keep on firing away like blazes."
Some of the flowers of speech that have blossomed from the Irish regiments at the Front are also worth culling. Speaking of the Catholic chaplain of his battalion, a soldier said, "He'd lead us to heaven; an' we'd follow him to hell." As a loaf of bread stuck on a bayonet was passed on to him in the trenches another exclaimed, "Here comes the staff of life on the point of death." The irregularity of the food supply in the trenches was thus described: "It's either a feast or a famine. Sometimes you drink out of the overflowing cup of fulness, and other times you ate off the empty plate." "What have you there?" asked a nurse of an Irish private of the Army Medical Corps, at a base hospital, as he was rummaging among the contents of a packing-case. Taking out a wooden leg, he answered: "A stump speech agin the war."
Good-humour at the Front is by no means an exclusively Irish possession. Happily the soldiers of all the nationalities within the United Kingdom are so light-hearted as to find even in the most dismal situation cause for raillery, pleasantry and laughter, and to derive from their mirth a more enduring patience of discomfort and trouble. The Irish form of humour, however, differs entirely from the English, Scottish or Welsh variety not only in quality but in the type of mind and character it expresses. In most things that the Irish soldier says or does there is something racially individual. Perhaps its chief peculiarity, apart from its quaintness, is that usually there is an absence of any conscious aim or end behind it. The English soldier, and the Cockney especially, is a wag and a jester. He is very prone to satire and irony, deliberate and purposeful. Even his "grousing"—a word, by the way, unheard in the Irish regiments, unless it is somewhat incomprehensibly used by an English non-commissioned officer—is a form of caustic wit. Irish humour has neither subtlety nor seriousness. It is just the light and spontaneous whim, caprice or fancy of the moment. It is humour in the original sense of the word, that is the expression of character, habit and disposition.
The Munstermen have contributed to the vocabulary at the Front the expressive phrase, "Gone west," for death; the bourne whence no traveller returns. In Kerry and Cork the word "west" or "wesht," as it is locally pronounced, expresses not only the mysterious and unknown, but is used colloquially for "behind," "at the back," or "out of the way." So it is also at the Front. A lost article is gone west as well as a dead comrade. "When I tould the Colonel," said an Irish orderly, "that the bottle of brandy was gone wesht, he was that mad that I thought he would have me ate." As food and drink are sent west, perhaps the Colonel had his suspicions. The saying, "Put it wesht, Larry, an' come along on with you," may be heard in French estaminets as well as in Kerry public-houses.
At parade a subaltern noticed that one of his men had anything but a clean shave on the left side of his jaw. "'Twas too far wesht for me to get at, sir," was the excuse. "Well," said the dentist to a Munster Fusilier, "where's this bad tooth that's troubling you?" "'Tis here, sir," said the soldier, "in the wesht of me jaw." Another Irish soldier told his Quartermaster that he was in a very unpleasant predicament for want of a new pair of trousers. "The one I've on me is all broken wesht," said he. It is fairly obvious what part of the trousers the west of it was.