by John Freeman
With Ireland gone, what remained were watercolours, trinkets, prie-dieux, crucifixes, silver, records by the lovely songwriter and cousin Percy French – and Catholicism, which occurred morning and night and every Sunday with a visit to Mass at St George’s Church, where I stared at the hot, bare kneeling legs of the girl in the row ahead. I had no models, except in the negative. It was not easy handing out anti-war leaflets in the garrison town of Warminster during the first Iraq war. An old lady known to our family as Mrs Bunny, since my sister as a child was unable to pronounce her name, walked right past me and I followed after her enthusiastically, only realizing as she turned and spat ‘I wouldn’t read it’ that she had not failed to see me. My father was still in the army and my mother was suffering from bulimia, depression, dyspraxia and epilepsy – to stay near the front of the alphabet. Nobody we knew had been to university, or had any connection with the remote, magical world of literature to which I aspired, bar an uncle by marriage who had written the biography of a cavalry horse which had been blown up by the Irish Republican Army in Hyde Park. The English public loved that story: animals, soldiers, nail bombs, bad Irish, proximity to the royal family and even a happy ending since the horse recovered. Later, he wrote fiction about a terrier called Gannet: my elder brother looked at the book, took a large puff of dope and said with slow concern in his voice, ‘I’d have thought the market for this sort of stuff dried up in 1914.’ But I’m getting ahead of myself.
At primary school it was usual for small boys like me to read ‘trash mags’, comics in which storm troopers said ‘Jawohl, mein Kommandant, Hände hoch’ and ‘Kill the Engländer Schwein’ – the Germans usually being neutralized by the end of the story by British soldiers with neat scarves and clipped expostulations, and occasionally by square-jawed, late-arriving American helpers. Sometimes the trash mags would be set one war earlier, at sea off Heligoland or in Europe’s trenches. I refused to read these magazines or to join the daily fights against ‘Germans’, though occasionally I would play Messerschmitts, a game where you intercepted the stream of urine of another boy with your own as you pissed into the same toilet. I refused to join the proxy wars of football, and when asked which team I supported would reply: ‘It’s a team you won’t have heard of.’
‘Yeah? Try me, you knob.’
‘It’s called footballisrubbish.’
‘Say that again.’
‘Football is rubbish.’
This was heresy in 1970s provincial England, a place where physical cruelty was more acceptable than it is today. The children of the Royal Irish Rangers, who made up most of my classmates at St George’s Catholic Primary School until it was burned down by Irish nationalists during the Troubles and we had a month off school, would outline the tortures they had heard about from their uncles, including one where a git is attached to two saplings which are made to spring apart. Then, still weakly denying any interest in football, I would be given a Chinese burn and wrestled to the floor. Usually I could talk my way out of being beaten up: I found immediate surrender to be a useful tactic, subverting the code of honour by which you only gave up when you had been jumped upon or pummelled for several minutes.
In truth, I didn’t enjoy the company of boyish boys; I preferred to be among girls, and was interested in the dynamics of female groups, which seemed to work according to what was left unsaid. My mother made a business suit in checked cloth for my Action Man so that he looked more like James Bond than a soldier. At one point I knitted a scarf in school in order to irritate the aggressive, ultra-male games master. Older girls (how I loved older girls) would come over to me in the playground and say, ‘OK, walking dictionary, how do you spell stethoscope?’ I would see the word in front of me in the air like a sign in sans serif and read out the letters. This was greeted with oohs and aahs as if it were an achievement.
To an extent, I wanted to be a girl. I liked to kiss girls, and was adept at getting them to show me their underwear. Other boys would dress in combat outfits, looking like shrunken versions of their soldier fathers; they would shout ‘on guard’ and stab the air with pretend bayonets. As they approached double figures, they would buy the wares of military surplus stores in nearby towns. It was clear to me early on that some boys and men and even a few women loved physical violence. They loved it for its own sake. It was not simply that they were sadistic, and wanted to inflict pain: it was more that they were thrilled by the aggressive anticipation of scrapping.
At the army stables, where I went out of my way to avoid riding, ostensibly because I had asthma but really because I believed some of the horses had evil in their eyes, the grooms would ask if I was following my father into the Royal Fusiliers. I was not. They asked if I liked hunting; I had managed never to hunt a fox, despite the strong ambient pressure. At the army cricket match, a voice would enquire if I was a relation of Field Marshal French. I hoped I was not. At the army shoot, one of the guns (if you were shooting that day, you were called a ‘gun’) would inform me as he swigged from a hip flask and waited for a pheasant to fly over that my uncle had won the first VC of the First War – as if my father might never have told us. It was like being Carl Joseph von Trotta in Roth’s Radetzkymarsch, who is reminded time and again that he is the grandson of the Hero of Solferino. My objection was not to Uncle Maurice. I didn’t mind his face; it was not unlike my own. If you put aside his scarlet coat, his gold braided epaulettes, the statement of heroism – seemingly his sole identity – that was inscribed on the top left of the oil painting, Uncle Maurice was fine. What I disliked were all the implications that surrounded him. I felt, as F. Scott Fitzgerald did, that I had been born in the wrong place. You could say I had my comeuppance, because I left St George’s Catholic Primary School in Warminster at the age of eight and was sent away, according to custom.
The sun rose at six o’clock on 23 August 1914. It was going to be a boiling hot day. Two hours later the Germans were approaching the railway bridge at Nimy in close formation. Some were shot, and they dropped back to a clump of trees to regroup. Then they came in a line, one after the other. Then they came from the sides too. Lieutenant Dease was wounded in the calf and neck but after lying still for a while he crawled down the embankment to his second machine gun, dragged a wounded soldier off it and started firing. He kept calling for gunners to come and replace the dead and wounded. According to a comrade, he continued to ‘fuss’ over his guns and was only content when both were firing at once. By now barges were burning on the canal. He crawled back up to the other machine gun and was shot as he crossed the railway tracks. When the sun was high the Royal Fusiliers withdrew towards Mons, and Maurice was left behind.
He never heard about the battles at Ypres and the Somme, or Jutland or the Allied march on Jerusalem, he never heard of Passchendaele or Tsingtao, or Verdun or Tannenberg or Kut, and he never heard of Sandfontein or the Isonzo, or Gallipoli where Europe and the Antipodes met the Turks and lost.
German troops got across the canal. The retreating British soldiers took a defensive position on the road leading to the Grand Place but were faced by a group of Belgian hostages pushed ahead by the enemy. In the square in Mons, the bourgmestre was taken hostage too. The British Expeditionary Force fell back towards Le Cateau, their fighting retreat gaining a fame of its own, like Dunkirk one war later. They endured, as one officer wrote in a letter to his family, ‘10 days of hell, strung out over 12 miles of front’. Towards the Flanders coast the armies stilled and trench warfare began. The Battle of Mons became a standard; barracks were named after the city and a Mons Officer Cadet School was opened in Aldershot, the home of the British Army (where I was born). The London Gazette reported that His Majesty the King had been graciously pleased to approve the grant of the Victoria Cross to Lieutenant Maurice James Dease. His citation read: ‘Though two or three times badly wounded he continued to control the fire of his machine guns at Mons on 23rd August until all his men were shot. He died of his wounds.’ Other heroes had similar wording. One wi
nner of the medal had ‘continued to serve a gun until all the ammunition was expended after all officers were killed or wounded’. Keeping going until everyone else was shot was part of the valour.
It took weeks for news of Maurice’s death to reach Mullingar. For a time there was just silence – no letters. A telegram arrived from the War Office saying he was wounded, spaced at five words per line in cursive script, then another saying he was missing, then another saying he was dead. But what if the earlier telegram was correct, wondered his parents, surely it must have been the truth? He was wounded and a prisoner. That was more likely, wasn’t it, that Maurice was alive? Then a letter came from a participant in the battle, describing the circumstances of his death. After that, his mother never spoke again about the war, only about how much Maurice had loved horses and how once he had ‘carried his bat’ in a cricket match. His death was bleached into perpetual disappearance, an absence that would never end.
‘You really ought to hear the men back from the 4th Battalion talk of Maurice, it would do your heart good,’ wrote another officer to his sister Maud, my grandmother. He became a talisman, a St Sebastian for the soldiers of the regiment. ‘They simply adore him and it’s quite funny to see so many of them have photographs of him. Sir A. Conan Doyle is lecturing on the Great Battles of the war in several places, and he talks at some length about Maurice and his VC at Mons.’ A ‘patriotic meeting’ was held at the Royal Albert Hall – ‘and when Maurice and another VC were shown on the screen the thousands present rose to their feet and cheered enthusiastically’. His friend Miss Mollie Hewitt of the Isle of Wight sent Maurice’s last letter on to the family.
He became a posthumous hero, one of the fallen who could be promoted as an example of selfless gallantry. Being young, religious, unmarried and unblemished by the later betrayals of mechanized warfare, he was a model martyr. Maud, doing her bit for the war effort in his memory, went to work in a military canteen on windswept Salisbury Plain. ‘Real well he died,’ a brother in arms wrote to her. Maurice’s image, painted in shining oils in his red dress uniform, is used in propaganda to this day. Pictures, cartoons and statues are still produced of Dease and Godley in action at Nimy. On entering the National Army Museum in London, the first thing you see is a model of the bridge with two little machine guns and the two heroic men winning their medals. Maurice was remembered in ideal, healing terms. His school magazine claimed that ‘to see old Father Myers limping slowly along to say Mass, leaning on the arm of Maurice Dease, was an object lesson in the respectful and thoughtful sympathy of the right-minded boy for venerable old age’.
After the war, as the past solidified and commemoration started, Maurice’s school, Stonyhurst, moved to secure his status as the first winner of the highest award for valour in the empire. An investigation by the War Office concluded that on the opening day of fighting, Dease and Godley ‘earned the VC about 9.10 a.m. whilst engaged in repelling the attack in question. In virtue of his rank, Lieutenant M. J. Dease, VC may be considered primus inter pares and it may safely be assumed that, as Battalion Machine Gun Officer, he had trained Private Godley, and formed that military character which at the opening of the first action vindicated the training received.’ It came down to class: Sidney Godley, brought up by an uncle and aunt and working from the age of fourteen at an ironmonger’s store in Kilburn, never had a chance of becoming an officer. So Dease was primus inter pares, while Godley survived; he was shot in the head and taken prisoner by the Germans, dying only in the 1950s.
Two years before Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Dulce et Decorum est’, Maurice Dease and another Irish officer were memorialized in a poem to the war dead, ‘Pro Patria Mortui’:
Hark! England calls to Erin in her pride:
‘One grief is ours, one glory – ours who weep,
Since these our sons who lie in war’s red sleep
By their brave deaths our grief have glorified.’
On Death’s dark altar, Freedom’s home to save!
Their names shall be as stars of Britain’s race,
And deathless with a love that shall endure.
This was supposed to be a compliment to the dead sons of Erin – saying they could be listed alongside men from the mother country ‘as stars of Britain’s race’. In 1915, when the London press was complaining that Irish MPs were not volunteering for service, a letter was published in the Standard pointing out that 100,000 Irishmen were in the battle line at Flanders: ‘Home Rule is on the statute book and Ireland is prepared to take her stand by the Empire in the present crisis. The first VC of the present war was awarded to an Irishman and a Nationalist, a personal friend and a schoolmate of the writer of these lines. I make reference to Maurice Dease, the gallant Irish boy of twenty summers, who defended the bridge at Mons and worked the guns when all his men had fallen.’ The letter was signed: ‘A Fairminded Irishman’.
In my family, there was always ambiguity about nationalism, my father cursing the television screen when the IRA blew up London but singing Irish songs on other days, my grandmother visiting the spot on the road to Cork where Michael Collins was assassinated. As her cousin Arthur Dease wrote from the Western Front after the 1916 Easter Rising: ‘I hear the proposal is a Colonial Govt. for Ireland like Aust. or Canada; it might work, anything to settle it.’ That was their view: anything to settle it. People often hold ideas that appear contradictory over time. A later owner of the house at Turbotston (which passed out of the Dease family with the extinguishing of the male line at Mons) displayed a picture in the hall of the local holder of the Victoria Cross beside a bronze bust of his own uncle, the IRA commander Seán Mac Eoin, presenting them as matching examples of military heroism.
After the Irish Civil War of the 1920s, Maud migrated to England and married my grandfather. His family saw no future in Ireland either. Their quasi-Palladian house, French Park in Roscommon, was sold and later demolished, and the children who had survived the First World War emigrated. Home became elsewhere. My grandparents escaped the strictures of Irishness by seeming nearly English, like so many of their generation. When my grandmother as a teenager on her first trip across the Irish Sea found herself staying at a house party in Cumberland for a dance, the English girl with whom she was sharing a room was frightened because she had been told that Irish Catholics had tails. Rudyard Kipling, whose dead son was an officer in the Irish Guards, thought soldiers from Ireland needed ‘inflexible justice’ – without it, there was a risk they ‘may be reduced to the mental state of nurse-harried children’. In Britain, even as late as my childhood, the Irish were considered Micks, drunkards, bogtrotters, pikeys, Paddies, white niggers, harps, leprechauns – comics from over the sea. A century of cartoons in the London press had portrayed them as overemotional throwbacks who had not benefited from evolution (there was reportedly scientific evidence) and should be regarded as one of the lesser breeds without the law.
My grandparents had little interest in the Protestant Anglo-Irish ascendancy; their aspiration was towards the integrated Catholic upper class of England, ideally those of recusant stock. When my aunt scored an invitation to a tea party given by the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, it remained on her mantelpiece for years after it had expired. I always felt in the family that the nineteenth century was more real than the twentieth, a time of political upheaval leading to their departure from Ireland in the wake of the First World War. Remembering my late grandmother, I see a veil, a rosary and a copy of the Peerage close at hand. The later nineteenth century was the moment when this small Catholic landowning class had flourished with the lifting of the Penal Laws. For the first time, they could get official positions and do more than follow hounds and donate their sons and daughters to the Church.
Like most émigrés, they inflated and romanticized the world they had abandoned. Decline was embraced as somehow superior; a term like ‘nouveau riche’ was an insult. They seemed happiest in the company of other Catholics. I would say Roman Catholics, except my father was told by his hea
dmaster to delete the word ‘Roman’ whenever he saw it in front of the word ‘Catholic’, since there was only one kind. For me, dressed in a banana-yellow Adidas hoodie and tight white trousers, more interested in Adam and the Ants than the Angelus, all this was far away. I did not feel at ease when we went to Ireland – it seemed like the past, a place where you could get trapped. My only recognition came with some of the faces there, which had a visceral, genetic familiarity: eyes set close, bright cheeks, a tendency to thickening around the jaw. What was left for me? Perhaps a residual feeling of a divine presence, the inescapable language of the Church and a morbid philosophical awareness of sin; being Catholic, like being Jewish, is not wholly optional. It runs on and on, like the imprint of a childhood spent in a boarding school run by the priests of the faith.
Year after year, the death of Maurice Dease was commemorated: a royal review for the holders of the decoration and their families in 1956, a return to Mons in 1964 by my father and grandmother for what they called a pilgrimage, a parade in Belgium for the seventy-fifth anniversary, a Dease memorial day in Westmeath, a remembrance march through the city of London, a dedication of a VC chapel by Queen Elizabeth II.
The flags on the city hall were snapping from saluting poles in the Grand Place, the cobbles below jagging with sunlight. The surface of the square seemed luminescent, like a grey sea on a hot day, water breaking against buildings that had been remade after their wartime destruction. A gang of elderly cyclists passed, sheathed in black-and-yellow stretched cloth. It seemed incredible that people lived here, that this was a functioning city with modern inhabitants. I had learned only that day that Mons did not rhyme with bronze, but with the French pronunciation of dance: danse, Mons – it was a soft sibilant, not a fighting fricative. And bear in mind how often the name of this city is spoken in my family; my father is not unlike the poet Edmund Blunden, whose wife said that no day passed in which he did not refer to the war. The cars of a wedding party honked as I ordered lunch. A salad arrived: chicory, paprika confetti, a quartered tomato, corrugated spirals of mayonnaise. I could have ordered cannibal salade, a speciality with horrible echoes of the Congo. It was not unusual in Belgium to encounter colonial statuettes of black ‘boys’ carrying a watering can, or leaning forward in supplication while holding out a church charity box marked ‘dank u’.
