Gaeilgeoirí an Chogaidh Mhóir

# It's a long way to Tipperary

# It's a long way to go... #

People were devastated when war broke out in Belgium.

We were a neutral country, like Ireland,

did not expect to get involved in all of this,

and within weeks, thousands of innocent civilians

had lost their lives, murdered by the German army.

People were shocked, to say the least.

Towns were destroyed, houses were destroyed.

Thousands of innocent people had to leave their homes.

No stretch of the imagination can give an adequate idea

of the disfiguring havoc that modern warfare entails.

The whole country along the line of fire, either side of the trenches,

is a veritable desert.

The pen picture of the writer will likely mislead,

and the stony image of the camera,

though more faithful to the reality,

is too small and even too calm and dead

to exhibit the speaking wounds of a butchered country.

Shell holes of fabulous sizes confront one on all sides.

In many cases, these are 12 or 15 feet deep.

Alas, broken and bleeding France.

Over no-man's-land seems to hang the veil that divides time from eternity,

like waves beating one after the other

against the rock-bound coast of Donegal.

Wave after wave of human beings rush against a stubborn foe.

The push is like the rising, swelling tide into the enemy lines.

Often the waves are dashed aside

and seem to fall like breakers on a sandy beach.

It is the life's blood of strong, energetic manhood

mingling with the white, chalky clay of the trenches.

Who can go over there, so dangerously near the veil,

and not prepare his soul?

He was badly injured - he was gassed, along with being shot.

So he laid there for a while before...

He must have been there for a couple of days,

or I don't know how long he was there,

and they found him.

The telephone lines were left opened night and day during the war

for messages coming. The telegrams, when they would come,

that they were dead.

On the one hand, we were in our right, defending ourselves,

and we're very grateful for all the other Allied countries

to come to our help, really, including Ireland.

But on the other hand, how can you justify this...mass murder, really?

The Great War of Civilisation, which was written on the back

of the medals, is a very hard fact to believe in these days -

killing thousands and thousands - millions of people.

Can you call that civilisation, really?

So in the long run, especially these days,

there's quite a different view towards the war

in these parts of the world.

Belgium knows what war is like.

We're still a very neutral country. We've seen enough war, we say.

His friends all fell and he said

that he thought it was good for them

because they were dead, and he said that it was good for them, he said,

because it was over for them.

You know, he loved every spare moment

that he could get to come to Fanad.

And the time was available because teaching in St Eunan's,

being president at St Eunan's,

he could arrange to spend his summers in Fanad.

He just loved being there - you can imagine the peace

that was in the place - having witnessed so much in the war.

I remember when I was a very small boy, going to the shore.

Now, the shore is only about half a mile from the house in Fanad.

I used to toddle after him, collecting shells and that,

while he was reading his breviary.

And I remember him as a very kind, gentle man, and that was the opinion

of the neighbourhood in general, that he was a very easy-going man.

The brass clock that Father Mac Giolla Cheara gave my mother -

his niece - was a present from the men he looked after,

well, some of the men who were left, who he looked after.

And I think it was tradition at the time that they usually give a gift

to their clergyman or priest,

who would have helped them in their hour of need.

And the story going on the clock was that, being a brass clock,

it had been made from a shell, an unused shell.

So it was treasured by my mother,

who kept it to the end, and she passed it on to me.