The ghosts of the Irishmen in khaki

I came across an RTÉ archive recently, Gay Byrne no less, interviewing a 93-year-old man sitting in a television studio in Dublin, his hands still, his voice steady as a metronome. Jack Campbell. Dubliner. Last of the Old Contemptibles. He's describing with vivid recall what it felt like to bayonet a German soldier in a trench somewhere in France, 70-odd years prior.

"Kill or be killed," he trots off the simple, emotionless fact of survival.

No tremor. No poetry. Just the awful mathematics of an industrial slaughter, delivered with the honesty of an old man who survived the horror.

Two hundred thousand is a number that should haunt us. Two hundred thousand Irishmen - give or take the dead, the maimed, the mad, the misremembered - who put on British khaki and marched into the meat grinder of the Western Front, of Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia. And what did we do with their memory? We buried it twice. Once in the mud of Flanders. Once in the soil of national shame.

I've been thinking about this lately, about how a nation constructs its mythology, and who gets left out of the frame. We Irish are terribly good at remembrance, we've monuments to everything. Famine ships, rebels and poets who died young. We've a positive fetish for martyrdom, provided the martyrs died for the right cause. But the Campbells and the Burkes and the Daltons remained forgotten, they died for the wrong empire, in the wrong uniform, at the wrong moment in history. So we did what we Irish always do with inconvenient truths and looked away.

Jack Campbell enlisted at 16, lying about his age as they all did. He wanted to see the world, like his brother before him, and those tales of adventure and empire seemed impossibly romantic to a boy from the Dublin tenements. A sergeant looked him up and down, told him he'd pass for older and that was that. One signature, and he became Crown property, one of Kitchener's boys, off to see the world through the lens of a Lee-Enfield rifle.

What he saw instead was this: the winter of 1914-'15, which he describes as "sheer punishment". Rats the size of terriers, grown fat on the dead. Supply columns shelled so regularly that men went hungry for days. Corpses frozen in attitudes of surprise. The peculiar democracy of the trenches, where a titled officer and a navvy from Cork could both drown in the same shell crater, both be eaten by the same vermin.

There's something almost medieval about the whole enterprise, even with all that 20th-century technology - the gas, the shells, the mechanised slaughter - married to tactics that wouldn't have troubled Wellington. Send the men over the top and watch them fall. Send more. Repeat until November 1918.

Emmet Dalton won a Military Cross at the Somme. This is how he remembers that day: his battalion went in with 28 officers and 900 men. Twenty-four hours later, two officers remained. Ninety-eight men survived while the rest lay dead, wounded, or simply vanished into the mud. Gone. Eight hundred young Irishmen, give or take, erased in the time it takes to watch a football match.

"It would be very hard to describe the Somme," Dalton says. "I don't know that there has ever been a battle like it."

He's wrong, of course. There have been plenty of battles like it. Verdun. Passchendaele. The whole bloody war was battles like it, men hurled against wire and machine guns in what the generals called "attritional warfare" and the soldiers called suicide.

But here's what gets me. Johnny Burke from Ballinasloe fought in Mesopotamia. British forces have taken a proper hammering from the Turks. Thousands dead. And then both sides call a truce to bury their dead. This is the protocol, you understand. Even in hell, there are manners.

So Burke walks out into no-man's land, and he meets Turkish soldiers doing the same. These are the men he's been trying to kill. These are the men who've been trying to kill him. And what does he notice? Their condition. How thin they are. How ragged. How utterly, humanly miserable. Not monsters. Not the enemy. Just boys, far from home, trying not to die.

That's the thing about war, with its fanaticism and ideology, unfurled flags and anthems and speeches about civilisation versus barbarism, it's just hollow noise. In the end, these were innocent men in holes, hoping the next shell lands somewhere else.

The Irish went to war for complicated reasons. Some believed John Redmond's promise - fight for Britain, earn Home Rule. Others needed the pay. The shilling looked good when you had nothing. A few, no doubt, believed in the cause. And the Unionists in the North - the 36th Ulster Division - went to prove their loyalty to the Crown, their worthiness for inclusion in the British family.

The historical irony that would be funny if it weren't so desperately sad is that while these men were dying in their thousands at the Somme - the 36th Division suffered over 5,500 casualties on July 1st alone, with 2,000 dead before breakfast - back in Dublin, different Irishmen were staging the Easter Rising. Fighting against the very empire their countrymen were dying to serve.

And when the survivors came home? Well. That's when the real cruelty began.

The Irish War of Independence began before many of them had even finished their demobilisation, and on their return, having worn British khaki wasn't just unfashionable, it was treasonous. Men who'd valiantly survived Ypres and Passchendaele found themselves shunned in their own parishes. War memorials that had been planned were quietly shelved. The National War Memorial at Islandbridge - dedicated to the 49,400 Irish dead - became a place of quiet embarrassment rather than pride. People walked past it and looked away, changing the subject.

Campbell survived being gassed. A piece of German shell lodged in his mask nearly suffocated him. He woke up days later in a Canadian hospital, had no idea where he was before eventually making it back to an indifferent Dublin. And then... silence. Decades of silence. He lived to 97, carrying those memories like stones in his pocket.

The transcript I've been reading includes this observation from the veterans: "Irish veterans reflect on the sacrifice of their fellow countrymen who died in World War I, wondering if their memories are being honoured or forgotten."

The answer, for most of the twentieth century, was: forgotten. Deliberately, systematically, shamefully forgotten.

There's a theory in Irish historiography that the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed were so traumatic, so all-consuming, that the nascent country simply didn't have emotional bandwidth left for the Great War dead. Perhaps. But I think it's simpler than that. We couldn't look at those men because they complicated the narrative. They were Irish, but they fought for Britain. They were brave, but their bravery served the wrong cause. They died for Ireland's freedom - or at least they thought they did - but their deaths became an embarrassment to the freedom that actually emerged.

So we erased them. Wrote them out of the story. Made them ghosts.

It's only in the last 20-odd years that this has begun to change when the peace process in Northern Ireland created the stage for these conversations. If unionists and nationalists could sit together in government, perhaps they could also stand together at Islandbridge. The handshakes between Irish presidents and British royalty at war memorials weren't just diplomatic theatre but acts of excavation, digging up what we'd buried for generations.

Professor Richard Grayson notes that those who returned found commemoration "controversial in a way that it was not in Britain". Some of them even fought against the British in the War of Independence - imagine that cognitive dissonance. You've spent four years fighting Germans for King George, and now you're fighting George's army for Irish freedom.

The numbers themselves are still contested with the official memorial listing 49,400 dead, while some historians believe that number is inflated and may include non-Irish who served in Irish regiments. The more conservative estimate puts Irish deaths at around 35,000. The truth is, we don't actually know how many Irishmen died, and Irish officialdom of the era didn't care enough to count properly.

Campbell, during the interview, was asked if he felt remorse for the killing he had done, and his answer was chilling in its simplicity. He felt a loyalty to his unit and to his oath. Kill or be killed. The German was trying to kill him, so he killed the German first. That's war, and that's what it does to young Irishmen. Turns them into accountants of death.

What strikes me most, listening to these testimonies, is the absence of glory; these men didn't speak of honour or empire or civilisation but spoke of rats and mud and the particular smell of gangrene, of watching friends disappear into shell craters. They spoke of hunger and cold and the terror of going over the top, and that it was an achievement to not die.

And then to come home and be told that their survival was shameful and that their sacrifice was for the wrong side and that their dead comrades - those inconvenient 35,000, or 49,000, or however many thousand ghosts - died not for Ireland but against it.

We're better behaved now, self-absolved by the centenary commemorations and the academic conferences and the careful, balanced remembrance. We can collectively look at these men and see them for what they were: Irishmen who made stark choices in impossible circumstances, who showed extraordinary courage and endured incredible suffering, and who deserve, at the very least, to be remembered honestly.

But I wonder sometimes if remembrance is enough. Whether putting up plaques and holding ceremonies can compensate for a century of silence. Would those brave veterans, such as Campbell and Burke and Dalton, and the thousands more whose names we'll never know, recognise what we're doing as remembrance or just as another form of forgetting? The polite kind. The kind with wreaths and speeches.

We do know that 200,000 Irishmen went to war, and tens of thousands never came back. The ones who did carried wounds - visible and invisible - for the rest of their lives. And we, their countrymen, looked away for generations.

That could be the unacknowledged tragedy of the Great War, not just what it did to those men in the trenches, but what it revealed about the rest of us and how easily we can trivialise inconvenient suffering. How readily we sacrifice truth for narrative coherence and how the dead serve the living, not the other way around.

Jack Campbell died in November 1992, at the age of 97. Ireland's last Old Contemptible. When he went, the last living connection to those trenches went with him. Now there's only us. And our guilty, belated remembering.