The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #152785 Message #3579044
Posted By: Jim Carroll
25-Nov-13 - 01:13 PM
Thread Name: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
Subject: RE: BS: Armistice Day (debate)
Im the absence of a reply, these are extracts from the sleeve blurb, introduction and an autobiographical account of his taking part in and being wounded at The Battle of Loos in 1915, by the great Irish poet and writer
More lies, no doubt
Jim Carroll
THE GREAT PUSH
Written from the trenches of Flanders, this book is MacGill's great war classic, and rivals in stature his well-known and brilliant socialist novel, CHILDREN OF THE DEAD END. Hailed as a minor masterpiece of war writing when it was first published in 1916, THE GREAT PUSH is a ferocious and passionate tour-de-force rivalling in its power the greatest of all war literature. Nowhere has everyman ever found a more compelling voice to describe his experience of war — the fear, the total destructiveness, the humour, and the profound existential sense of life lived bloodily on the edge of death in one of the most terrifying wars ever to have been waged.
THE GREAT PUSH is the sequel to THE RED HORIZON and ends with MacGill being wounded and returned to England, marking his permanent exit from the war. The book will not only interest war historians but all those who wish to understand human behaviour and endeavour in one of the most extreme situations ever known to man.
THE justice of the cause which endeavours to achieve its object by the murdering and maiming of mankind is apt to be doubted by a man who has come through a bayonet charge. The dead lying on the fields seem to ask, " Why has this been done to us ? Why have you done it, brothers ? What purpose has it served ? " The battle- line is a secret world, a world of curses. The guilty secrecy of war is shrouded in lies, and shielded by bloodstained swords; to know it you must be one of those who wage it, a party to dark and mysterious orgies of carnage. War is the purge of repleted kingdoms, needing a close place for its operations.
I have tried in this book to give, as far as I am allowed, an account of an attack in which I took part. Practically the whole book was written in the scene of action, and the chapter dealing with our night at Les Brebis, prior to the Big Push, was written in the trench between midnight and dawn of September the 25th; the concluding chapter in the hospital at Versailles two days after I had been wounded at Loos.
PATRICK MACGILL.
..............
there. . . . The line of wounded stretches from Lens to Victoria Station on this side, and from Lens to Berlin on the other side. . . . How many thousand dead are there in the fields round there ? . . . There will be many more, for the battle of Loos is still proceeding. . . . Who is going to benefit by the carnage, save the rats which feed now as they have never fed before ? . . . What has brought about this turmoil, this tragedy that cuts the heart of friend and foe alike ? . . . Why have millions of men come here from all corners of Europe to hack and slay one
another ? What mysterious impulse guided them to this maiming, murdering, gouging, gassing, and filled them with such hatred ? Why do we use the years of peace in preparation for war ? Why do men well over the military age hate the Germans more than the younger and more sober souls in the trenches ? Who has profited by this carnage ? Who will profit ? Why have some men joined in the war for freedom ? "
Suddenly I was overcome with a fit of laughter, and old Mac woke up.
" What the devil are you kicking up such a row for ? " he grumbled.
,f Do you remember B , the fellow
whose wound you dressed one night a week ago ? Bald as a trout, double chin and a shrapnel wound in his leg. He belonged to
the Regiment."
" I remember him," said Mac.
" I knew him in civil life," I said. " He
kept a house of some repute in . The
sons of the rich came there secretly at night; the poor couldn't afford to. Do you believe
that B joined the Army in order to
redress the wrongs of violated Belgium ? " Mac sat up on the floor, his Balaclava helmet pulled down over his ears, and winked at me.
" Ye're drunk, ye bounder, ye're drunk," he said. " Just like all the rest, mon. We'll have no teetotallers after the war."
……………pitiful lying there, His face close to the wires, a thousand bullets in his head. Unable to resist the impulse I endeavoured to turn His face upward, but was unable ; a barb had pierced His eye and stuck there, rusting in the socket from which sight was gone. I turned and ran away from the thing into the bay of the trench. The glory of the dawn had vanished, my soul no longer swooned in the ecstasy of it; the Pleiades had risen, sick of that which they decorated, the glorious disarray of jewelled dew-drops was no more, that which endured the full light of day was the naked and torturing contraption of war. Was not the dawn buoyant, like the dawn of patriotism ? Were not the dew-decked wires war seen from far off ? Was not He in wreath of Pleiades glorious death in action ? But a ray of light more, and what is He and all with Him but the monstrous futility of war. . . „ Mac tugged at my shoulder and I awoke.
" Has the shelling begun ? " I asked.
" It's over, mon," he said. " It's four o'clock now. You'll be goin' awa' from here in a minute or twa."
" And these wounded ? " I asked, looking round. Groaning and swearing they lay on their stretchers and in bloodstained blankets, their ghastly eyes fixed upon the roof. They had not been in when I fell asleep.