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| Emily Lawless From Google Images |
There are any number of anniversaries just around the corner and 2015 makes it a hundred years since the landings at Gallipoli and also two hundred years since the Battle of Waterloo and with 1916 coming up next year, and any number of other ones I'm not familiar with, there's no shortage of things to remember. Wellington's family were from just up the road and a large part of his army was Irish, or so I have been told, and his sense of humour was certainly local while Napoleon had a fair number of them on his side and the horses were all Irish. Well maybe I exaggerate a bit. I wonder if the Turks had any on their side. Samuel Johnson remarked that, "the Irish are a fair people, they never speak well of one another" or something like that and I'd imagine it's because they manage to find themselves on both sides of any argument or in any war and it marks them perhaps or maybe. As Billy Joel sang in Goodnight Saigon "And who was wrong and who was right". Emily Lawless who was from a Unionist background and with connections to Dunsany, writing of The Wild Geese penned the following.
War-battered dogs are we
Fighters in every clime
Fillers of trench and of grave
Mockers be-mocked by time
War-dogs hungry and grey
Gnawing a naked bone
Fighters in every clime
Every cause but our own.
That's Emily look her up sometime.
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