Dirty Shirt
1914: an innocent abroad, New Englander Daniel Wyndham comes to Tralee, County Kerry, in search of the Irish heroes of legend, especially as told by Lady Gregory. However, an altercation outside a pub sets off a chain of events which sees him sign up for six months’ service in the Royal Munster Fusiliers, having to settle for dressing up the stories he loves in Wild West garb to appeal to his barrack mates.
When war is declared, an irregular ruse of two veteran officers of the Boer War who are impatient to see action gets the Munsters – the “Dirty Shirts” – transferred to France. What ensues there is effectively a deadly scrap of massive proportions fought over a thin stretch of former farming land and a ramshackle piggery.
Ware’s prose is vivid: the decent, foolish Major Fitzwilliam-Brophy and the urbane, astute “Tummy” Belcher recall fighting in hotter climes where soldiers had “skins burned the colour of red brick and their beards bleached like dead grass”. A busby is unforgettably described as “this thing on your head that looked like it needed to be fed scraps from the butcher’s to keep it happy”. An enraged English officer has a “face like one great contorted muscle”. Ware has an unerring eye for detail, telling his story not from the point of view of strategy and troop movements, but compassionately and humanely from that of the soldier right there in the trench, his feet sodden and swollen, his equipment chafing, face to face with the realisation that death is probably inevitable, whatever he does – and the reader experiences each death as the loss of a unique human being.
