Camp life seemed to revolve completely around two things: Food – and how there was never enough of it; Time – and how there was always too much of it.
Initially, time – like last year’s snow – evaporated in the thrill of the great adventure on which they were all embarking. The new grey uniforms, the rations, the guns, bayonets and all the accoutrements of war occupied their minds and their time. Then too there was a getting-to-know one’s fellow soldiers – a motley crew of swamp diggers, shopkeepers, bakers and butchers; Germans, Poles, French, Creoles, a wayward Welshman or two … and the Irish. The latter came from the four provinces of Ireland and the fifth province – America, both north and south. Fighting for as many different reasons as there were fingers on their hands.
‘Adventure’ … ‘Money’ … ‘To “see the elephant”.’
‘For the Republic and agin’ the Nativists.’
‘To keep the niggers down south!’
‘To raise an army when this war is over and take British Canada.’
‘The New England girls is too uppity – the Dixie girls more fun.’
Or even, ‘I just “jined” up.’
In Patrick’s own group along with Oxy and himself was an O’Toole from Oranmore in County Galway, who quickly earned the sobriquet of ‘Orator’, and with good cause. For as he himself said, ‘At forty paces I could talk the hind leg off Lincoln’s jackass, without Abe himself or the poor beast ever knowing it.’
‘Recruited in Ireland – a gun put in me hand when they got me to America’ was how he ‘was jined up!’
The Orator had a view on everything: the war; its real causes; how it could be won – if they’d only listen to him. Generals who had gout had not escaped his rheumy eye and the Orator could even recount how the alligator was once native to Ireland and brought over to America by Saint Brendan from the Allihies in Kerry, hence the origins of the first part of its name.
Then there was ‘Mother of Sorrows’ from Dublin’s Liberties, ‘christened as a child by the name of Mick Liddy!’ No sentence escaped Mick Liddy’s lips but it invoked God’s Mother at some stage before it was finished.
‘If the Mother of Sorrows looked down on us now what would she think? All this killin’. I’m killed meself too – the humidity is killin’ me – not a breath. An’ as well, I’m soaked through with that drizzly mist – it’s very wettin’. An’ if I put on me oilskins the backs of me trousers gets soaked on account o’ the drops of rain. O’ course I’m not thinkin’ straight – I should’ve stayed in the tent … but on a day like this with the smell o’ the wet on the canvas and them Germans steamin’ beside me, I’m scuppered altogether on account of the air an’ I won’t sit down in a tent neither, on account of I get agoraphobia an’ I have to get outside again, in the air. It’s a terrible thing – that agoraphobia.’
The Germans – Himmel and Gimmel – brothers fresh off the boat from ‘Lutherland’ as Mother of Sorrows called it, hadn’t two words of English to rub together. Fine buxom lads they were, ‘corn-fed like Virginia chickens, with heads like batterin’ rams on them,’ the Orator said.
‘Great men to have at the gates of Washington!’