It’s a sunny October day in 2014 as I type these words.
November isn’t long away and this year, 2014, rings with all the sad echoes and memories of a World War I have never fully understood.
Not why men fight (for it is generally men), but how such a thing occurred at all?
I know who was there and what went on. I realize the pressures of honour and patriotism and religion, applied to any individual by the collective conscience. I’m aware too, of how this experience, and that of the Second World War, somehow galvanized the alloy of Ulster culture into the tortured twisted mono-sword of an imagined Protestant Ulster, with one paranoid eye looking at the rest of itself (the island of Ireland) as a foreign body. (Imagine Balor meets Orion, on a bad day)
I’m aware of all this but it still doesn’t add up. Like a bad set of accounts.
I’m still waiting to see or hear any documentary that investigates the profits and losses of the munitions factories in Britain, Germany, Europe and America. Who made what? Whose life was affected financially, by the sales of stocks and shares in all these companiesduring these conflicts?
From the boots, the uniforms, the food, paper for letters, the purchase of metal, harmonicas, the digging of coal, the making of steel, the canvas for planes, the rubber for tyres, the filaments of bulbs, glass, medicine, tobacco, rifles, nails, wood, stone and finally flowers. None of these things were exchanged for free. Who can account for this? Where are the figures and what story do they tell about the home front in any of these countries?
“Tom Foolery” follows one man’s journey as an estate worker in Co. Armagh, to the narrow streets of Belfast. He thinks that working in a factory and moving to “the big smoke” will be a step up for him and his family.
The year is 1914 . . . He has been living in Belfast for three years.
Tom Foolery.
By Randall Stephen Hall © (Just click the link for the audio file.)
https://soundcloud.com/randall-stephen-hall/tom-foolery-7-6-12
I am a Peep O’ Day Boy
A White Boy and a Fool.
Full of fears and fathoms
I’m drowning in your rules.
Caught up in the mincer
The chancer’s big estate.
Mangled by the memories
That stand to guard his gate.
I’m leaving for the city.
My children need a start.
The narrow streets they beckon.
From the narrow ground we bark.
The master’s dogs are chained up
So I’m off to take a bite.
Go work up in the factory.
Replace my days for night.
Chorus.
Tom Foolery, Tom Foolery.
Lord Tom, my master still.
He’s opened up a factory
He has to pay his bills.
We stand in line and march around
Beating his big drum.
But nothing ever changes
For he’s still number one.
They’re sending a big squad of us
Off to the Great War.
Lord Tom he makes munitions
And they leave here from his door.
Barbed wire and rubber tyres
A bayonet or two.
He’d like to make some uniforms
To help us all help you.
Chorus.
It was a big adventure.
So glorious and proud.
Lord Tom is pleased to see us.
He said to call around.
He’d like to give us work now
But he needs some men with legs.
So I sit outside the factory
Play music, sing and beg.
Chorus.
End.
Excellent RSH …What price war indeed? It one of life’s mysteries how the working man and the poor is so easily manipulated into taking part….
You wish to find an economic accounting, that is to say, a detailed cost benefit analysis on the value of defeating the Nazi Party. Equating the two wars may not have been your intent, hopefully no as you can comprehend.
I don`t think there was a NAZI party in 1914. The first world war was a stupid, pointless disgrace, thousands of Irishmen, Nationalist and Unionist gave their lives for nothing. They should have let the English King and the German Kaizer wrestle each other and the winner gets the spoils, it was a family feud that no decent person should have gone near it.
Thanks “Another Jude”, Virginia and Paddy Kool. It’s 2014. We can look back at the First World War now with perspective and sense. Many people died needlessly but many people made money out of it too. A lot of money. You never hear of them. You never see their balance sheets, hear their family names or what their story was, as you would, the makers of the Titanic.
Our perspective should also extend to the out of date politics and ideals of the nationalists and unionists from that time. Their ideas are flagging like old tyres, lost for lack of air.
Still up for the blood sacrifice?
Kind regards.
Stephen Stiofán