Ballydonoghue Parish Magazine, 28th Edition
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning We will remember them ..."
The poem above by Laurence Binyon was dedicated to all who fell in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign during World War I. The sentiment of remembrance was not true, however, for the thousands of Irish soldiers who fell during 1914-1918, fighting under the British and allied flags. For them, the famous song 'The Band Played Waltzing Matilda', written by Eric Bogle, was more apt.
"And the old men moved slowly, all bent stiff and sore,
The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war.
And the young people ask what are they marching for,
And I ask myself the same question ..."
Over half a million Irish were involved in the "European War", as it was known in the early years, 200,000 of these being from Ireland itself, and a further 300,000 being Irish emigrants or of Irish descent. An Irishman fired the first British shot of the war, and an Irishman won the first Victoria Cross.
And among the eight and a half million dead of World War I were at least seven soldiers from the parish of Ballydonoghue. The times that they lived and fought in, as well as previous and subsequent traditions, destined these men to be hostages to fortune. Their lives would be consigned to the dark and unremembered corners of history and folklore. Now the Ballydonoghue Magazine begins to tell the stories of these men, some of whom have relations still in the parish, in the lead-up to the 100th anniversary of World War I in 1914.
One of the emigrant soldiers who lost his life hailed from the east of the parish, in Kilgarvan. James Carr was born on November 3rd, 1877, son of James Carr and Ellen, nee Barrett. The sponsor at his baptism was Hanora O'Sullivan and the priest who officiated was Rev T Lawlor. James Carr senior had died by 1901 and the mother Ellen was 65 in that year, while Thomas (30) and James (22) were still in the house.
On February 6th, 1902, Thomas Carr married Mary Walsh of Tullamore, daughter of Edward Walsh, and the witnesses were William E Walsh and Patrick Quill. The ceremony was performed by Rev T Molyneaux.
Little is known about James's youth in Kilgarven. No doubt he skipped over April fields with wings on his feet, helped his brother Thomas on the farm, raided orchards in the vicinity, and was full of harmless devilment as young people should be. As he grew up, folklore declares that James Carr was handy with his hands and constructed a number of buildings in the Kilgarvan area. It seems that he decided to emigrate to New Zealand sometime around 1910, not surprisingly as over 23,000 emigrated from Kerry between 1901 and 1911. The majority of farms in the county were still less than 20 acres and employment was scarce. Adverts for opportunities in Australia and New Zealand were plentiful in the fourteen local newspapers that could be read in the county in those years. An emigrant could take the 10.15 am train from Tralee to Cork and arrive at 2 pm. From Cork, one could catch the 2.30 pm ferry to Southampton that sailed every Saturday, and from Southampton anywhere in the world, including New Zealand, could be reached.
James enlisted in the New Zealand army, in the Ottago Infantry Battalion in the Military district of Wellington in the northern island. His enlistment address was Morton, and he was single on enlistment. He gave his next-of-kin as his brother Thomas Carr, as his mother had passes away by this time. His skills as a carpenter and builder would have been highly valued by the army, as machinery was scarce and clouds of the coming war drifted over Europe and the other side of the world.
And war did break out. On June 28th, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was shot dead in the streets of Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. This indirectly led to the outbreak of World War I, on August 4th, 1914. Recruitment was the word all over Ireland, and New Zealand.
On October 16th, 1914, Private James Carr boarded the ship, the Ruapehu (Hawkes Bay) at Port Chalmers, New Zealand, destined for Alexandria in Egypt. The ship picked up Australian troops in Albany, Western Australia, on its way. James was part of the main body of the New Zealand army that would join with the Australian forces to become The ANZAC forces (The Australian-New Zealand Army Corps). This army was the subject of the Eric Bogle song mentioned above, and the song is dedicated to the futility of the war in Gallipoli, just like the other song he wrote, "The Green Fields of France". This ANZAC force would fight with the mother country and its allies. Private Carr's platoon would land in Suez and then would proceed to Turkey, to the Dardanelles and Gallipoli.
Turkey was an ally of the Germans and the area around Gallipoli was the gateway to Russia, whose forces were fighting on the British side. Russia needed supplies through the Gallipoli region of the Bosphorus. If the allies got control of this region, they would be able to surround Germany on all sides. The emerging Winston Churchill saw that the war was at a stalemate in the western front and promoted the new front of Gallipoli. Amazingly the minister of state for war was Horatio Kitchener, who was born not two miles away from James Carr, in Gunsboro, on June 24th, 1850. Kitchener was secretary-of-state for the war and was the face of the war in the famous recruitment poster which stated "Your country needs you". (Another Lisselton soldier, Mick Cullins (Collins) had served under Kitchener in the Boer War in South Africa from 1900 to 1902.)
James Carr would have heard the chat among his comrades on the ship bound for Suez about Kitchener and probably told them that he knew where Kitchener had been born and had been brought up for a short while. (How bizarre it was that Kitchener at this time had been partly responsible for his former neighbor (and thousands of others) being on Turkish shores, and would ultimately suffer the consequences for mishandling that particular campaign.) James was approaching his late thirties, so many of his comrades would have been much younger than he, some only 16, as documentation was scarce and the theatre of war was attractive to teens. Many youths who sought enlistment told the truth that they were fifteen or sixteen, and the recruiting sergeant would tell them to take a walk around the barracks and to be nineteen when they returned! Most of the ANZAC forces were inexperienced and untried, and news of the early casualties was kept from the raw recruits. They were originally destined for France, but the plan for a new front changed their destination, but probably not their fate. Little did they know that they were entering a hell, where half of them would die in atrocious conditions. The region was a place of rock, heat, dust and scrub. The place-names Seddel-Bahr, V-beach, Suvla Bay and Hill 60 would be scenes of slaughter that would dispel any romantic illusion of war that the young soldiers had been brought up on.On February 19th, 1915, the attach on the Dardanelles began from the west, and began badly. In one battle, over 3,000 British soldiers were casualties at the hands of the Turkish forces who were fighting on their home ground. The ANZAC forces, including James Carr, landed in Gallipoli on April 25th, 1915, and from the start suffered setbacks. Their ship landed at night in complete darkness, and in the wrong place. Instead of a flat shore, they were faced with high cliffs and rugged terrain. They were fired on immediately by the Turks while they were still on the shore, and men began falling all around, before they were able to advance to cover.
An Australian submarine, being used for the first time in war, landed in the same region and was commanded by an Irishman, Lieut-Commander Henry Stoker.
The engagement in April in which James Carr and his New Zealand comrades were involved became known as the first Battle of Krithia, and it was a disaster for ANZAC.
There were 10,000 New Zealand casualties (dead or wounded) in the first days of the attack while the Australians had 21,000 casualties.
Many other Irishmen were involved, and a number from Kerry were fighting with the Royal Munster Fusiliers. Within a short time, the waters ran red with the blood of many nations, including Irishmen. Gallipoli became a mess of trenches, machine-gun emplacements and barbed wire defences. There were rats on the western front, but Private James Carr and his comrades experienced swarms of flies which thrived in the searing heat, aggressively crawling into mouths, noses, ears and eyes as well as savaging tinned food as soon as it was opened. The flies also feasted on the body-parts that dotted the battlefields. When the soldiers went bathing, they found that the waters were infested by marine creatures which stung venomously and left festering sores on their feet. Dysentery, caused by the lack of proper latrines was widespread, lack of water caused a raging thirst and the gunfire lit bushfires whose smoke blinded the eyes. The staple diet of soldiers was "bully beef", a tinned meat which was tasteless, and was eaten with dry biscuits. When the roasting Turkish sun hit the tins, the bully beef turned to a fatty mush. Soldiers were weighted down while on the march with kit that weighed half their bodyweight, and trench warfare made living a torture. Stretcher-bearers had to dodge bullets and shrapnel to ferry the wounded non-stop to the understaffed medical "centres" where infections thrived. Men saw sights that would haunt them for life, if they were lucky enough to survive.
May 13th, Fatal Day
From May 6th to June 4th, 1915, there were two more battles at Krithia. Private James Carr moved with the ANZAC forces under General Godley to attack the Turkish troops on May 6th and this second Battle of Krithia lasted a number of days. May 8th was a particularly black day of death for the New Zealand infantry as the memorial at Twelve Tree Copse shows. Over one thousand men were lost that day. They had to retreat again. It is very likely that the Kilgarvan man fought in this battle, and his force gained a valuable quarter of a mile. Shortly afterwards, however, on May 13th, there was skirmishing. James Carr never returned. His body was never found. His body lay among his fallen comrades who were blown to pieces by shell and mortar and Howitzer. The remains of the man who had played in the fields of Kilgarvan with his parents, James and Ellen, lies forever on Turkish soil. His official record gives the date of his death as May 13th, 1915, and under "cause of death", the record says "killed in action".
On May 24th, after a temporary ceasefire, the bodies that could be recovered from no man's land were buried, before fighting started again, but without James Carr.
"But the band played Waltzing Matilda
As we stopped to bury our slain,
We buried ours and the Turks buried theirs,
Then we started all over again ..."
The Gallipoli campaign lasted from February 1915 till January 1916. In all, New Zealand forces lost 2,701 soldiers in the Gallipoli campaign, one of them being James Carr, while Australia lost 8.709 and Britain lost 21,255. Turkey lost 86,000. There were approximately 4,000 soldiers who had enlisted on the island of Ireland killed. At least one other Ballydonoghue man, Patrick Kelly from Tullamore, whose story will be told in the next edition, was killed also. Other places in Kerry were well represented on the dead list from those Turkish shores: from Listowel, Thomas Boyle, John Brouder, and William Byrnes were among the dead, while Tralee and South Kerry had many men from the Royal Munster Fusiliers who were lost. The numbers wounded was usually at least twice the amount killed.
Later in the campaign, the allied soldiers gained a respect for the brave Turkish fighters, realising they were not the monsters that the officers had called them, but ordinary family men like themselves forced by circumstances to become killing machines. Indeed the enemy became known as "Johnny Turk" among the Irish battalions, where northern Protestants fought alongside southern Catholics, and poor man fought beside landed gentry.
The campaign was not without its humorous side. Many slang words that entered Australian and New Zealand English were born in the trenches of Gallipoli. "An ANZAC button" was a nail used to hold up trousers. "ANZAC stew" was the poor sustenance made from a single ring of bacon thrown into a bucket of boiling water. "To chat" meant to remove lice (which were numerous) from one's clothing. "A curio" was a souvenir taken from a dead enemy soldier, while "swinging the banjo" meant swinging a shovel. A "digger" meant an ANZAC soldier (digging trenches), while "the Gallipoli gallop" and "the Turkey trot" was another term for diarrhoea. James Carr no doubt heard the expression "ANZAC soup", meaning the water that came from a shell-hole which was polluted by a corpse.
(For Herbert Horatio Kitchener, the Gallipoli campaign was a disaster, and he was recalled back to England. He was to die on a mission to Russia on June 5th, 1916, after his ship, HMS Hampshire, hit a German mine off the Orkney Islands.
Back in Ireland, the Easter Rising of 1916 was beginning to change the climate of opinion, and the "terrible beauty" that was being born in the national consciousness would consign the deeds of World War I soldiers to the mists of memory. Whether Irishmen fought for the rights of small nations, the adventure of war or simply for employment, didn't matter anymore. The weight of nationalist opinion meant that there would be no glory on their return. If they had fallen, they were simply forgotten.
This year, 2012, Sunday July 8th, was named as the memorial day for all those Irish soldiers who died in all the wars. It has been a major step for Irish society to reach this point.
In Australia and New Zealand, April 25th had been named ANZAC day since 1916 to commemorate the landings in Gallipoli on April 25th, 1915.
Death Notice
And so, sometime later, a registered package arrived at the Carr home in Kilgarvan. It contained two items. One was a letter from Westminster Chambers in London, signed by the High Commissioner for New Zealand, dated 14th June 1915, which stated: "It is with much regret that I learn of the death of your brother, Private James Carr, who was killed in action, and I desire to express my sincere sympathy on your bereavement. It must be some consolation for you to know that your brother died in the brave performance of the highest duty to his country." The letter was headed by the following message: "The King commands me to assure you of the true sympathy of His Majesty and The Queen in your sorrow," and signed "Kitchener". Attached to the letter was a list of those who fell beside James Carr at the Twelve Tree Copse and Hill 60 sites in Gallipoli, headed with the message "The names of those soldiers of the New Zealand expeditionary force who fell in the second battle of Krithia and Hill 60 and have no known graves". The second item was a memorial medal. Made of bronze, about the size of a saucer, and often known as "The Death Penny", the medal bore the name of James Carr.
Liam reckons that there was no military tradition in the Carr family and that James was the only one to enlist. He doesn't think of his grand-uncle too often as it all happened a long time ago but he does know that he is buried in a mass grave in Gallipoli. His own opinion of the war is "that was the way the world was at the time, fighting and wars, but that is all over now." Liam does feel proud of his granduncle, and states that it is a great honour for the family that James Carr made the ultimate sacrifice with half a million other Irish troops.
Another member of the Carr family resided in the Fatima home in Tralee. Sister Clement (Mona) Carr was a niece of the lost soldier and was a very energetic 95 years of age when I talked to her a few weeks before she passed away last August. She was born two years after James was killed in action and had spent her life as a Presentation nun, having been principal of St Joseph's School in Castleisland from 1971 to 1982. She remembered hearing about James Carr the soldier at home but the details were not revealed to her. Her parents were James and Margaret Carr. [Incorrect. Sr Clement's brother and sister-in-law were James and Mae Carr. Her parents were Thomas and Mary (Walsh) Carr.]At Peace
Today, graveyards and memorials dot the landscape of Gallipoli. On one of the monuments, that of the Twelve Tree Copse (New Zealand) Memorial is inscribed the name of James Carr, because he has no known grave. The monument is situated in the Helles area, about one kilometre south of Krithia, where the battles took place. The names of 178 other soldiers from New Zealand, whose bodies were never found, are inscribed on that memorial. Turkish farmers who now work these quiet fields regularly come across bones of soldiers killed beside James Carr.
One of the monuments bears the words of the Turkish war-leader Kemal, who became the republic of Turkey's first president afterwards: "To those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives here, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in peace. Having lost their lives in this land, they have become our sons as well ..."
He was speaking to Ellen Carr, mother of James, when he spoke those words, as well as to the tens of thousands of other parents who lost their sons in a fruitless campaign in a war that would not, as believed at the time, end all wars.
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