“Hold Steady, remain calm, men” the officer shouted, as the bull broke into a gallop towards them. It was no use. They bolted in all directions, leaving the officer standing.
Some of them lost their Glengarry caps, others dropped or threw away their timber guns, some stumbled in the long grass. Others, the fastest on their feet, had reached either the next field through the gate, or dashed back over the stile into the previous one.
The officer stood alone, howling to the men who had run the wrong way: “Get back here, all of you, you are making a bloody shambles of the whole exercise”.
One man got slightly gored by the bull but managed to make his escape over the stile.
With the field empty apart from the man giving orders, the raging and by now very frustrated bull turned around from the stile he was facing and fixed his malevolent gaze on the officer.
The officer began inching his way to the gate behind him, quickening his pace as the bull quickened his. The men in the fields on either side were cheering him: “Get out of it, Sir, he’ll kill you, run, run!”
With a stiff upper lip, the officer accelerated his backward pace, still striving to maintain his dignity.
Then the bull began thundering towards him. It was gaining fast. The men roared in a chorus of frantic alarm: “Sir, run for God’s sake, leave the field, or you’re finished!”
Some men covered their eyes. They couldn’t bear to look. They believed their commander’s self-consciousness and devotion to standing firm for Ireland was about to prove his undoing. “Jaysus, he’s a gonner!” someone moaned.
With disaster imminent, the officer howled “cripes!” turned his back to the bull, and ran the remaining few yards to the gate. The men cheered as they would for a marathon athlete. He could face death or terrible injury within seconds.
With the bull almost close enough to touch him, and the smell of its steaming breath wafting up his nose, the officer bounded over the gate with a superhuman burst of energy.
The men were astounded. They applauded him, but he casually dismissed their commendations. Straightening, gasping for breath, removing his cap, and settling his hair back in place, he rasped: “That, gentlemen, was a lesson in military logic and common sense. You hold out for as long as you can and then, if there is absolutely no alternative, you may opt for a tactical retreat. Any wounded?”
The man who was slightly gored put his hand up, his other hand grasping the injury to his thigh. But instead of looking for sympathy, he smiled at the officer and broke into singing: “For he’s a jolly good fellow”. Everyone joined in, and the officer blushed.
He thanked them; adding on a more serious note that valuable time had been lost as a result of their encounter with the bull. When the lads re-assembled, they trekked on through the fields, keeping an eye out for both enemy troops and mad bulls.
To shorten the distance to Kilkenny, they opted to cross the Ballyline/Ballymack road near Desert. A volunteer who best knew the terrain, and was an expert poacher, scouted ahead to ensure that no enemy troops were in the locality, or if they were, to ascertain their exact whereabouts so that the men could get past them unseen.
He reported back that the road was safe to cross as far as he could determine. Their relief at this news was short-lived. Rain started pelting down, forcing them to seek temporary shelter under a pair of chestnut trees in a nearby field off the roadside.
Ten minutes passed, the rain cleared, and a glowing rainbow appeared in the sky over Kilkenny, still about seven miles off. On they struggled. Reaching a place called Grove, they again had to risk crossing the road.
As they darted one by one to the opposite side to enter yet more fields, they expected at any moment to hear the cracking of army rifles, firing those blank shots that would have signalled defeat for them. But they all scampered noiselessly across. No shots sounded.
The officer carefully scanned the fields facing them with binoculars as the men lined up along the ditch. “Right men, there doesn’t appear to be any bulls or enemy forces ahead. Into those fields!”
Skirting the ditches, they approached a fêted landmark on the road to Kilkenny, the famous Lime Tree where courting couples had met for centuries. Here the men spotted their first enemy troops.
“Take cover men!” the officer rasped, squinting with binoculars through a gap in a blackberry bush. Seamus, squatting beside him, asked if he could have a look.
The young recruit balked as he focused on the warlike scene. He could see about fifteen soldiers in full uniform, armed with the best rifles and wearing German helmets. They were cooking something on a stove, laughing loudly.
Some of them were eating pancakes and drinking from big mugs. One soldier was scrawling his initials on the Lime Tree with a knife, to the apparent amusement of his mates.
Seamus quickly returned the binoculars to his commander. At a signal from the officer, the LSF men deftly threw themselves to the ground, clasping their mock guns. They crawled in time-honoured military fashion back through a field of yellow weeds, fresh heaps of cow dung, and nettles until they felt sufficiently far enough away, and out of sight of the enemy, to find a way of getting around the troops unseen…
(to be continued )
(Extract from Are We Invaded Yet? by John Fitzgerald )
