An Old Armageddon Revisited

'But perhaps Armageddon lay not so far away as Ireland.

  The beds of the young men of England were empty, they had comer out to the war. And the goosedown covers, the plain starched sheets, the feather pillows of a thousand Ulster farm-houses had no new young men now to dream in them. The cities and towns of the Irish North had no new young men sent their vivid sons. The old lousy warrens of Dublin. Of course, the two sets of sons liked to trade insults with each other as they passed by chance along the road, or fetched up in billets near each other. The Ulstermen thought the southern boys were all suspect, Home Rulers and worse and suggested as much in forceful phrases. At any rate, great armies were massing everywhere, great divisions, so that the single man was only one flickering light in wide sky of millions. There must be movement at the front, all were agreed. The French boys were drowning in the caverns of Verdun, drowning in their own blood. Millions must push back millions. The Kaiser sent his myriad boys, the King of England his. great troops of women followed, to bandage bolster, and bury. And all of England, and all the old empires, British, Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, the empires of halfpenny lives and the hungry, sad kings and commoners, all party to the same haze, strained for news, and the mountains stood away, and a thousand widows wore their black ribbons in Ireland on their arms, and were treated kindly in the main, with whispered sympathy and whatever was left of wise words. Because the box of wise words was emptying.'

An excerpt from 'A Long Long Way', a 2005 novel about Ireland and WW1 by distinguished author and playwright Sebastian Barry.