I raised myself high over the parapet of our cliff, and shouted at him: ‘Take care of yourself,’ and I blushed at such a display of anxiety in the presence of my comrades. He was exposing himself unnecessarily and would be one of the first to be shot at. “Not quite necessary for a lance-corporal. He carried his rifle with the bayonet fixed threateningly at the high port, and presented a good picture of the young leader going into battle. Denis went ahead, abreast with this officer, too far in front of his section, I thought. John Lucy never forgot the last time he saw his brother: “My brother’s platoon suddenly got the order, unheard by me, and up went the men on to the open grassland, led by their officer. John and Denis Lucy fought at Mons, Le Cateau, and all of the B.E.F.’s other major major battles in 1914. By 1914 they were both members of the Royal Irish Rifles, and were among the first sent to France and then Belgium to resist the German invasion. Two years earlier, he and his brother had joined the British Army simply as a way to escape poverty in Cork, Ireland. John Lucy didn’t care about politics, and he certainly had little interest in what Germany was up to in Belgium. For a time, all Irishmen–on the surface, anyway–stood side by side with the British in their determination to fight imperial Germany. It probably would have slid into internal chaos that year, thanks to the Home Rule Crisis, had not the outbreak of World War I intervened. In 1914 Ireland remained under British rule, but trembled on the brink of Civil War. “Forward he Went” Royal Irish Rifles at the Battle of Cambrai, 1917. That book, There’s A Devil in the Drum by John Lucy, published in 1938, stands #1 on my list of the top ten personal accounts of World War I. Through all of them, I keep coming back to one deeply personal and gently introspective account by a poor Irish boy who served with his brother in the British Expeditionary Force of 1914. Since beginning my almost obsessive jaunt through World War I personal accounts I have read many hundreds of published and unpublished volumes of memoirs, diaries, and collected letters written by individuals from all over the world. To me, one of the most fascinating aspects of World War I is how men and women with no frame of reference for understanding modern, industrialized warfare, faced and processed the intense experiences they underwent in 1914-1918. This reflects my approach to military history, which has always been less about equipment and tactics than the human experience of warfare–inspired in part by the great British historian John Keegan’s seminal work, The Face of Battle.
My route of entry was through the war’s great memoirs, many of which I have described in this series.
I first became interested in World War I almost thirty years ago.
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