England's Janissary Read online

  England’s Janissary

  PETER COTTRELL

  For my mother, Pamela Dorothy Cottrell (nee Mockett)

  6 March 1932 – 15 October 2009

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE: Saturday, 9 September 1916, Ginchy, the Somme

  CHAPTER 1: Tuesday, 6 January 1920, Drumlish, County Longford, Ireland

  CHAPTER 2: Tuesday, 6 January 1920, Drumlish, County Longford, Ireland

  CHAPTER 3: Greville Arms Hotel, Granard, County Longford, Ireland

  CHAPTER 4: Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 5: The Muldoon farm near Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 6: The Muldoon farm near Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 7: The Muldoon farm near Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 8: Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 9: Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 10: Cairn Hill, Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 11: Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 12: Balinalee, County Longford

  CHAPTER 13: Roath, Cardiff, South Wales

  CHAPTER 14: Moore’s General Store, St Mary’s Street, Drumlish

  CHAPTER 15: The Courthouse Inn, Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 16: Friday, 27 August 1920, Gaigue Cross, County Longford

  CHAPTER 17: M Company HQ, RIC Auxiliary Division, Longford

  CHAPTER 18: Newtonforbes railway station, County Longford

  CHAPTER 19: Greville Arms Hotel, Granard, County Longford

  CHAPTER 20: Longford Town

  CHAPTER 21: Parnell Square, Dublin

  CHAPTER 22: M Company HQ, Auxiliary Division RIC, Longford

  CHAPTER 23: Sunday, 31 October 1920, Greville Arms Hotel, Granard, County Longford

  CHAPTER 24: Monday, 1 November 1920, an abandoned croft, County Longford

  CHAPTER 25: Monday, 1 November 1920, Drumlish RIC Barracks

  CHAPTER 26: Monday, 1 November 1920, Kilshrewley, County Longford

  CHAPTER 27: Monday, 1 November 1920, An abandoned croft, County Longford

  CHAPTER 28: Tuesday, 2 November 1920, Granard, County Longford

  CHAPTER 29: Kingstown, County Dublin

  CHAPTER 30: Wednesday, 3 November 1920, Kilshrewley near Ballinalee, County Longford

  CHAPTER 31: Wednesday, 3 November 1920, outside Ballinalee, County Longford

  CHAPTER 32: M Company HQ, Auxiliary Division RIC, Longford

  CHAPTER 33: Drumlish, County Longford

  CHAPTER 34: Gaigue, County Longford

  CHAPTER 35: Dublin

  CHAPTER 36: Dublin Castle

  CHAPTER 37: RIC HQ, Phoenix Park, Dublin

  CHAPTER 38: Saturday, 20 November 1920, Kingstown, County Dublin

  CHAPTER 39: Sunday, 21 November 1920, Phoenix Park, Dublin

  CHAPTER 40: Sunday, 21 November 1920, Kingstown, County Dublin

  CHAPTER 41: Sunday, 21 November 1920, Kingstown, County Dublin

  CHAPTER 42: Sunday, 21 November 1920, Dublin Castle

  EPILOGUE: Monday, 5 December 1921, Cadogan Gardens, Kensington, London

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Saturday, 9 September 1916, Ginchy, the Somme

  KEVIN FLYNN WAS not a religious man, however, from the scant shelter of the shell-crater it felt like a titanic petulant toddler was randomly pounding the ground with an invisible hammer and all he could do was crush himself further into the chalky soil and pray to the long-forgotten deity of his childhood.

  He fumbled for the words of prayers buried deep in the darkest, neglected recesses of his mind and between explosions he could hear the man huddled next to him muttering desperately: ‘Hail Mary, full of Grace … Jesus! … blessed art thou …’ Elsewhere he could make out less noble sentiments whilst another man moaned, clutching his shattered face as blood oozed slowly through grimy fingers. Others just stared ashen-faced at him, waiting for him to tell them what to do.

  When the German defensive bombardment had begun he could count the heartbeats between the guns firing and the shells striking the ground. Now the barrage was in full swing and sounded more like a deranged drum roll shredding the Irish Division’s attack. Above him, over the lip of the crater, a German machine gun groped across no man’s land, scything the legs from under anyone foolish or unlucky enough to cross its path.

  Everything was noise and Flynn drowned in it; blood pounded in his ears and echoed around his head whilst every fibre of his body throbbed. The ground groaned under each impact and despite being drenched in sweat he felt as if even the moisture in his body was withdrawing deep within him to escape the chaos all around him. Even the urge to urinate had long gone – or at least he could no longer remember whether he had surrendered to it or not. His tongue felt as if it had grown to twice its size and stuck to the roof of his mouth, a mouth so dry it felt like sandpaper. It tasted bitter – acrid, dry, coppery with fear and adrenalin.

  He sucked down gulps of sulphurous cordite-laden air in deep calming breaths and stared at his rifle’s sights, focusing on the numbers stamped into the blue-grey metal. The rifle’s furniture felt hard beneath his grip as strength returned to his aching limbs. He knew they had to move. ‘Right, lads,’ Flynn shouted, ‘if we stay here, we are as good as dead. When I say, we move – clear!’

  Flynn slithered up the slimy side of the crater, hugging the ground, and as he peeked over its ragged lip he felt hot air kiss his cheek as a bullet brushed past his face, sending him tumbling back into the squalid hole. ‘Shit!’ he cursed as fear rippled anew through him and he knew he had to get a grip. Christ, how he hated the sergeant stripes that squatted expectantly on his sleeves, mocking his resolve and self-control.

  ‘Ye all right, Sarge?’ called a big open-faced Dubliner, his slum accent brittle with fear, and Flynn forced himself to grin despite his own welling desperation, staving off the moment when terror would overwhelm his rational mind. They were all scared and he knew that the others were looking to him, as an NCO, to tell them what to do, to take away the burden of choice and make decisions for them.

  The army was good at that, at ingraining instinctive obedience into impressionable young men. He knew it, they knew it and he felt such a charlatan, cursing the stripes he’d once flourished before giggling Grafton Street shop girls. Flynn felt his heart sink; he was a sergeant whether he liked it or not and despite his obvious inexperience the others expected him, in their innocence, to know what he was doing, even though they were all of an age.

  ‘Right, lads, listen in,’ he said, affecting his best sergeant’s voice, clear, calm, in control, play-acting. ‘Jerry’s got a machine gun about a hundred yards up on the left. If we move right, it looks like there is a trench about thirty to forty feet away. If we can get into it then we’re home and dry. You, Corporal—’ He pointed at a burly lance-jack on the other side of the crater ‘—I want you to give covering fire. When I shout, you follow.’ The lance-jack nodded and sloshed, thigh deep, across the shell hole to take up a fire position and slipped off the safety catch.

  ‘When I say move you go like hell and don’t stop until you reach the trench and if you find any Jerries in it when we get there then give ’em what for, clear?’ Flynn barked. ‘Remember your drills and you’ll be all right.’ He couldn’t believe that he was spouting the same claptrap as the instructors had back at the depot and he wasn’t sure who he was trying to reassure – them or himself. He gave them one more cursory glance and turned back towards the German lines. ‘Prepare to move!’ The lance-jack began blazing at the machine-gun nest. ‘MOVE!’

  Flynn lunged forward, his legs
pumping, adrenalin and fear tunnelling his vision so that all he could see was the ruined parapet of a trench forty feet ahead of him. Muttering another Hail Mary, Flynn stumbled forward, feeling as conspicuous as a turd on a billiard table before tumbling to his knees behind the meagre cover of broken iron barbed-wire pickets and blazing wildly at the enemy, sensing rather than seeing the others running hell-for-leather towards the sanctuary of the trench.

  He was in hell, a chaotic, random pyrotechnic hell littered with tattered khaki corpses, lying deceptively peaceful amid the carnage. Flynn blazed at the enemy, palming the bolt in exactly the way he had been told never to as he screamed ‘Move!’ over his shoulder at the rifleman behind him. He waited until the man was past him before he sprinted after him and crashed into the trench, home and dry.

  He skidded and crashed full-square onto his backside, sending pain shooting up his body, and looking down saw that something was caught on the mud and nails of his ammo boot. It took a second or two for it to register that it was the shredded remains of a face. He grimaced and fought back a gagging sensation before throwing the wet, rubbery thing away.

  Biting back his fear in hard, laboured breaths, he took in his surroundings. The air was foul, a cloying cocktail of cordite, rotting matter and a hint of phosgene. The lance-jack was there, the Dubliner and another three pallid, shaken youths. The others were gone. There was nothing more to be said. ‘Follow me!’ Flynn said and without a backward glance trotted down the trench. Moments later they passed an ashen-faced German corpse slumped staring blankly into space, its skull gaping and leaking brains.

  A warm mug of discarded coffee steamed, tugging seductively at Flynn’s taste buds as bloated flies feasted on the greying cadaver, but without a second glance they ran on, bombing bunker entrances as they passed with neither a backward glance nor an attempt to inspect the results. He could hear the thud of boots on duckboards but it always seemed to be just around the next traverse. Always out of sight.

  Flynn prayed that his pathetic band wasn’t all that was left of the company or even the battalion, let alone the brigade, and he was becoming desperate to find someone to report to, someone to take away the burden of responsibility. Someone else must have made it into the German trenches. They had to. They just had to.

  Skidding to a halt, he grunted as the others thudded into his back. There were muffled voices and the scuffle of boots around the next traverse. Gulping for air, he strained to listen – the voices had dropped away. Clutching a grenade to his chest, he blinked the fear and sweat from his eyes as he began to ease the pin loose. Psyching himself up for what had to come next, he darted his head around the corner. A bullet gouged into the woodwork next to his head as he lurched back into cover. ‘Jesus Christ! We’re British!’ he shouted at the top of his voice.

  ‘Come out slowly if you don’t want to get shot,’ ordered a firm commanding voice.

  ‘We’re coming out. There are six of us – Ninth Dubs! Don’t shoot!’ Flynn called as he stepped slowly around the traverse. The saucer-eyed youngster who had shot at him relaxed visibly, exhaling heavily as the tension poured out of him. Behind him a dozen or so Dublin Fusiliers watched him nervously and stood aside as a young officer approached him.

  Selfishly, Flynn’s first thought was relief, not because he had found some other members of the regiment, fellow survivors, but that he had found someone who outranked him, someone to abdicate his burden of responsibility to. The officer, little more than a boy himself, beckoned Flynn forward. ‘Good to see you, Sar’nt, whoever you are,’ he said with a forced air of studied calm. ‘We could use your help.’ He paused, awaiting a response but none came. Flynn was looking down at the corpse lying at his feet. ‘You know him, Sar’nt?’

  ‘Knew him, sir,’ Flynn corrected, regretting his words as soon as he said them. ‘It’s Mr Kettle, sir,’ he added, almost matter-of-factly. ‘My company commander. Least he was. B Company.’ Someone had once told Flynn that Lieutenant Kettle was a home ruler, the Irish Parliamentary Party’s MP for South Tyrone up in Ulster and that he taught at some Dublin college, God knows which one.

  Strain was etched across the officer’s face as he ran his fingers through his matted blond hair before plonking his battered helmet back onto his head. ‘I know, he was a friend of my father. You know it was him who said that us Irishmen were not fighting for England but for the rights of small nations,’ the officer said in middle-class north Dublin tones not dissimilar to Flynn’s own.

  ‘Lieutenant Dalton, acting OC C Company. I guess I’m OC B as well, now,’ the officer continued, holding out his hand. Flynn shook it firmly but as he opened his mouth to speak a shell crashed into the parapet, sending both men sprawling into the muck as dirt, chalk and debris rained down on them. Flynn cursed and Dalton smiled boyishly. It was then the shooting started.

  ‘You lot, hold your position here, we’ll be back in a minute,’ Lieutenant Dalton shouted over the din. ‘Sar’nt, you come with me.’ They scurried down an old communication trench and moments later they were up and out over the sandbags into the shattered moonscape of ruined buildings where they lay catching their breath, gathering their thoughts, desperately trying to get their bearings and locate the enemy.

  ‘That way!’ Dalton whispered and darted off. There was so much gunfire that it was virtually impossible to tell where it was coming from – in front, behind, left, and right, above. Thankfully, none of it seemed to be very effective but still they kept low in an attempt to avoid stray rounds until they squatted behind a ruined wall. Dalton raised his index finger to his lip, appealing for quiet – at once bizarrely childlike and deathly earnest – then pointed off to the right. Flynn lay flat and poked his head around the corner. There were coal-scuttle helmets bobbing nervously in the crater up ahead whilst a German officer was frantically snapping out quick battle orders. ‘On my word, we attack,’ Dalton whispered, pulling out a grenade.

  Flynn nodded as the officer smiled reassuringly. Now who was conning who, Flynn thought. Strangely, he didn’t feel as scared as he thought he should be; maybe it was because he wasn’t making the decisions anymore, maybe it was because he was way beyond scared already.

  The attack was swift and violent and over almost as quickly as it had begun but it did the job. Flynn’s ears were ringing as he stood on the lip of the crater staring down at torn bodies and the huddled mass of wretched, frightened, broken boys holding up their hands, wide-eyed and pleading for their lives. Their German officer, bleeding profusely from a torn cheek, slowly unbuckled his pistol belt and let it drop to the floor wordlessly, raising his hands. Flynn squatted down and picked up the gun belt, briefly examining it before tossing it over to Dalton. The lieutenant deftly dropped the pistol, a Luger automatic, into his jacket pocket and let the belt drop. ‘A keepsake for my little brother,’ Dalton said.

  ‘Best be getting them back, sir. Before they work out there’s just the two of us,’ Flynn prompted and prodded his bayonet, none too gently, into the German officer’s back. ‘C’mon, Jerry, let’s go.’

  Scrabbling for the right words, Dalton trawled the depths of his rusty schoolboy German. ‘Soldaten, hande hoch! Raus! Raus! Schnell! Mitt me kommen! Raus!’ Meekly their sheep-like mass of captured Germans, pale with shock and fright, quietly did as they were bid whilst stray rounds zipped by.

  Dalton frantically shouted for the others to cease firing and Flynn resisted the swelling urge to run for cover, focusing instead on herding their bag of prisoners into the captured trench. Even his prisoners seemed keen to reach safety and be out of the fighting that had begun so bloodily in July. Some, especially the younger ones, appeared to have a bit of a spring in their step and even their officer looked relieved to have let slip the weight of having to make decisions. Shed, in the end, as easily as his pistol belt.

  ‘Twenty-one of the little buggers, by my reckoning, sir,’ Flynn told Dalton as they flopped down on the fire step. Flynn felt his hands tremble and balled his fists to try and co
ntrol it but he could feel it beginning to overpower him as it always did when the adrenalin drained away. Even Dalton was having trouble reloading his revolver as his hands shook too. They looked at each other and started to laugh, like teenage boys usually do after they have done something unfeasibly stupid, something that sounded like a good idea at the time, and had only just got away unscathed. It was then that the sergeant noticed that the young officer was bleeding and suddenly Dalton seemed to notice too as his own adrenalin rush subsided. ‘Stretcher bearers!’ the sergeant cried. ‘Mr Dalton’s been hit, stretcher bearers!’

  As Dalton was bundled onto the waiting stretcher, he turned to the sergeant. ‘What is your name, Sergeant?’

  ‘Sergeant Flynn, sir. Kevin Flynn.’

  ‘Well, Sergeant Flynn, it looks like you’re in charge now.’ And with those three words Flynn felt the weight of responsibility crash down once more on to his tired young shoulders as he riffled through his pockets and pulled out a small tin of ration cigarettes and plucked one from it. Momentarily he glanced at the legend in tight blue letters – ‘If you don’t like these then bugger off and buy your own’ – printed down its side. He lit it and sucked in the rank blue-grey smoke, feeling it fill his lungs, feeling it take away his sense of smell, and sighed.

  ‘Bugger! Why can’t you find a bloody sergeant major when you need one?’

  CHAPTER 1

  Tuesday, 6 January 1920, Drumlish, County Longford, Ireland

  ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE, woman, will you not keep your noise down? The lads will hear you!’ Sergeant James McLain barked in frustration.

  ‘I will not!’ bristled his wife Mary, as she rounded angrily on her husband. ‘I don’t want to go to Dublin! I like it here in Drumlish!’

  ‘For the love of God, Mary, how long have we been doing this? I’ve got nigh on thirty years behind me and when they say it’s time to move it’s time to move.’