Tom had known since England declared war in August 1914 that he could not fight for the king and country that so badly abused his homeland. He knew a few Irish men who had fought, but thought them an aberration. They were not, or at least not entirely. Some 140,000 Irish men had enlisted, over one-third of who would give their last full measure. He was forced to confront these facts head-on in mid-July when he was asked to cover a meeting of over 100 representatives from all parts of Ireland to determine how best to memorialize Ireland's lost sons. Many of the men who jostled for the chance to speak had themselves fought on the Western Front, including one who had lost an arm and a leg serving at the side of Major William Redmond on the Somme. Redmond had been killed, but looking at the man before him, his one remaining arm steadying a crutch to keep erect, Tom wondered if death wasn't preferable.
Before arriving in Dublin, Tom never gave a thought to the way his lack of service might set him apart from others of his generation. In the months since he and Sybil arrived, though, Tom frequently found himself in the company of veterans from the places he and Sybil had tracked on their now worn and tattered map. In the company of only one veteran, Tom was adept at turning the conversation away from war, usually toward Ireland's own war, of which he felt more a part, or toward some other topic. When he found himself in the company of more than one man who had served in the trenches, however, he was resigned to staring into his mug, vacantly, and half-listening, or else feigning interest. He tried to remove himself as much as possible from these conversations, but occasionally this was impossible. As the debate over the scope of the memorial gardens ranged on, Tom allowed his attention to drift to the last time this had happened.
Tom's resistance toward hiring a girl to help with the housekeeping had been futile and, at a time when so many women were desperate for work, his mother had an easy time of finding them help. Tom had feared that she might find a girl, a woman, he had known before he left for England, and was grateful when the girl she brought to their home bore neither a name nor a face he recognized. She was a good worker, and the food she made was more than edible, if not up to par with Mrs. Patmore. Still, on nights Sybil worked late at hospital, tucking into no more than a sandwich for dinner, he could not bring himself to have her prepare anything for him and joined friends for a pub meal instead.
Under just such circumstances, two nights earlier he'd supped with two of his fellow journalists while Sybil worked late. Both of the other men had served in France. Instead of the conversation drifting in its usual pattern, to the campaigns they had fought and under whose command or calling roll on comrades living and dead until they found names of mutual acquaintance, the conversation turned sharply and focused on Tom.
"Why didn't you fight?" Mick asked.
"Too proud to enlist and too lucky to be conscripted, that's my guess," Eamon responded absently. This was the reason most of the men who hadn't fought gave; he wasn't really interested in hearing it again.
It would have been the safest response in the circumstances, but journalism was a profession that traded in the truth – mostly – and Tom did not wish to mislead his colleagues.
"No, I got the call up alright. Rejected on medical grounds. I have, let me remember precisely. I believe the exact condition is a mitral valve prolapse with a pansystolic murmur**. I wasn't good enough for them."
"Don't sound so bitter, Tommy. There's lots of boys that was cannon fodder that'd been only too glad for your pansystol, well for whatever's wrong with you." Mick meant well, but he only succeeded in making Tom feel worse.
"I had big plans to humiliate the army, make them pay for the way they're always treating us." In this pub with these men his brogue and his anger rose in unison.
"Heart murmur or no you could have fought in Ireland. Joined the Rising. Done something other than drive a bloody car around the countryside," Eamon was outraged that his colleague was satisfied to pretend that this heart valve thing was grounds to live idly in England for three years before coming home.
"My cousin was killed in the Rising. Shot on King Street." He shouldn't have said it; he should have sipped his ale and let the conversation end.
"As was my brother. But that's nothing to do with you," Eamon pressed.
"Does it matter? I've come now."
"And brought a British wife with you," Eamon said quietly.
His mind had churned thinking of what to say next. Was this man implying he was less Irish because of his wife? That they should have stayed in England? How dare he? Before Tom could react too rashly, Mick interceded.
"Mrs. Branson's a lovely woman. She's not like the rest, even if she does speak the King's English."
Tom flushed that Mick had risen to defend his wife. His normally nimble mind could think of nothing to say, nothing that would defend her honor or his or that could make him feel closer to these men – Mick and Eamon and the thousands more – who had survived one war and become entrenched in another. For the first time in his life, he felt an outsider. And a coward. He pulled some change from his pocket and nearly flung it onto the table, taking his leave from this place. Sybil did not ask what troubled him when he met her at the hospital later that night and he could not bring himself to unburden his worries on her. Much later, when her breathing was steady and even and he was certain she slept deeply, he turned onto his stomach, pressed his face hard into his pillow and wept bitter tears.
He returned his attention to the meeting at hand. Those present agreed Dublin needed a permanent memorial and they selected from their ranks a dozen men to form a Memorial Committee to raise funds for the permanent memorial. The group made no progress on what the memorial would be; Tom sighed as entered this point into his notebook, for he could only imagine the number of meetings he would be called upon to attend where one side argued the merits of an obelisk while the other sought a park. This one had lasted for hours as it was.
He struggled to give the story of the Memorial meeting character, but it had been a dull meeting – at least the parts he'd paid attention to – and he could not fix that flaw with a few strokes of his pen. The afternoon was unusually cold and wet for the middle of July and as he wrote, Tom found he was scolding himself to concentrate on the task at hand. His story finished, he made his way to a meeting of IRA men. The tone at these meetings had become harder, the edge more violent, in just the three or so months he had been attending. The first attack on a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police had come in June and just this month a detective sergeant was fired on when returning home in the evening. Such violence was only the beginning; today, those in attendance were called upon to make a river of British blood course through the streets. Tom shuddered at the thought. He did not relish a man dying by his hands. As this thought entered his mind, so did the one that had nagged him since his dinner at the pub two nights before: perhaps he was a coward.
As they walked home from the hospital that night, Tom asked quietly, "Sybil, do you think I'm a coward?"
"Of course not. What a strange question though. Whatever makes you ask?"
He told her then about his dinner with Mick and Eamon, about the man who was missing the lower half of his left leg and most of his right arm, about the cries for British blood that had made him shudder. He did not long to kill a man as many others seemed to; he did not even particularly want to kill a man.
"But I still don't understand. Your work as a journalist is dangerous. And important. Why you've said many times how important newspapers are to the efforts, that without the papers only those who attend the meetings would know what is happening. No, I don't think you're a coward at all."
It was true. The newspapers were critical to disseminating the government's doctrines. The papers and priests facilitated Irish nationalism. Still, the "lost years" as Tom had been thinking of the years since the Rising nagged him.
"But maybe I'm just scared, Sybil. Maybe I don't want to find myself on either side of a bullet."
"Tom Branson, I've seen what bullets do to bodies, more than I hope you'll ever see. I should hope you have the good sense not to want to be on one or the other side of a bullet!"
"But what of the war? It seems all the men I know fought in France while I was driving around Yorkshire. Look at Downton. William, dead; Thomas, with his hand blown to bits; Matthew, who was nearly paralyzed. I thought it would be different in Ireland, but even here…" his voice trailed off and he struggled to make sense of his own thoughts.
"Tom, Tom, stop! You were called up to fight and you didn't pass the medical. It wouldn't matter if you'd enlisted. As for Ireland, if you feel that lying in wait for some member of the DMP and putting a bullet in his back is less cowardly than printing an article in the paper each morning under your own byline, where anyone from the King of England to Earl of Grantham to the Chief Constable of Dublin can see what you've written, then I suppose I can't stop you. But know this: a British woman has no place in Ireland on her own: if you end up in Kilmainham Gaol for ambushing a constable, I won't stay. You'll find me on the next boat to Liverpool."
"And if I end up there because of my work as a journalist?" He asked quietly, for journalists could certainly find themselves among the ranks of political prisoners.
"I'll hold my head high that you were imprisoned for telling the truth, not for killing some poor woman's husband."
"But will you still leave Ireland?"
"I don't see how I could stay, Tom."
They walked the rest of the way without speaking, each lost unto their own thoughts. Tom wondered how he, who had been so eager to fight for Ireland for years, had come to prefer a pen to a gun, when either might lead to a coffin. Look at his life, he was married to an English woman, employing a poor young girl to cook his dinner and scrub his floors, and shuddering at the idea of assassinating one of the oppressors. How had this happened?
Sybil wondered, too, whether her encouragement had been enough to chase away the demons of cowardice that lurked for so many men these days, and whether he would continue to believe that writing the news was as worthy of the cause as making it. She did not wish to pull the lead bits from him, not that she'd likely get the chance. If they caught you, they finished you and if they didn't you hid out in a safe house until they had bigger fish to catch. These were their thoughts as they walked through the summer twilight contemplating the choices and compromises life – and fate – had forced them to make.
Author's Note:
I would be remiss not to mention the document Irish Soldiers in the First World War available from the Irish government at http:/ www. taoiseach. gov. ie/eng/Taoiseach_and_Government/ History_of_Government/ 1916_Commemorations/1916Commemorations-BattleOfTheSomme1. rtf as the source of my information on Irish involvement in World War I, Michael Redmond, and the July 17, 1919, meeting regarding a memorial to the war dead.
** Tom's heart murmur was the piece of the entire series so far that I had the hardest time accepting, for in WWI all sides were so desperate for men that virtually no one was turned away. In England, typically you needed only your trigger finger and thumb on one hand and four front teeth, in order to hold the packet of powder in them to tear it. I could never understand how Tom would have been turned away by the military. What's more, I've learned the condition the writers gave him was not diagnosed until 1966. (You can read an interesting analysis here: http:/ public. shns. com/content/british-soldiers-hearts-and-downton-abbey.) Nevertheless, to keep true to the original script, I've included his condition as diagnosed on the show.