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On Another Man's Wound

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Ernie O'Malley gives a free form rememberence of his activities during the Irish War for Independence. Unlike the methodical analysis of Tom Barry in Guerrilla Days, O'Malley gives his view of the war in a more emotional way. Perhaps that is not the correct way to describe it, but this book contains more of the personal feelings and thoughts of an educated Dublin man on the run in rural Ireland. He hates the food, he finds the conversation dull, but the spirit of the people carry him on. O'Malley adds life to our view of this violent era in Irish history and strips away much of the myth while adding to the heroics.

The title refers, as English reminds us, not to (as Gerry Adams propounded) the slogan that one generation's freedom fighters must rise up upon the fallen bodies of a previous generation's failed fighters to seek victory, but to the fact that it's easy to withhold pity when someone else is doing the bleeding and the dying. As a medical student before the 1916 Rising, O'Malley knew this to be more than a metaphor. His choice in a few years to take up arms against the Crown only deepened his empathy, and his awareness of the divisions that tore Irish into pro- and anti-British soldiers and then pro- and anti-postwar Treaty soldiers once the British had left--most of the island. He never confused anti-British tactics with anti-British prejudice, and one of the most memorable parts of his memoir is when he tells of his love for Shakespeare's sonnets, a copy of which he took into battle.

O'Malley was a rarity among those who were involved in the Irish war against Britain for independence that followed the failed Rising. He only was periphally involved, if at all, in 1916, but his powerfully described, deeply detailed accounts of his involvement in the war that followed show a university-educated, well-mannered, upper/middle-class Catholic who chose to lead troops most often from disparate backgrounds than his own into a guerrilla war to obtain the ideal Republic as a reality.

See also "The Singing Flame," O'Malley's incomplete Civil War account--which does not live up to the prose of AMW, but is worthwhile for its depiction of the futility and the idealism of the 1922-3 internecine strife. His letters from this period have been co-edited by his son Cormac and Prof. Richard English, who wrote the biography "Ernie O'Malley" in 1998 subtitled "IRA Intellectual"--also reviewed by me on Amazon.

Literally, it must say that this book belongs to the most important texts of Irish Revolution, without which it is hardly possibly to understand its events. This is not only personal experience but there are numerous notes of Irish nationalism in general give colourful picture and interpretation of events by the point of active observer. Attentive reader surely gives a tribute to auther's witty and exact notice for situation and persons that determinated the following course of events include the mass of tensions led to Irish Civil War. Ernie is very intelligent teller, and more important, correct and just, his story has no ideological exaggerations, of course, to the degree which would be possible in such circumstance.

"On another man's wound" is generally regarded as the only personal account by a War of Independence commander that has true literary merit. It is a beautifully written and gripping narrative of O'Malley's experiences from 1916 to 1921. The book is packed with incident from initial observations on the 1916 rebellion to guerrilla action in the South, to his capture in Kilkenny, subsequent torture, and his participation in the only successful escape from Kilmainham gaol in Dublin. Along the way there are interesting pen portraits of many of the leading figures of the time including Erskine Childers, Liam Lynch, and, not least, Michael Collins.

At its heart the book is a remarkably honest account of the brutalising effects of war: Towards the end O'Malley describes unflinchingly his decision to murder three captured British soldiers just before the Truce. The effect is both chilling and moving: O'Malley's literary acheivement is to show how his personal experiences are representative of all soldiers in war, which can transform idealistic youth into diminished and bloody men in a pattern that is repeated through history and across the world to this day.

As such the book retains a relevance beyond it geographic and historical contexts: It speaks a truth that should be remembered by all contemplating sending young people to kill and die on behalf of some cherished cause, particularly if the closest the decision makers have been to war is a London law chambers, or being absent without leave from the Texas National Guard.