When Sunday is a day of rest and of reckoning

SUNDAY is the last day of our week, though North America, Canada and Australia view it as the first of the fresh onslaught ahead. That military metaphor being appropriate for those of us who spend life locked in combat with things from careers to childcare, waging a war with work or killing time till we can be with (or away from) our families.

Tough, eh? But as Scarlett O’Hara might say, ‘tomorrow is another day’.

That’s if it’s not gone with the winds of war, specifically World War I in the case of Irishman Frank Gunning, who kept a diary of his week for this time frame just over 100 years ago — after this 21-year-old from Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, left his job in the banking sector to enlist in the 7 th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.

Which is how he ended up in the trenches at Gallipoli on August 12, 1915, where the soil was so sandy it kept falling in. Grateful for the stretcher bearers and courageous Captain Paddy Tobin, who tied a handkerchief around a flesh wound and carried on.

The week that followed included endless treks down the beguilingly named Chocolate Hill in search of water, no matter how filthy, and marching over the shallow graves of fallen comrades. He got to wash on Tuesday at Shrapnel Gully, his sergeant showing them how to scrape the dirt off their bodies by rubbing them with sand.

But the whistle warning them to keep their heads down blew continuously on August 16. And the great excitement when the mail arrived the next day was as short lived as the lives of over 100 of the soldiers in his battalion, after the surprise attack at dawn on August 18. The men catching bombs and flinging them back were soon killed. As was Paddy Tobin, who led the charge over the ridge brandishing his revolver. “The second he fired, he fell back, gave one kick, and not another sound. I saw no one return.”

One of the dying that filled the trenches next to Frank that day lay flat on his back, a big slice of his shoulder and neck blown clean off. He kept “moaning for water, while the sun straight above beat down in a most unmerciful way”. Meanwhile, half the head was blown off a body hanging over a nearby rock, the tunic black with blood.

“You can read of these things,” Frank wrote, “but there it was straight in front of me. Don’t know now how I stood it, it’s a wonder I didn’t go mad with the awful heat, and everything included. I first felt the dysentery.”

And however your evening might be, Frank spent his in a dug out, looking at the sinking sun and thinking of home, and the heavy losses and pals who were missing, trying not to cry.

Frank was hospitalised the following day. When he was well enough, he was sent back — only to be killed, age 22, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Which was a Saturday; for some the last day of the week before the new week to come. But that for Frank would neither end, nor ever again begin.