War & Peace 2

Waterloo Square scan0005.jpg

Wellington at Waterloo by Ermest Crofts (1886),courtesy of Bonhams, London/Bridgeman.

Selections from THE WAY OF WAR IN THE SEARCH FOR PEACE: The 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment at Waterloo.

Read here by Valerie Read and the author, this abridgement of the poem is preceded by a short introit from The Maids of Mourneshore (a tune associated with The Wild Colonial Boy) played on the Irish pipes by Robert O'Mealey in 1943 (made available courtesy of the pipemaker Chris Bailey),and closes with The Lament for O'Donnell after the Battle of Kinsale, played on the fiddle by Padraig O'Keefe circa 1948/1949 (courtesy of Ken MacLeod). Both tunes are available because of the generosity of Ross Anderson, Professor of Engineering Security, at the University of Cambridge, on Ross's Music Pagewww.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/music/index.html.

The Way of War in the Search for PeaceThe 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment at Waterloo

From Aftermath

...................That's partly why six hundred
of our men were back there lying on the ridge
exhausted, wounded, dying or already dead -
their bodies lying red upon the landscape,
delineating the bloody struggle there,
while myth began to weave its death-or-glory shape
asserting all of us has died there in that square.