My grandfather, a Friel from Glasgow, served as a teenager in the Great War. He returned but never really spoke of his ordeal, he brushed off all enquiries with a story of his battalion becoming lost in a forest and never seeing action. Lately, I have heard that this was a common technique to evade having to talk of the horror. One small story emerges from the mists and smokes of time in which, on a cold cold frozen winter night, his small cavalry company stumbled into a small French village, frozen to their saddleleather. Danny a teenager was frozen board stiff in his saddle and losing consciousness with the cold. An elderly French woman spotted him and pulled his horse up before retrieving a bottle of brandy from her house. She revived him with the spirit. He swore that if she hadn't at least brought him to his senses he would have lost awareness, passed over and froze to death. Originally, on first joining the platoon he was allocated, the horse in Stable number 9. On their first introduction he opened the half door of the stable at which the incumbent tenant back-kicked him in the chest and flat on the backside of his breeches. He recalled the horse as stalwart, short tempered and sturdy. He retained his love of horses all his life - always having a wee flutter on the go- and held the number9 as his lucky number.

Ciaran Friel