World War I is present in the memoir less as a battlefield narrative than as a continuing force in civilian life. Frank McCourt encounters it through the men who returned from service: Pa Keating, whose exposure to gas in France left him with a lasting cough, and Uncle Pat Sheehan, whose own military past is recalled in the family’s orbit. Their stories connect wartime experience to illness, employment, drink, and the forms of humor with which people endure hardship.

Service and its aftermath

Pa Keating served in France and was exposed to gas. Years later, his cough still marked that experience. Angela identifies its source when she recognizes the sound of him speaking: he had swallowed gas in the war. The memoir thus introduces the war through a bodily consequence that persists after the fighting, heard in a cough rather than described through a battle scene.

Pa Keating’s life after the war also makes the limits of that return visible. He came back to Limerick and worked at the gas works, shoveling coal and coke into the furnaces. He tells the children that he was gassed in France and ended up laboring there. The juxtaposition is plain: service abroad did not bring him a secure or distinguished civilian position at home. His later employment ties the war’s aftermath to working-class life in Limerick.

Stories told in the family

Pa Keating’s account of the war shifts between hardship and comic invention. At a gathering after Eugene’s death, he recalls being hospitalized after gas exposure and then sent back to the trenches. He contrasts the treatment of English and Irish soldiers, saying the English were sent home while the Irish were left to their fate. From that grievance, he turns to a tall tale about using gas in his system to produce a flame for boiling tea in the trenches, earning money from soldiers who wanted hot water, and eventually bribing generals to leave the army. He says he then went to Paris, spent his money, and returned to Limerick to take the gas-works job.

The comic story does not erase the serious claim underneath it: Pa Keating presents Irish soldiers as neglected in comparison with English soldiers. Its place in the scene matters, too. The family is gathered after a child’s death, and Aunt Aggie objects that this is not a proper story to tell in the presence of a dead child. Grandma defends the storytelling as preferable to sitting in silence with long faces. The war enters mourning through a story that makes the adults laugh while also carrying a memory of unequal treatment.

Work, poverty, and the war’s long reach

The war’s consequences are not confined to recollections of France. Pa Keating’s civilian work, the cough he attributes to gas, and his recurring presence in family life show how military service continues to shape a man’s health and circumstances. His story of having made a fortune in the trenches is expressly comic; the account’s ending—his return to Limerick and work at the gas works—sets the joke against his actual laboring life.

The memoir also places the war within a wider landscape of precarious work. Uncle Pat Sheehan carries newspapers through the rain, while Frank helps him deliver them around Limerick. Later, John Hannon’s coal deliveries involve heavy bags, aching legs, and work that he hopes Frank will escape through schooling. These episodes do not make every hardship a direct effect of World War I, but they establish the working conditions and economic insecurity among which veterans and their families live. In that setting, Pa Keating’s return to strenuous work after being gassed is part of a broader account of poverty rather than an isolated anecdote.

Memory, humor, and inheritance

Frank receives the war chiefly as inherited memory: adults tell him what happened, and their accounts are interwoven with ordinary visits, work, drinking, and family crises. Pa Keating’s cough provides a recurring link between the story of France and his present life. His jokes convert wartime gas exposure into a comic performance, yet the joke repeatedly returns to the facts of illness, return, and labor. The contrast lets the memoir hold two registers at once without treating humor as proof that the experience was harmless.

The war also persists in the way the adults explain themselves to children. Pa Keating presents his cough and employment as consequences of service; Frank’s family hears both the absurdity of his stories and the grievance that Irish soldiers were not cared for as English ones were. World War I is therefore not a self-contained historical episode in the memoir. It is a remembered source of bodily affliction, a subject of family storytelling, and part of the social past that accompanies the children’s daily life in Limerick.