If you’ve got it in you, the army will bring it out

“If you’ve got it in you, the army will bring it out” is a recruitment slogan Cushla remembers from a magazine. It offers a compact promise: the army can recognize and develop a quality already present in a person. In the novel, that promise enters her thoughts during an uneasy interaction with a soldier, placing the language of recruitment beside an encounter in which she is addressed and judged by someone else.

The Slogan in Context

Cushla recalls the advertisement after a soldier has made a personal remark to her and insulted her. The slogan is not spoken by either of them; it returns as a remembered line. That distinction makes it less a reply than a contrast in her thoughts: the advertisement presents military service as a route for bringing out individual potential, while the encounter leaves Cushla subject to another person’s assumptions about her.

Language and Belonging

Elsewhere, the novel shows how words and sounds mark communal boundaries. When a man asks Cushla whether she speaks Irish, she appreciates that he calls the language Irish rather than Gaelic. In another exchange, she recognizes that a claim about Irish lacking a word for refusal is leading somewhere, and asks what is meant by calling it slippery. The recruitment slogan’s confident promise of personal development therefore sits alongside language charged with cultural and political meaning.

Cushla’s memories of childhood make those boundaries concrete. At a birthday party when she was seven, other children asked her to spell her name and exchanged looks at its fourth letter: Catholics pronounced the letter H as “haitch,” while Protestants said “aitch.” Later, after she exclaimed in surprise, adults at home hushed her for swearing. The memory joins small differences in speech and etiquette to the pain of being marked as an outsider. Much later, a man asks Cushla to join an Irish-language conversation group, showing that the language remains a point of connection as well as division.

Significance

The slogan’s appeal rests on the idea that ability can be drawn out by an institution. The surrounding scenes complicate that optimism without establishing the advertisement as a sustained motif: the line is a brief recollection, set against encounters in which identity is inferred from speech, judged through social codes, or invited into shared practice. Its significance lies in this contrast between a promise of self-realization and the pressures that shape how Cushla is seen and where she might belong.