Eighty years ago this summer, The Irish Times published a poem by a little-known writer named Samuel Beckett. Fenced off in a box on page five, between An Irishman’s Diary and Letters to the Editor (which led with a row about the price of tomatoes), the single verse was entitled “Saint-Lô 1945“, and read as follows: “Vire will wind in other shadows/unborn through the bright ways tremble/and the old mind/ghost-abandoned/sink into its havoc.”The poem was too obscure for one reader, a “bewildered” resident of Sutton, who assumed “Vire” to be a common noun. The reader searched through dictionaries and found only the definitions “small ring” and “crossbow bolt”, neither of which helped. Nor could they have, because the Vire is a small river in France, flowing through Saint-Lô on its way to the English Channel. In fairness to the Sutton reader, it hadn’t been famous enough to make the cut for the celebrated rivers passage in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), although that managed to namecheck 1,100 other waterways around the world.Beckett’s poem was inspired by his visits to Saint-Lô after the second World War, by which time the town was in ruins, thanks its former status as German-army stronghold and a key target for Allied bombers clearing the way for the Normandy landings.The “night of fire” that coincided with D-Day, on June 6th, 1944, reduced it to rubble. There were more bombs to come in July, this time from the retreating Germans, during the ensuing ground battle. On finally entering the town, one US soldier quipped: “We sure liberated the hell out of this place.”So complete was Saint-Lô’s destruction that for a time afterwards, some people thought it should be left like that, as a museum of ruins. But the surviving residents disagreed and went back to rebuild lives from the chaos. Among the international efforts to help was a project in which Beckett became centrally involved, and also wrote about – this time in prose – in June 1946.Initially intended for broadcast on Radio Éireann (it’s unclear whether it aired), The Capital of the Ruins recorded the event in plain terms: “On what a year ago was a grass slope, lying in the angle that the Vire and Bayern roads make as they unite at the entrance of the town . . . a general hospital now stands. It is the Hospital of the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô, or, as the Laudiniens (residents of Saint-Lô) themselves say, the Irish Hospital.”Beckett was back in Paris by the time it opened. In the script for broadcast, as elsewhere, he was typically modest about his role as the project’s store manager. But one of the doctors who witnessed it found him “terribly conscientious” in his work.The many shortages he had faced included rat poison, then much in demand. After consulting experts at the Institut Curie, he improvised his own concoction.His time in Saint-Lô has lighter moments too. One of the town’s few surviving houses – although shells had passed through the walls – was home to a miraculously intact piano. On visits there, Beckett played Mozart and Chopin from memory.According to Beckett biographer James Knowlson, there were other places to de-stress too. Some of the project team were known to pass evenings in a bordello, where the ambulance – occasionally driven by Beckett – was a common sight.By contrast, while showing a colleague around Notre Dame in Paris in late 1945, it was noted that Beckett “pounced on a little rosary beads” from a stall to bring back as a present for his assistant store manager, a devout Catholic.Short as his time in Saint-Lô was, it had a profound effect. At the very least, it coincided with the start of “a frenzy of writing” in which, over the next few years, he would produce the prose trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, as well as the breakthrough play Waiting for Godot.As another of his biographers, Anthony Cronin, comments, “The Capital of the Ruins” was also notable for including Beckett’s first recorded use of the phrase “the human condition”. After an epiphany back in Dublin around that time, he was to devote the rest of his life to writing about the plight of humanity at its most feeble.The Saint-Lô project was handed over to the French Red Cross in 1947 but Beckett predicted, with faint traces of pride, that it would continue to be known as the “Irish Hospital”. More important, he argued, was the legacy it would leave on those who had taken part.In his conclusion to the intended broadcast, a writer who would soon be famous for the bleakness of his outlook sounded an uncharacteristically hopeful note. Those who had travelled from Ireland to Saint-Lô, he suggested, would “come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again”.