Charlie Kelly wears an unidentified watch

Dust hangs over the trench in The Siege of Jadotville (2016) while Charlie Kelly's Walter Hegarty, in wire-rimmed glasses, empties a submachine gun toward a line off-frame and a second soldier fires past his shoulder. The film is Netflix's account of a real stand. In September 1961, about 150 Irish soldiers of A Company, 35th Battalion, serving with a United Nations mission in the Congo, dug in at Jadotville in the breakaway province of Katanga. Their commander, Commandant Pat Quinlan, played by Jamie Dornan, held the position against a Katangese force many times its size. No Irishman was killed. They gave up only when the ammunition and the water ran out, and spent about a month as prisoners.

The watch is harder to pin down than the history. It is not on view in the trench, where both of Hegarty's hands are on the gun. It surfaces in a quieter beat, when he is scouting and looks down to check the time: a plain field watch, white dial, a small running-seconds register at the bottom, on a padded black leather strap. The markings never resolve. A commenter on a watch-spotting blog put a name to it, a Kienzle Markant, a German maker whose vintage models did carry that off-center seconds hand, but the writer who logged the scene could not read the dial himself, and one unsourced guess is not an identification.

So the watch keeps its anonymity, much as the men did. Their surrender was read at home as a defeat to be forgotten, and Ireland did not formally commemorate A Company until 2005, more than forty years after the fact. The siege is otherwise documented almost hour by hour. In 2017 the surviving men of A Company, and the families of those who had since died, were given the Jadotville Medal, a decoration that can be issued for no other battle in the Defence Forces' history.