During the month of May 1915, the streets of inner-city Dublin were visited by tragedy and sorrow. The origins of this misery lay thousands of miles away on the beaches at the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula and in the trenches north-east of the Belgian town of Ypres.
By the spring of 1915 in the Great War, stalemate had set in on the Western Front. British commanders believed that attacking Turkey at the Dardanelles would draw German troops from the Western Front and open an ice-free corridor to Britain's Russian allies. In March 1915, an attempt by the British and French navies to force the Dardanelles ended in failure. The next attempt to take the peninsula would be carried out by the infantry.
On March 16th, 1915, the 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers set sail from Avonmouth for Gallipoli, stopping off at Alexandria in Egypt for coal. The only casualty on their voyage was Private Peter Kavanagh (27), a single man from 16 Verschoyle Place, off Lower Mount Street in Dublin. He died of pneumonia and was buried at sea.
At dawn on April 25th, following a naval bombardment of the Turkish positions, hundreds of Irishmen from the 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers and 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers tried to come ashore at the Dardanelles from towed barges and from an old steam collier named the SS River Clyde. At roughly the same time, on beaches further round the peninsula, similar landings took place by other British units along with soldiers from Australia and New Zealand, collectively known as ANZACs.
As they attempted to land, both the Dublins and Munsters were cut to pieces by Turkish machine-gun fire from the most heavily defended part of the peninsula. A Royal Naval aviator who flew over the shattered SS River Clyde and the floundering barges full of dead Irishmen described the sea below as being "red with blood". Sgt J. McColgan of the Dublins, who was wounded in the leg, was in a barge with 32 men, only six of whom came out alive. He recalled: "One fellow's brains were shot into my mouth as I was shouting to them to jump for it".
The packs the men were carrying weighed 60 lbs. In the scramble to get ashore, many of the men were drowned when they jumped out of the drifting boats into the water.
The Dublins' chaplain was a Tipperary Carmelite priest named Fr William Finn. Attempting to disembark from one of the first boats, he was shot immediately he set foot on the beach. He managed to scramble ashore but was fatally hit again while administering absolution to a dying soldier.
Of the 1,100 officers and men of the 1st Dublins who landed at Gallipoli in April 1915, only 11 were still with the battalion when they withdrew in January 1916. The rest were either killed, wounded or missing.
The 1st Dublins who died in the April landings of 1915 were buried near where they fell at "V" Beach Cemetery. Among them are two Mallaghan brothers, John and Samuel, from Newry, Co Armagh, killed on the same day. Others included 17-year-old Private Alfred Verrent from Nenagh, Co Tipperary and Private Tom Errity (20), from Newtownmountkennedy, Co Wicklow - Irish farmers' sons killed by Turkish farmers' sons.
During the same week in April, more than a thousand miles away on the Western Front near the Belgian village of St Julien northeast of Ypres, the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Fusiliers suffered equally appalling casualties - this time from German gas, as well as bullets and shells. Also on April 25th, the 2nd Dublins along with the 1st Royal Irish Fusiliers, men from Armagh, Cavan and Monaghan, attacked the Germans at St Julien. Three days earlier, for the first time on a massive scale, the Germans had launched a chlorine gas attack on Canadian and Algerian troops in the French Army near St Julien. Chlorine gas mixed with water (saliva and lung fluid) produces hydrochloric acid. Men's lungs just melted.
The majority of the Dublin Fusiliers killed were never found. Out of the 137 dead Dublins, 117 of them are named on the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres. Among them were two brothers from the fishing village of Skerries in north Co Dublin, Joseph and James Gossan. Private Hugh Lynch (19) of the 2nd Dublins came from
67 Railway Street, Dublin. According to family memories, he was a very quiet lad who joined up during the General Lockout in 1913. Another Dublin family who suffered were the McDonnells from the Liberties. The first member killed was Private Peter McDonnell (42) from 46 Bride Street. His two brothers, Patrick (32) and John (22) died a month later in an even worse gas attack on May 24th when the Germans attacked a farm, known to those who were there as Mouse Trap Farm.
Out of a Dublin battalion strength of 668 who "stood to" on that May morning, 647 were either killed, driven crazy from the effects of the gas or simply missing presumed dead. Those who survived suffered for the rest of their lives from damaged lungs. Among the dead was Sgt William Malone,
a married man from the South Circular Road area.
The Easter Rising in Dublin occurred roughly a year after the Gallipoli landings and the gas attacks at St Julien and Mouse Trap Farm. In a tragic twist,William Malone's brother Michael was killed fighting with the Irish Volunteers against British soldiers in Dublin. There is a memorial plaque to him on the house where he died at 25 Northumberland Road. Thanks to the efforts of a few people, William Malone is now commemorated by a brass plaque at Mouse Trap Farm in Flanders.
In September 2000, a group from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association went to Mouse Trap Farm to pay their respects to those young men who died in April and May 1915. Local Belgian schoolchildren sang a song of peace at the spot.
I have often wondered why the Rising in Dublin was initially so unpopular with the tenement dwellers of inner Dublin. One must wonder if the names Gallipoli, St Julien and Mouse Trap Farm had anything to do with it.
• For details of exhibitions on Gallipoli and St Julien, see the website of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association: www.greatwar.ie