Irish soldiers in France cheer for Home Rule
High spirits and appalling carnage related in stories from the front
Irish soldiers at the front cheered the news that the Home Rule bill had been enacted.
Corporal J.J. Cunningham, of the 1st Irish Guards, wrote a letter from the front last week saying: ‘The boys are all in high spirits as they learned on the battlefield that the Home Rule bill had been placed on the Statute Book. I need not tell you that when the news came there was a terrible cheer for ‘General’ John Redmond.’
Corporal Cunningham said that the Irish had already earned a huge reputation in battle: ‘I have seen the Irish Guards, Dublin Fusiliers, Connaught Rangers, and Munsters in action, and without exception they have all behaved with the same spirit as that possessed by their forefathers.’
The general spirits of the soldiers was claimed by Corporal Cunningham to be of the very highest order: ‘We are all doing very well, and you will be glad to learn that the ‘Micks’ are slaughtering the Germans left, right and centre.’
‘We are now entrenched in the thickest of the fray, and the only complaints amongst the officers here is that it is giving them hell and the devil to hold those ‘mad Irish’ back.’
Corporal Cunningham concluded: ‘When they fix bayonets and sing ‘God Save Ireland’, there is always blood on the skyline.’
A testement to the ferocity of the fighting: nurses and patients at a British field hospital in Antwerp. The hospital was established at the request of the Queen of the Belgians and is located in a house provided by here. (Image: Irish Life, 9 October 1914. Full collection of Irish Life is available from the National Library of Ireland.
Other news from the war paints a much grimmer picture with tales of mounting casualties and horrific slaughter.
The scale of the carnage at battles along the front is slowly emerging and the list of casualties of war is growing longer.
Some of the wounded Irish soldiers were also captured by the Germans and are now in prisoner-of-war camps.
Sgt. E. Cawley of the Connaught Rangers wrote to his wife in Sligo: ‘I am now quite well. I got wounded twice in the left leg and in the back of the head. There was also a horse shot under me.’
Another captured soldier, Lance-Corporal Clark of the Royal Irish Regiment, wrote: ‘I got knocked out by a piece of shrapnel and am now in hospital. I expect to be detained till the end of the war.’
‘I was picked up by the German soldiers and brought to their hospital. They were very good to us and have looked after our wounds very well.’
