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in verse of the death of an Irish soldier in Flanders:
O Mountains of Erin,
Your beauty is fled;
Beyond you in Flanders,
My darling lies dead.
Through the dunes and the grasses
Bespattered with blood,
They bore him; and round him,
Bareheaded they stood,
While the chaplain in khaki
Was reading a prayer,
And the wind for his keening
Was moaning an air.
O son of grey Connaught,
No more shall we stand
By the dark lough at evening,
My hand in your hand,
And talk of a houseen
To hold you and me,
The scent of the heather,
The gorse on the lea.
Charles Leslie was appointed as lieutenant colonel commandant, later Colonel, of the Monaghan Regiment of Militia on its formation in 1793. On 8 August a ballot was held in Dublin to decide the precedence of the units and the Monaghan Regiment came out first. However, units were usually referred to by their county or county borough titles rather than their numbers, although those numbers were to be worn on uniforms and equipment together with the unit badge.
The following is the text from Army Form W.3121 describing the date, place and action for which P/No 176456 W/Lieut (T/Capt) James Montgomery RUR was recommended for an award by the Commanding Officer of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Ulster Rifles, Lieutenant Colonel I C Harris, in June 1944 and forwarded through the chain of command for approval.
When Major General Bernard Montgomery assumed command of the 3rd Division on 28 August 1939, it was, by his own reckoning, a natural selection (‘I am the only man fitted to command it’) - and especially as he had commanded one of its brigades in 1937.
The last action for the 2nd Battalion The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, in 13 Infantry Brigade, was to hold a bridge position at Loo before its demolishion to delay the advancing Germans. The Inniskillings would then make their way to the beaches, arriving with only eleven officers and 204 other ranks by 31 May 1940.
The official war artist, Major Sir William Orpen*, portrayed the awful conditions that men experienced at 'The Front', in his poem The Church, Zillebeke, October 1918. The mud landscape that became synonymous with the Battle of Passchendaele was unimaginable to the ordinary civilian back home and Orpen's poem attempts to describe it:
(Right, Self-Portrait in Battledress in an area under bombardment,© IWM ART 5255a)
The Munich Agreement, signed by the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy on this day in 1938, ceded the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Czechoslovakia, a creation of the Versailles Settlement at the end of the Great War, was not consulted or party to the agreement. Munich was the latest in a succession of international agreements which sought to appease German and Italian military and territorial ambitions, and was intended to avoid military confrontation with Germany.
Corporal James Elliott was a Part-Time soldier in the 3rd Battalion The Ulster Defence Regiment's Newry Company. He lived with his wife and three children near Rathfriland, Co Down, regularly crossing the nearby Border because he worked as a lorry driver for a local firm. It was late afternoon, Monday 17 April 1972, when he was kidnapped by armed men near the Border Crossing Post at Killeen. He had been travelling north on the main road from Dublin when seized and then taken back into the Republic of Ireland (ROI).
A musket-ball maker was carried by soldiers to improvise ammunition from heated scraps of lead.
My Son
Here is his little cambric frock
That I laid by in lavender so sweet,
And here his tiny shoe and sock
I made with loving care for his dear feet.
I fold the frock across my breast
And in imagination, ah, my sweet,
Once more I hush my babe to rest
And once again I warm those little feet.
Where do those strong young feet now stand?
In flooded trench half numb to cold or pain,
Or marching through the desert sand
To some dread place that they may never gain.
_God guide him and his men to-day!
Though death may lurk in any tree or hill,
