The Big Fight (Gallipoli to the Somme)

Captain David Fallon, M.C.
THE BIG FIGHT
( Gallipoli to the Somme )
BY Capt. DAVID FALLON, M.C.
New York W. J. Watt & Company PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1918, by W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.


When great historians with their learned pens shall come to set forth the complete story of the most sweeping and horrible war the world has ever known, I figure they may perhaps have need of such evidence, information and material as a man like myself can give. I mean a man who has been through the red hell of the vast conflict in places where it has flamed most fiercely, a soldier who has been eye-witness of its superb heroisms, its stupendous tragedies, scientific marvels, has undergone its tense emotional and psychological experiences, bears on his body its wounds, has seen at first hand with the amazement all civilization has felt, the cowardice, bestiality, utter moral abandonment to which a nation may fall in a mad dream of the conquest of the world.
My name is David Fallon. I am of the County Mayo, Ireland. And I’d ask your pardon for a word or two by way of boasting in stating that my ancestors for a pretty-long journey back into history, have always figured in the man-sized battles of their generations. My father, a naturalist, rushed away from gentle scientific pursuits in 1870 to bear arms for France against the Prussians. And it isn’t only because I’m Irish that I fought to get into this present big fight—and I did fight to get into it—but for the pertinent and additional reason that it was in France father met Mlle. Sarah Voltaire who not very long thereafter became Mrs. Fallon.
And small wonder, with my boy’s mind stirred so many an evening by the exciting stories of the Franco-Prussian battles my father and mother would tell us of in the glow of the old library fireplace, that I had no trouble electing the course of my life. I left the University of Dublin to enlist in the British army. I joined a Northumberland regiment, Nov. 19, 1904, and the military examiners were not at first quite so enthusiastic about the performance as I was for I offered them no Hercules. I was then only eighteen years old, a little under medium height and slim as a whalebone. A weighing machine as far as I was concerned escaped with the small effort of marking one hundred and ten pounds. But I was sound of eye, tooth, blood and heart and so they cordially handed me my uniform—even if they did have to trim off the sleeves of the tunic a bit.