You could not walk far in the Peninsula without seeing them, sometimes thickly crowded together outside a field-ambulance, sometimes a solitary cross marking the spot where a sniper’s victim had been buried. Each of these tombs had at its head a little wooden cross bearing the man’s name, regiment, and rank, and the date of his death, and in some cases his comrades had done a little more. Here Australian gunners had made a pattern with fuse caps on the earth that covered their friend, and there a lid of a biscuit-tin had been beaten into a plaque, bearing a crucifix. Death had made strange bedfellows: in one little cemetery high up at the Chailak Dere behind Rhododendron Ridge there lay side by side Private John Jones, Royal Welsh Fusiliers and Sergeant Rotahiru of the Maoris. From the two ends of the earth Christian and Buddhist and Sikh had come to fight in the same cause, and in death they lay together. It was my lot in the last days of September to endeavour to compile a register of where the men of my Battalion had been interred, and as I went from grave to grave writing down the name of one Irishman after another I was irresistibly reminded of Davis’s lines:
“But on far foreign fields from Dunkirk to Belgrade
Lie the heroes and chiefs of the Irish Brigade.”
Now the age-long quarrel with the Turk had carried Irishmen even further afield and the “Wild Geese” who fought on the Danube under Prince Eugene found their successors in those of the 10th Division who lay under the Cross of Christ in the barren waste of Gallipoli.
Not indeed that every grave was marked with a cross. Some had fallen within the enemy’s lines and others were hastily buried under the parados of a captured trench without even a stone to mark where they lay. In the heat of battle, it was impossible to delay for forms and ceremonies, and often even the names of the fallen were not noted. Only those who died in hospital were buried with proper rites, but it mattered little where the bodies of the heroes rested. The whole land is one shrine, made sacred by the memory of devotion to duty and self-sacrifice, and no man could wish to lie elsewhere than in the ground he had won from the enemy.
Yet it seemed a pity that it should be knocked to pieces so soon. Much labour spread over many weary months had gone to form it and to make it worthy of the name of Irish, and it was tragic that it should practically be annihilated with so little tangible result achieved. It is not perhaps altogether easy for the civilian to understand how sorrowful it seems unless he realises that a unit trained to arms has a spiritual as well as a material being. A battalion of infantry is not merely a collection of a thousand men armed with rifles; it is, or at any rate, it should be, a community, possessing mutual hopes, mutual fears, and mutual affection. Officers and men have learnt to know one another and to rely on one another, and if they are worth their salt, the spiritual bond uniting them is far stronger and more effectual for good than the power conferred by rank and authority. In the 10th Division the bonds uniting all ranks were unusually strong. In the first place came love of Ireland shared in equal degree by officers and men. Second to this, and only second, was pride of regiment, happiness at forming part of a unit which had had so many glorious deeds recorded of it and resolution to be worthy of its fame. The names of the battalion, Dublins, Munsters, Inniskillings, Connaught Rangers, spoke not only of home, but also of splendid achievements performed in the past, and nerved us to courage and endurance in the future.
Above and beyond these feelings, common to all Irish soldiers, the 10th Division had a peculiar intimacy gained from the circumstances of its formation. It was the first Irish Division to take the field in war. Irish Brigades there had often been; they had fought under the fleur-de-lys and the tricolour of France and under the Stars and Stripes as well as they had done under the Union Jack. But never before in Ireland’s history had she sent forth a whole division (but for one battalion) of her sons to the battle-field.
The old battalions of the Regular Army had done magnificently, but they had necessarily been brigaded with English, Scotch and Welsh units. The 10th Division was the first Division almost entirely composed of Irish battalions to face the enemy. Officers and men alike knew this and were proud of their destiny. As the battalions marched through the quiet English countryside, the drums and fifes shrilled out “St. Patrick’s Day” or “Brian Boru’s March,” and the dark streets of Basingstoke echoed the voices that chanted “God Save Ireland” as the units marched down to entrain. Nor did we lack “the green.” One unit sewed shamrocks on to its sleeves, another wore them as helmet badges. Almost every company cherished somewhere an entirely unofficial green flag, as dear to the men as if they were the regimental colours themselves. These constituted an outward and visible sign that the honour of Ireland was in the Division’s keeping, and the men did not forget it.
There was singularly little jealousy in the Division. Naturally, where there were two battalions of one regiment in the same brigade, each one of them cherished the belief that they and they alone were the true representatives of the old regiment, but this was only wholesome emulation. Where this cause for rivalry did not exist units were on very good terms, and at Basingstoke, where the different messes first really got to know one another, there was any amount of friendship and good fellowship. Every battalion, of course, believed that it was the finest Service Battalion in the Army, but it was also convinced that the remainder of the Division, though inferior to itself, reached a very much higher standard than any other unit in K.1.