All the night of the 21st the Munsters waited, and all the night of the 21st it rained and snowed and stormed.
The pitch darkness of a night of waiting is a memorable experience, even when there are many such to record. There is the curious feeling of loneliness common to all humans out in the night. The bright smoke of fires over the land behind the parapets of the German trenches made will-o’-the-wisp columns of misty light; sometimes a star shell shot up, lighting the place like day, and sometimes the crack of a rifle tore the dark and spattered in the mud of the trench. Life and death come much closer in the night than they do in the day time, and the whole almost intolerable mystery of war is intensified a thousandfold. Very slowly the sullen dawn broke, as if unwilling to reveal the sights that night clothed over, and the sodden fields and the barns and farmsteads stood out blackly against the grey. The green and yellowish water lying over the flats was frozen, and the dead were very visible, lying in pathetic heaps amid the refuse of a thousand unexpected things. The weary desolation of dawn over French Flanders passes all description.
Lieutenant-Colonel A. M. Bent, C.M.G.
2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers, dangerously wounded at Festubert, 22nd December, 1914
Record of Service:—South African War, 1902—Operations in the Transvaal, January to April, 1902. Queen’s Medal, with three clasps. North-West Frontier of India, 1908—Operations in Mohmand Country. Medal with clasp.
The noise grew with the morning light, and the boom and bang of heavy crashes grew fiercer, until the hour arrived when the Battalion, led by Colonel Bent, started to the attack.
The men swarmed over the parapets and raced across the fields, carrying their heavy equipment and following their officers over the shell-scarred, churned-up earth. Strands of barbed wire beset their way, and the ground was broken by great shell-holes. Before them, from the German trenches, the machine guns hammered out their deadly message of welcome; and the men went gamely on, most splendidly led by their officers.
Major Thomson, Second in Command, fell across the first German trench, but would not permit himself to be removed; continuing to issue orders from where he lay, he was wounded again, the second wound proving fatal. He met his death unvanquished and unappalled, and his name remains bound in with the great story of the Regiment. Colonel Bent fell in the earlier part of the charge, desperately wounded; Major Day was killed a little later, showing the greatest gallantry; and Captain Hugh O’Brien, a young Irish officer beloved by his men, and who had been proved in the South African War to possess unusual dash and coolness, fell as he shouted to his company, “Get a bit of your own back, boys.” Not twenty yards from where Captain O’Brien fell Captain Durand met his death. He had joined the 3rd Battalion Royal Munster Fusiliers in 1906, having served through the Matabeleland and Mashonaland campaigns in the Rhodesian Horse; he died most nobly, leading at the extreme point of the advance made by C Company, under fierce enfilading fire. The sorrow and the heroism of such death is touched by the great enduring light of glory.