When the Franco-Prussian War broke out, the sympathy of Ireland was naturally, for historic reasons, on the side of France. It was not surprising, then, that many young Irishmen who had served in America, or in the ranks of the Papal Volunteers, or had borne a share in the Fenian movement, were anxious to show their sympathy in a practical way, and at the same time to gratify the national propensity for a fight
—in any good cause at all.
I happened to number among my friends some of these young Irishmen, of whom I may mention Captain Martin Kirwan, James Lysaght Finigan, Edmond O'Donovan, Arthur Forrester, Frank Byrne, and James O'Kelly. There was a strong feeling in Ireland to send a considerable body of men to France, but the law stood in the way. It was evaded by the formation of an Ambulance Corps, and for this generous subscriptions flowed in, along with numerous applications from volunteers. These were all medically examined, as if for a regular army, and in this way as fine a body of young men as ever left Ireland was picked from those who had volunteered. The ambulance service was equipped in the most perfect manner, and presented to the French nation. On arriving in France, there were (as was, of course, intended) more men than were required for the ambulance duties, and these at once volunteered for service as soldiers. They were formed into a company under the command of Captain Kirwan, one of the sergeants being Frank Byrne, who was afterwards Kirwan's colleague as an official of the Irish constitutional organisation in Great Britain. The company might have developed into a regiment, and even into a brigade, had the movement started earlier to get men over to France by various means. This could have been done, notwithstanding the Foreign Enlistment Act; and towards the end of the war, French agents were in this country providing for the sending over of large numbers of men to France, when the capitulation of Paris caused the collapse of their arrangements.
The men of the Irish Ambulance Corps did their work so well as to show that not only did Irishmen make good soldiers, but that, possessing the sympathetic Celtic nature, their services were highly appreciated by the wounded who fell to their charge. Captain Kirwan's company fought bravely, sustaining the credit of their country through the whole campaign, and, under Bourbaki, were among those who actually struck the last blow the Germans received on French soil.
Arthur Forrester, who joined the French Foreign Legion, was severely wounded in the foot. After the war he came into the office of the "Catholic Times," when I was manager and John McArdle editor of that paper. We welcomed him, of course, not only as an old friend and brother journalist, but as one who had been fighting for France.
In his "Camp Fires of the Legion" written for my "Irish Library," James Lysaght Finigan tells of his adventures in the war. He found his way to Lille, in the north of France, and, with several hundreds of other Irishmen became enrolled in the ranks of the Foreign Legion. In Lieutenant Elliott he was delighted to recognise Edmond O'Donovan, who had figured so prominently in the Fenian movement, and whose incarceration in Ireland and exile in America were fresh in his memory. "The Legion," Finigan says, "showed itself worthy of its predecessors, the Irish Brigades of former days, during the reverses that constantly befel the armies of France." He gives graphic accounts of the battles they were engaged in, and how, in the defence of Orleans, he and a number of his comrades were taken prisoners, among those being his friend O'Donovan, who had been wounded by a piece of shell.
The Foreign Legion must have borne the brunt of the fighting. The fourth battalion was cut to pieces at Woerth, Gravelotte, and Sedan; the fifth battalion was reduced from 3,000 to some 300; the sixth battalion retook Orleans, was compelled to abandon it, and covered itself with glory at Le Mans and elsewhere; and the seventh was interned with Bourbaki in Switzerland until the end of the war.
Although I often heard from him afterwards, the last time I met Edmond O'Donovan, if I remember rightly, was in a North Lancashire town, in which John O'Connor Power had been lecturing the same night. I forget exactly who else of the "boys" were there—I think William Hogan was one—but there were some choice spirits, and we made just such an Irish night of it as Finigan describes they had when he and O'Donovan fought in the Foreign Legion.
Edmond O'Donovan was the son of the famous Irish scholar and antiquary, John O'Donovan, the translator from the Gaelic—with O'Curry and Petrie—of that great Irish history, "The Annals of the Four Masters," and other manuscripts. The elder O'Donovan had made the acquaintance of Sir Thomas Larcom, when both were young men together on the staff of the Ordnance Survey. John O'Donovan appointed his friend Larcom to be guardian of his children in case of his death.
It was Larcom's duty, as an official of the Government, to hunt down the Fenians, both native and foreign, so that he had undertaken a serious and perplexing charge. For O'Donovan's elder sons were strong Nationalists and Fenians; so that, on the death of his old friend, Larcom was like an old hen having charge of a brood of ducklings who could not be kept from the troubled waters of Fenianism. There is no doubt that Larcom's influence kept them from or saved them from a lot of trouble. The O'Donovans were an accomplished family, the one I knew best, besides Edmond, being Richard, who has held a responsible mercantile position for some years, and who furnished me with much valuable information about his father, when Thomas Flannery—one of our best Gaelic scholars—was writing a life of Dr. John O'Donovan for my "Irish Library" series.