The Glorious Madness – Tales of the Irish and the Great War: First-hand accounts of Irish men and women in the First World War

By Turtle Bunbury

From tragic generals to nuns on the run – the extraordinary stories of the Irish on the frontlines of the First World War that you've never heard before

Based on first-hand accounts of the First World War, The Glorious Madness is a collection of character portraits and stirring anecdotes that brings to life the hopes, fears and ambitions that defined the generation of Irish men and women lost to the catastrophe of the first great modern war.

From the generals and field commanders through to the troopers and nurses on the front lines, from the trenches of the Somme to the beaches of Gallipoli, the Irish served at every turn in the Great War.

Popular historian Turtle Bunbury is renowned for uncovering important forgotten stories from our past. Here he reveals many never-before-heard tales of the Irish heroes and heroines whose lives coincided with one of the most brutal conflicts our world has ever known – including nuns, artists, sportsmen, poets, aristocrats, nationalists, nurses, clergymen and film directors.

From the dramatic story of the nuns of Ypres and their escape to Ireland to found Kylemore Abbey, to the multiple-escapist who became the one-legged nemesis of Michael Collins, and the five tragic, rugby-loving pals from the same Dublin team massacred at Gallipoli, the stories that Turtle Bunbury unearths about Irish men and women offer a new and timely perspective on Irish participation in the Great War.

An important book, by turns poignant, enlightening, whimsical and darkly comic, this is history as it should – free-wheeling and finely tuned to the rhythms of the human heart.

Reviews

[In The Glorious Madness] Turtle continues the wonderful listening and yarn-spinning he has honed in the Vanishing Ireland series, applying it to veterans of the First World War. The stories he recreates are poignant, whimsical and bleakly funny, bringing back into the light the lives of people who found themselves on the wrong side of history after the struggle for Irish independence. This is my kind of micro-history.
John Grenham, The Irish Times

A wonderful book packed with great individual stories and pictures which bring the Irish participation in the Great War vividly alive.
Sean Farrell, Irish Independent

Based on first-hand accounts of the conflict, this collection of character portraits and stirring anecdotes brings to life the hopes, fears and ambitions that defined Ireland's 'lost generation'.
Peter Costello, The Irish Catholic

Turtle Bunbury's book about the Great War is a great read, a dramatic confection of remarkable stories about remarkable events and individuals slapped together with great dexterity and professionalism. … This is military history as entertainment on a scale we have not seen since, well, the First World War …
This is one book that can be judged by its cover.
Pádraig Yeates, Dublin Review of Books

The impressively versatile Turtle Bunbury is known for his sensitively written, well-observed Vanishing Ireland series of books and his appearance on RTE's Genealogy Roadshow. He also toured this year as one of the lecturers in the Great War Roadshow, headed by Myles Dungan.
Now, also marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Bunbury marches into what once would have been a no-man's land for historians.
There is much to enjoy here. Bunbury has an eye for irony and pathos and a fluid attractive writing style. It's packed with personalities and stories of courage under fire amid truly unimaginable slaughter, of mind-boggling military incompetence and of individuals emotionally afflicted by reports of courage in another cause at home.
Emmanuel Kehoe, Sunday Business Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Oct 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9780717166145

Turtle Bunbury

Turtle Bunbury is a bestselling author, historian and television presenter. He has established himself as one of the most prolific and energetic history writers in Ireland, publishing eleven books to date, including the bestselling Vanishing Ireland series. Having grown up surrounded by old portraits and dusty books at Lisnavagh House, County Carlow, Turtle studied history at Trinity College Dublin before moving to Hong Kong where he became a travel writer. Returning to Ireland some years later, he was determined to bring Irish history to life for all those who felt the past was just a dull chronicle of dates, dates, dates. His quest has led him to a succession of fascinating book titles, including the highly acclaimed Vanishing Ireland series, as well as to the History Festival of Ireland, which he co-founded. Turtle is a well-known name on Irish television and radio, and a contributor to magazines such as The World of Interiors, Playboy and National Geographic Traveller. He is co-presenter of RTÉ’s ‘Genealogy Roadshow’, voice of Newstalk’s ‘Hidden Ireland’ series and the founder of Wistorical, an innovative concept for promoting Irish history globally through social media. Turtle lives on the family estate in County Carlow with his wife Ally and their two daughters, Jemima Meike and Bay Hermione.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

MY HAIRBRUSH ONCE BELONGED TO A MAN CALLED ALAN APPLEBY DREW, AN UNCLE OF MY paternal grandmother, who was working as a teacher at Mostyn House School in Cheshire when the Great War broke out. Alan was a man who liked to sing and entertain. He had travelled a good deal and spent a few years in Shanghai. His father was on the Scottish team who took on England in the world’s first rugby international. Alan evidently felt sufficiently Scottish to join the Cameronians, aka the Scottish Rifles. Lieutenant AA Drew arrived on the Western Front in February 1915 and lasted four weeks. The 31-year-old was killed at Neuve-Chapelle, alongside most of his fellow officers from the Cameronians. I found his grave in the Royal Irish Rifles cemetery at Laventie and I thanked him for his hairbrush. After his death, his distraught family gifted a carillon of 31 bells to Mostyn House, one bell for every year of his life. When that school closed a few years ago, the bells were offered to Charterhouse in Surrey, where Alan had been at school. Considering that Alan was one of a staggering 687 past pupils from Charterhouse who died in the war, the school was very keen to take the bells. And so it was that on a sunny afternoon in May 2014, I stood beneath a belfry at Charterhouse, alongside my father and my oldest brother, listening to the clanging melodies as AA Drew’s carillon rang anew.

My maternal grandmother also lost two uncles in the war. Guy Finlay and his younger brother Bobby grew up at Corkagh House near Clondalkin, County Dublin. Their father was Lieutenant Colonel of the 5th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and, not surprisingly, both sons joined the regiment. So too did their eldest brother, Harry, who succumbed to dysentery in the Anglo-Boer War. Bobby was killed in Flanders during a failed attempt to capture the German trenches at Aubers Ridge in May 1915. Fourteen months later, Guy fell at the Somme, caught out by the German counter-attack at Bazentin Ridge.

Three years ago, my brother and I went to find our great-great-uncles’ graves on the Western Front. Before we left, I dashed into the woods of Corkagh Park on a whim, seeking something from the old family home that I might place on the Finlay brothers’ graves, should we find them. Rather pathetically, the best I could come up with were two leaves from a majestic old horse chestnut tree that they had perhaps played beneath as boys. The bodies of Guy and Bobby were never found, so they had no graves. However, I found their names on the memorial walls at Ploegsteert and Pozières and I wedged the chestnut leaves alongside them.

It was exceptionally moving to find Alan Appleby Drew’s grave and the names of the two Finlay brothers. But it was at the cemetery in Tyne Cot in Flanders that the immensity of the war overwhelmed me. I walked alone down a path through line after line of those proud white headstones, with a wall blocking the view to my left. I thought I might have become immune to all the death by then, but any jauntiness in my stride vanished and I found myself walking ever slower until I ground to a halt just at the point where the wall beside me ended. And then I turned my eyes to the left and I slumped. Behind the wall, the field of graves was replicated again and again as far as I could see, like the saddest dream ever dreamt. Endless rows of white upright slabs, 12,000 all told, framed at one end by the ‘Memorial to the Missing’ upon which were written the names of another 35,000 whose bodies were never identified.

Most veterans of the Great War felt compelled to submerge their experiences in grim silence, creating an emotional void that would torment their wives and their children to such an extent that I think the repercussions of that war will be felt by unknowing generations for many decades to come.

For those who returned to Ireland after the war, the horror of their experience was magnified by the realisation that everything they fought for amounted to naught and that anyone who thought otherwise was no longer welcome. Although many of those who won independence for the Irish Free State had formerly served in His Majesty’s forces, there were powerful elements within the new order that would oblige the country at large to throw an unforgiving eye on ex-servicemen of the British Empire. In time, the hostility became amnesia and the Ireland of my youth in the late 20th century seemed to have a history in which the only war the Irish ever fought was for freedom from Britannia’s rule.

Tom Kettle was one of Ireland’s most brilliant nationalist politicians when the war erupted. He chose to fight because he believed the Kaiser’s army would destroy the very fabric of Europe. And yet he was also intuitively aware of how the truth could coil upon itself. In the wake of the Easter Rising, he wrote: ‘Pearse and the others will go down in history as heroes, and I will be just a bloody English officer.’ When the Irish President Michael D Higgins addressed the Houses of Parliament in Westminster in the spring of 2014, he spoke of Kettle specifically, and acknowledged all of the other Irish men and women who served. It was another coming-of-age moment for Ireland, an end to decades of silent schizophrenia.

There are no clear-cut figures as to how many Irish actually fought. By the time you combine all the Irish or half-Irish who served in the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and US armies, there was probably more than a quarter of a million. Tempers tend to rise during the guessing game of how many Irish-born actually died but a figure of between 35,000 and 40,000 seems to be increasingly accepted. The Irish war dead remain almost entirely forgotten in most of the towns and villages from whence they came. In the small town of Tullow, County Carlow, where I wrote this book, at least 63 men perished in the war but I suspect that very few people in the town have ever heard of those 63 dead men.

This is not a definitive book of Irish involvement in the war. It is simply a collection of Great War stories with an Irish twist. From the generals and field commanders through to the troopers and nurses on the front lines, the Irish served at every turn. They tore through the skies in flimsy biplanes. They soared across the seas in battleships. They charged across the tortured earth with bayonets fixed. They wrapped bandages and dabbed softly in the field hospitals. They prayed, they sang, they killed, they wept and they died.

The book explores the lives of some of these people — the Home Rule politicians who died for the Empire; the Anglo-Irish aristocrats and working-class Dubliners who fell side by side; the padres who tried to bring comfort and peace; the flying aces and sharp-shooting snipers; the dashing cavalry officers and their noble steeds; the future Irish rebel leaders who learned their military skills in British uniform; the luckless Benedictine nuns and white feather victims caught up in it all; the songwriters, poets and painters who tried to show people back home how it really was. Many of these men and women were unbelievably courageous. Others seem to have been pathologically designed for war. And there were some who loathed every second of it.

It has been an amazing privilege to spend such a concentrated time getting to grips with this tangled web of campaigns, battles, regiments, battalions and so many names, numbers, twists and deaths that it sometimes became hard to breathe. By night, I dreamt of giants shrouded in barbed wire cloaks upon the shattered shores of Gallipoli, of soldiers crying in the streets of Ypres, of cricketers catching hand grenades and nurses trudging through incessant snow.

My aim has been to look at war from the perspective of the people. When I walked the stark lines of Tyne Cot and all those other cemeteries, the war slowed down. Every headstone represented a human being; their names stared at me like eyes from another world. Their cheerless fate was decreed by the simple fact that their abbreviated lives coincided with one of the most brutal conflicts our world has ever known.

. . .

PART ONE

T

     H

           E

WESTERN

FRONT

. . .

THE WESTERN FRONT

• • •

THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE IRISH MEN AND WOMEN WHO SERVED IN THE Great War did so on the Western Front. Running for approximately 400 miles from the North Sea through Belgium and northern France into the Swiss Alps, the front line was created when the British, French and Belgian armies combined forces to halt the German military advance. To consolidate their respective positions, the various armies dug trenches either side of the front line. Over the next four and a half years, the war for the Western Front would involve at least 50 different battles including the Somme and Ypres. Such offensives were characterised by the greatest artillery bombardments ever known, the ghastly introduction of poison gas and the increasingly fundamental role of aeroplanes to both observe and bomb enemy positions.

The Germans so nearly won the day when they launched their Spring Offensive in March 1918. However, the failure of that offensive spelled the end for the Kaiser’s ambitions and finally brought the German Empire to its knees.

Upwards of four million people died on the Western Front. A further 11 million were wounded, captured or otherwise vanished. This section looks at some of the Irish who participated. The career soldiers and hapless civilians who marched side by side. The bold, godforsaken men who charged over the top. The holy men and medics who offered succour to the wounded and dying in No Man’s Land. The audacious pilots who plunged through the lead-filled skies. The displaced octogenarian nuns scampering through the ruined city of Ypres. The artists who painted the carnage. The poets for whom the war became muse.

THE IRISH DAMES OF YPRES

THE

IRISH DAMES

OF

YPRES

. . .

THE GERMAN SHELLS WERE BLASTING INTO THE WALLS OF YPRES AS THE PRIORESS LED HER clutch of petrified nuns through the desecrated streets. Behind them, orange flames ripped through the corridors of the 17th century Irish convent which had been their home for so many years – over half a century in the case of Dame Josephine, the oldest of the Irish nuns.

It was not easy going as they stumbled through the rubble, their arms laden with packages of clothing and prized belongings. German shells shrieked through the skies. Every explosion was followed by the deafening crash of slates and bricks tumbling to the ground.

Through the haze, two men in British uniform appeared alongside the women, grabbed their packages and began to help them down the street.

‘It is very kind of you to help us,’ said a nun.

‘It is our same religion,’ replied one soldier.

‘And our same country,’ added the other.

The soldiers were Irish Catholics, one from Kerry, the other from Belfast. Their regiment is unknown, but together they helped the nuns reach the relative safety of the outskirts of the Belgian city. It must have been extraordinary for the two soldiers to find themselves lurching through the madness of Ypres with such an unlikely harem. Perhaps they wondered about escorting them all the way back to the Allied lines but, without authorisation from their superiors, they hesitated.

The Kerryman was the first to go, departing in haste, but the Belfast soldier remained until the nuns told him he really ought to rejoin his regiment. When Dame Columban later described their escape from Ypres, she told how the Ulsterman shook hands with each one of them while the nuns ‘thanked him heartily, wishing him good luck and a safe return to dear old Ireland!’

Just before he left, the Prioress took him to one side and handed him a bag of pears. ‘Here, take these pears and eat them, and we will pray for you.’

The Belfast man turned his head away abruptly, mumbled ‘No, no, keep them for yourselves’, and burst into tears. And then, just as suddenly, he ran back to the war, waving his hand and shouting ‘God speed.’

The Prioress stood still with her bag of pears and wept as she watched him go. When Dame Columban arrived to comfort her, she said: ‘I could keep up no longer when I saw that dear, kind, genuine, Irish-hearted man break down. How I wish I could know his name.’

‘Come along,’ said Dame Columban gently. ‘Let us hope that one day we shall find it out, but don’t cry any more or you’ll have me joining in too.’

Ypres was once amongst the most affluent cities in medieval Europe. At its heart was an Irish convent, established in Rue St Jacques (now Sint Jacobstraat) in 1665. Twenty-one years later, the convent was officially dedicated as the Irish Benedictine Abbey of Our Lady of Grace. Dame Mary Joseph Butler of Callan, County Kilkenny, was elected its first Abbess.¹ Over the next quarter of a millennium, all bar two of its Lady Abbesses were Irish, carrying names such as O’Bryan, Ryan, Dalton, Lynch and Byrne. Amongst the best-known pupils to pass through its doors were Nano Nagle, who founded the Presentation Sisters in 1775, and Judith Wogan-Browne, who was entrusted with the leadership of the first Brigidine Sisters in 1807.

The convent at Ypres survived the French Revolution intact, largely thanks to the intervention of Jacques O’Moran, a Roscommon-born French General who was guillotined during the Reign of Terror. While Ypres itself was badly damaged during the ensuing Napoleonic Wars, the Benedictines discreetly continued about their business and, for several years, the Irish Abbey was the only convent of any order still existing in the Low Countries.

The convent’s luck ran out 100 years later when Ypres — or ‘Wipers’ as the British pronounced it — became one of the most violently contested battlegrounds on the Western Front.

The Irish Dames, known in Ypres as De Iersche Damen or Les Dames Irlandaises, received a foretaste of the coming horror in early September 1914 when the Belgian Government ordered the expulsion of all German residents from the kingdom. Four of the Benedictine nuns were German; a choir dame and three lay sisters, one of whom was the cook. All four had been enclosed within the convent for at least 25 years. On 8 September, to the considerable shock of their community, a Belgian official arrived at the convent and ordered the four women to leave Belgium within 36 hours.

Scholastica Bergé, the Lady Abbess, was the first Belgian to lead the community. In her prime, she would have been able to put manners on King Leopold himself. However, she was now confined to her bed, having been paralysed by a stroke two years earlier. Dame Maura Ostyn, the 46-year-old Prioress, who was also Belgian, did what she could for the German Dames but to little avail. Amid scenes of much tearfulness, the four women left Ypres for a convent just over the frontier in Holland.

At least seven of the 15 Benedictine nuns who remained in Ypres after the departure of the German Dames were Irish. Dame Placid came from County Wexford, as did her cousin Kate Rossiter, aka Dame Aloysia. Dame Josephine, née Fletcher, may also have hailed from Wexford while Dame Patrick was certainly Irish, but from where is unknown. Sister Mary Winifred started life as Dublin-born Emma Hodges and may have been related to the well-known Dublin booksellers. Sister Romana King, who would join the group in their flight from Ypres, is also thought to have been Irish.

The two youngest Irish Benedictines were Dames Bernard and Teresa. Born in 1889 and christened Maureen Stewart, Dame Bernard was a granddaughter of James Stewart, a Catholic convert from England who moved to Dublin in 1851 to become Professor of Greek and Latin at Cardinal Newman’s Catholic University.

Dame Teresa, aka Dora Howard, was 19 years old when she joined the Order in 1904.² She was a niece of John Redmond, the Irish Parliamentary Party leader, and his brother, Major Willie Redmond. The Redmond connection to the abbey at Ypres appears to have been strong for several generations, and it would soon play a fundamental role in the fate of the Benedictine nuns. It also explains why John Redmond sat down at his desk in April 1915 and penned the introduction to a 200-page memoir entitled The Irish Nuns at Ypres: An Episode of the War. Vividly written by Dame Columban, this manuscript offers a blow-by-blow account of how the Irish Dames coped with the destruction of everything around them, and chronicles their epic, but harrowing, escape.

Four weeks passed between the exodus of the German Dames and the first attack on the once sleepy city of Ypres. It was a hideously tense era during which the city did all it could to make itself seem unimportant. Any form of light by night was prohibited. So too were loud noises, and the belfry that normally summoned the nuns to prayer was replaced by a few discreet shakes of a handbell. All the while, the German Army edged ever closer.

At 1.30pm on 7 October, an enemy aeroplane flew overhead. Shortly afterwards, German long-range guns opened fire on Ypres and the convent began to shake. Enclosed within its walls, the women prayed fervently. Within half an hour of the German bombardment, the Prioress gathered her Dames and her Sisters and told them that the Germans had just overpowered the Belgian policemen defending the old city walls.

Over the next six hours, approximately 10,000 German cavalrymen trotted into the city from the Menin Road in the south-east and the Lille Gate in the south. Chanting victoriously, they were followed by convoys of armoured cars, carriages, carts and field guns. They quickly secured every building in the city, cut the telephone wires, destroyed the telegraph system and posted armed guards at every turn. Up above, German spotter planes circled the autumnal skies.

‘It is all over with Ypres,’ wrote Dame Teresa in her diary. ‘The guns we heard all yesterday were the last defence of the Belgian Army or rather police and they were only a hundred against fifteen hundred. They are all over the town, and the Burgo-master is a prisoner. What is going to happen?’

Soldiers were billeted in the Cloth Hall, the schools, the army barracks and hundreds of private homes. The next morning, a washerwomen who worked for the Irish Dames was obliged to give breakfast to 30 Germans, several of whom had slept in her house. Some had led their horses into her drawing-room and then, after jesting that she and her sons were now ‘Belgo-Germans’, they pilfered all her clean washing including, she added sadly, all the convent’s towels.

· · ·

One of the Irish Dames wanders amid the ruins of Ypres.

But while the nuns prayed and prayed and waited for the Germans to smash their way into the convent, the only new arrival was Edmund, their elderly Falstaffian servant, who said the Germans were moving on already. When he asked a German where they were headed, the soldier brashly replied, ‘To London!’

Amazingly, no Germans sought refuge in the abbey that night. In fact, during this first short occupation of Ypres by the Kaiser’s army, the nuns’ greatest concern was ‘the want of bread’. Predictably the Germans relieved the nuns’ baker of his loaves when he attempted to make a delivery to the convent. When the Prioress sent out for flour, she was informed that ‘none was to be got’, and so the nuns had to be content with their limited supply of rice, Quaker oats, coffee, butter and some tins of fish. ‘The milk-woman, whose farm was a little way outside the town, was unable to come in,’ wrote Dame Columban, ‘and no meat could be got for love or money’. It was several days before a wily farmer managed to slip past the Germans and bring the nuns some potatoes.

One week later, 21,000 British and French troops arrived in Ypres. The first the Irish Dames knew of their arrival was when they heard the soldiers ‘singing lustily’ as they passed alongside the convent.

‘We were actually engaged in the Litanies with the words, From all evil, good Lord deliver us,’ wrote Dame Teresa, ‘when we suddenly heard the heavy tramp, tramp of soldiers, and the sound of singing. We trembled, thinking of the terrible Uhlans [a contemporary term for the German cavalry]… but judge of our surprise and amazement when we found out that it was an English song, and lo! mingled with our cries of supplication came as it were in answer: Here we are! Here we are! Here we are, again! We almost joined in, but, of course, we daren’t.’

‘But imagine the thrill of joy that went through our hearts. Then outside in the streets we heard the clamours of the populace joining in with Alo, Alo! and cries of joy. We were just wondering in our Irish hearts whether or not it was an Irish regiment that was the first to enter, thinking of the dear old standard with the harp on it, of the days of the Irish Brigade. Suddenly, we got our answer. In gruff brogue we heard the song which everyone seems to be singing everywhere else and always — It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go.’

By the time Edmund arrived at the convent with eagerly awaited bread supplies, the Allies had taken up defensive positions around the east of the city, vowing that the Germans would never enter it again. Edmund added that much the greatest Belgian cheer had been for the ‘petticoats’ of the Scots Highlanders. Bread was still very much in demand, but the Prioress passed some of Edmund’s precious loaves to a ‘poor man, with tears in his eyes’ who wanted to send them to his son on the front line.

For several weeks, Ypres became the British Army’s chief headquarters on the Western Front. At the convent, the Irish Dames returned to the normal business of prayer, but the possibility of a German counter-attack was always on their mind, not least when the octogenarian Dame Josephine prayed aloud to the Heavens, ‘Dear St Patrick, as you once chased the serpents and venomous reptiles out of Ireland, please now chase the Germans out of Belgium!’ Her words were all the more epic for her age. Christened Josephine Fletcher, the Jubilarian was professed in 1851 and had been living in Ypres since 1854. In her youth, she had known nuns who lived through the French Revolution.

The Benedictines began making Sacred Heart badges for the Allied soldiers to wear, particularly Irish Catholics in the British Army. Hélène, a poor woman who washed the convent steps, distributed them amongst the troops. They proved so popular that the convent was soon subject to ‘the constant ringing of the bell’ as more and more people requested badges for loved ones on the front lines. One young girl literally brought them by the dozen to St Peter’s Church in the Rijselstraat, where an as yet unidentified Irish battalion was billeted. As she pinned the badge onto each man’s uniform, she solemnly announced that its makers were the Irish Dames of Ypres.

Dame Josephine was right to be fearful. While their daily news was full of conflicting tales of neighbouring villages and towns lost and destroyed, there could be no doubt that, as Dame Columban wrote, the ‘ever-approaching sound’ of gunfire meant that ‘the danger was steadily increasing for the brave little town of Ypres’. The Germans were staging a comeback.

With the rising noise came the first refugees. The Irish Dames soon found themselves feeding at least 40 such souls, serving up soup, boiled potatoes, bread, porridge and beer. The Prioress put the nuns on standby to gather up emergency parcels in case they had to flee suddenly. The very notion of leaving the convent was absolutely alien to most of these women who had spent so much of their lives in peaceful solitude within its walls.

From Edmund and the washerwomen they learned that the Germans now greatly outnumbered the Allies and that a second assault on the city by the Kaiser’s army was imminent. Hearts sank when word arrived that Bruges had fallen. From their upstairs windows, the Irish Dames could see smoke rising from distant battlefields. The windows of the convent were starting to shake again.

On 21 October, the citizens of Ypres were advised that the city was about to be shelled by the Germans. The Prioress arranged for all valuables to be taken down to the cellar, including the bed-ridden Lady Abbess. Dame Columban was particularly anxious about a large barrel of petrol in the garden. If it caught fire, she feared, ‘we should all be burned alive’. Armed with spades, Dames Teresa and Bernard dubbed themselves the ‘Royal Engineers’ and spent an entire day digging a huge hole in the garden. Unfortunately, when the hole was dug, the Dames did not have the strength to either roll or tip the barrel into it but, on the plus side, they used all the freshly dug earth to solidify the outer defences of their underground safe room.

Edmund reported on the brief wave of optimism that swept through Ypres when nearly 40,000 khaki-clad troops from India and Nepal arrived into the city. However, this was offset by the already commonplace sight of badly maimed and dying soldiers being brought in by ambulance from the front.

· · ·

Officers and soldiers, thought to be from the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), consider their situation amid the rubble of Ypres following a major artillery bombardment by German shellfire. The luckless town was the site of three major battles during the Great War and much of its fine architecture was destroyed.

The Dames now spent their waking hours rolling bandages, cut from sheets and veils, fastening a Sacred Heart badge to each roll. It seemed likely that the convent would be requisitioned as a hospital. A French officer visited and declared it ideal. The nuns duly cleared out the rooms — the refectory, library, classrooms, children’s dormitory, novitiate and workroom — only for the officer to return and tell them that he had found a better place.

Reports of German atrocities became ever more alarming. Two German aeroplanes were seen throwing petrol bombs on neighbouring villages. Women, including nuns, were reported to have been subjected to ‘outrageous barbarities’. Dame Teresa wrote in her diary of how she ‘trembled, thinking of the atrocities perpetrated on other convents like the one at Peck where they had torn clothes from the nun’s backs.’

The second bombardment of the city of Ypres began on the afternoon of 28 October. Not everyone took it as seriously as they perhaps should have done. When a bomb blew out the windows of a house on Rue Notre-Dame, the owner gamely ordered the glazier to come and fit new ones.

That night, Dame Teresa found just enough light to scribble in her diary: ‘The German shells fell on the town to-day. The first fell in the sleepy moat just outside the ramparts. We have now to live in our catacombs; even the sanctuary lamp is out, and the chapel no longer contains the Blessed Sacrament.’

The main concern for the Prioress was to remove the 84-year-old Lady Abbess from harm’s way. She assigned this task to 38-year-old Dame Placid, aka Elizabeth Mary Druhan, who was born at Our Lady’s Island in County Wexford, where the O’Druhans were territorial chiefs at the time of the Norman invasion. She took her name from her mother’s uncle, Dom Placid Sinnott, OSB, one of the founders of the Benedictine monastery, Downside Abbey.

On 30 October, Dame Placid left the convent along with the three most vulnerable women: the paralysed Lady Abbess, the elderly Dame Josephine and 73-year-old Sister Magdalen Putte. The Lady Abbess did not want to go. As Dame Columban put it, the poor woman was so ‘moved when the news was broken to her that it took four women to carry her downstairs’. With the aid of a carriage that the Prioress had managed to borrow, Dame Placid escorted her small party eight miles west to the small town of Poperinge — or ‘Pops’ as the British called it — where they were received into the convent of La Sainte-Union, together with several other refugee communities.

Meanwhile, as the bombing intensified in Ypres, the Prioress and the remaining Irish Dames dragged their carpets, armchairs and ‘straw-sack’ mattresses down to the cellars. As some priests were by now staying with them, the cellars were divided into male and female quarters.

It was miserable in the cellars, listening to the German guns growl ‘like some caged lion’. Nobody had seen an egg or a drop of milk for weeks. Nor was there any fish or bread to be found. It was increasingly uncomfortable, with 57 people now sleeping in the cellars, including a Flemish workman who, panicked that his house was about to be blown up, had pleaded to join them with his wife and four children. By day, ‘numberless poor’ arrived at the door seeking food, ‘for they could not find anything to eat in the town’.

· · ·

A convoy of horses and wagons pass by the ruins of St Martin’s Church and the Cloth Hall of Ypres.

In early November, the Prioress ordered the Dames to gather up their prized belongings and prepare to evacuate. Dames Columban and Bernard were given a quick blessing and then abruptly thrust into the mud and chaos of central Ypres with instructions to find a workman to carry their belongings.

‘What a sensation!’ marvelled Dame Columban. ‘Happy prisoners for so many years, we now found ourselves in the streets. With a shudder, we started on our errand.’ In a daze, the two women scampered from one doorway to the next. German shells and shrapnel bombs were once again whistling in from afar and exploding in the city. Allied guns responded with thunderous resolve. The abandoned grand houses of Ypres’ once illustrious textile dynasties were collapsing. Men sloshed through the mud with bandaged bodies on makeshift stretchers, desperate to get the wounded out of the city. French cavalry trotted this way and that. Monoplanes and biplanes loomed above; some dropped bombs, others engaged in dogfights. And in between all this, the two nuns continued to dart with uncertainty until an officer finally persuaded them to return to their convent which was, as Edmund gallantly assured them, as fine a place to die as anywhere.

The Prioress became so determined to gauge the strength of the Allied defence of Ypres that she then decided to leave the convent and walk to a chateau in Brielen, two miles outside Ypres, where Sir Douglas Haig was based. She ambitiously sought an audience with Haig himself, but had to make do with his aide-de-camp who offered her some ‘vague information’ and a lift to Poperinge in his car. As she walked home, she met some British soldiers who assured her, ‘Oh, it will soon be over… we’ll be home for Christmas!’ She no longer believed such upbeat remarks.

Back in Ypres, bombs were falling with increasing accuracy. On the Prioress’s command, Les Dames Irlandaises assembled their packages and ‘passed with a last farewell through the long-loved choir, which had known the joys and sorrows of our whole religious life’. Even as they were fastening the locks on the front door, the first shell struck the abbey, sending ‘a shower of bricks and glass falling into the garden’. The Benedictines fled down the deserted street and then turned back to see the convent on fire. ‘A cry of anguish arose from our hearts.’ It was at this point that the two soldiers from Belfast and Kerry came to their aid and escorted them out of the ruined city.

There was some respite when, after the Belfast man left without his pears, their Flemish workman friend arrived with a ‘stylish-looking hand-cart’ onto which he roped their luggage. For decades the farthest any of these women had walked in a day had been six or seven perambulations around their little garden. Now, they found themselves on a heavy-hearted nine-mile trudge westwards to Poperinge, tramping alongside cavalry, infantry and scores of other refugees. The sisters followed behind the handcart, wading through ‘thick slimy mire’ so bad that ‘we seemed to slide back two steps for every one that we made forward’. They walked through darkness and rain, the roadsides heaped with dead horses, a red moon glimmering through gaunt and leafless trees.

Finally, they came to Poperinge where they were reunited with the Lady Abbess and accommodated for two weeks in a refuge run by the Carmelites, along with 11 nuns from the Sacred Heart Chapel in Ypres.³ The latter were particularly shook; six of their community were missing and at least one of them had been blown up.

The mood was sombre in Poperinge, but the Irish Dames did what they could to resume their normal routine, making badges, praying and reciting the Benedictine grace before and after meals. They began visiting the wounded, which gave them ‘an insight into human misery which we should never have had’. Men laid out for amputation, men with missing jaws, men with broken eyes. They fed them pear slices and tried to raise their spirits. When they died, as so many did, they offered ‘De Profundis’ for the repose of their souls.

Dame Josephine did not survive. The 80-year-old Jubilarian, who had implored St Patrick to oust the Germans from Belgium, succumbed to a combination of shock and exhaustion.

A few days after her funeral — during which a