Notes

New Zealand Tablet, 11 May 1916, Page 31

Notes

Irish Gallantry at Loos

As a timely set-off to the actions of the Sinn Feiners, Mr Phillip Gibbs has described the splendid gallantry displayed by the 16th Irish Division in breaking up a German attack made under cover of gas. ‘ While Sum Feiners,’ he said, as reported in a cable dated May 1, ‘were besmirching the honor of Ireland, the Irish Division in France is proving that there are no politics in the Army. ‘ The Dublin revolt is hateful to the men in the trenches. The Irish holding a chalkpit at Hullueh experienced a hellish bombardment on April 27. Day and night the whole Loos salient -was throbbing with high explosives. The officers rallied the men with the cry, “Steady, boys!” Then at five in the morning there was a sudden shout of warning of gas. The division donned gas helmets and, amid remarks such as “I wish Casement would get a taste of this,” the men fearlessly awaited the oncoming cloud, behind which were German infantry. The Dublin Fusiliers fiercely replied to the attack, and a German officer and forty-seven dead were left entangled in the barbed wire at one point. In a second attack the Germans, after more gas, reached a portion of the Inniskillings’ and Dublin Fusiliers’ trenches, but - a counter-attack ejected them in half an hour. This is the first time this Irish division has been in action, but the young soldiers were magnificently cool.’

The Man Who Dropped the Match

Home papers record the fact that the wretched Serbian student Priuzip, whose shot at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, set Europe a-fire, is dying of consumption in an Austrian gaol. An odd chance has left him to linger in prison and face death by disease while millions whose lives his shot imperilled have met their end by fire and sword. Five of those said to be implicated with him in- the plot were hanged, but his age was nineteen, and as a minor he could not by Austrian law suffer the death penalty. His sentence was twenty years’ penal servitude. Should he live to complete it, he would emerge to find the world'still bleeding from the wounds that came of his act. ‘lt is arguable,’ says the Manchester (r northern , ‘that no single action in all recorded time has so changed the fate of the world as his. It may be that the Great War would have come in any case. That we can never know. But the murder of the Archduke was the immediate cause of it as certainly as a dropped match is of an explosion in the powder magazine where it falls. If Norman William had died at Senlac, if Wellington had lost at Waterloo, the conceivable consequences would have been less wide than those which might have been averted if this Pan-Slav fanatic had held his hand at Sarajevo, as he confessed he was tempted to do when he saw the Archduke’s wife by her husband’s side in the carriage.’

Our Lady of the Trenches

In the following simple but graceful lines, contributed to the Rosary Magazine, Denis A. McCarthy brings out an aspect of life in the trenches which, to the Catholic mind, at least, goes some little way towards relieving the hellish horror of the ceaseless carnage which is draining the life blood of Europe:

Within the gloomy trenches Where hideous noises stun,

And death’s dark rainfall drenches The gunner and the gun,— Behold, there stands an altar

To Mary and her Son.

How strange to bring her hither, The Virgin Full of Grace, Where battle-tempests wither . The bravest of the race !—

But is she not their mother, And is not this her place?

These lads from hillsides heathy. These men from wood and wold. From bench and shop and smithy. From farm and field and fold, Their hearts lay hold on Jesus And Mary, as of old.

And prayers they used to prattle In boyhood, have become A prelude to the battle More potent than the drum, And, oh, the soul repeats them E’en when the lips are dumb.

And lest their spirits falter, And lest they fail as men, They raise her here an altar Within their darksome den. While waiting war’s wild fury To burst on them again.

And when the strong hand clenches In death’s last grip of pain. Our Lady of the Trenches, Be thou there with the slain, Nor let their heart’s devotion

To thee be all in. vain !