Personal Experiences
of the
Great War
An Unfinished Manuscript
Written by Frank M. Laird B.A. T.C.D
Late Royal Dublin Fusiliers
I command you to read and enjoy this extract from 'Personal experiences of the great war' by Frank Laird.
...........We had put in a pleasant month on the Curragh and I had just got my wife installed in Kildare . Not far from the camp when the batallion moved to Moore Park Fermoy,on August 10th.
The Great House at Moore Park which is now no more.
This splendid demesne just outside the village of Kilworth,was an ideal spot for training and the hutments were even better than those we had left,the place was surrounded by delightful country and the small but busy town of Fermoy was only a few miles away. This distance could be travelled by either on foot or by one of Noble's taxis, a collection of ramshackle 'tin lizzies'driven for hire by a set of southern Irish desperadoes with little regard for their lives or those of their passengers.
One of these contraptions leaving the camp one night with a full load of lady passengers from a dance, drove full tilt, despite the warning cries of the sentry, into a gate which had been closed by special order and deposited itself and its load in the ditch
One famous Sunday night has fixed itself in my memory. My wife and I with another cadet alighted at midnight in Fermoy from the Cork train. The rain was coming down in torrents. There was one taxi outside ordered by us, but already full of cadets in a cheerful frame of mind. A voice from within declared that they would get out for no one on God's earth! Then they heard there was a lady outside and out they tumbled,and proved to our surprise and amusement to be all friends of our own from the 7th Dublins. By judicious cramming seven or eight of us packed in as well as the driver and set off with creackings and groanings outside the station. Here the protesting bus finally struck, and we had to sit in it by the side of the road till another of the same should return from camp. At length our driver hailed one and we transhipped and set off again. Our new conveyance had little or no light. The glass screen was obscured by the driving rain and the night was pitch dark. In spite of all, our man drove like John son of Nimshi, and about half way home way home banged full tilt into the back of an outside car preceding him on its proper side of the road. The horse was almost thrown over the wall beside the road, the shafts were broken and four cadets, passengers, and the driver were spilled on the thoroughfare highway. By some miracle we came to a standstill right side up. On investigation it appeared that one of our victims was knocked unconscious.
A taxi opportunely turned up with a party bound for camp and it our friends humped the unconscious cadet and persuaded the reluctant travellers to convey him to Fermoy Hospital on the grounds that we had a lady with us and could not take him in.
This affair being satisfactory concluded,we proceeded on our way in a very lopsided fashion, but reached Kilworth without further mishap in the small hours of the morning, and frozen to the bone
Immediately on my arrival in Moore Park I set about a hunt for digs with a view to enjoying as much domestic life as possible amid war's alarms. By good fortune I recognised an old acquaintance in the curate of the place, and with his aid secured a very comfortable sitting-room and bedroom in a carpenter's house on the main,and only street of Kilworth just outside Moore Park wall. Here I installed my wife and having secured a 'sleeping out pass' was able to spend my time from 4pm daily till the next morning's parade,unless that bete noir of training 'night work' appeared on the bill of fare.
Life thus slipped by very pleasantly through August, September and October, varied by boating and bathing in the Blackwater, cycling through the beautiful scenery of Cork county and a week-end or two in Cork county.
In the middle of October our final examination came around partly book work and partly work on the parade ground. Lieutenant Broadhurst had charge of the latter, and put us through our facings in platoon drill.
A week before we left a change came over the battalion. Our little gentleman Colonel S-M-was replaced by a stark disciplinarian, lamed and shattered in the war, and apparently embittered also in spirit. He lost no time in tightening up the strings. Among his first orders was one that all sleeping-out passes were to be cancelled. Consternation reigned among the married cadets. We pointed out to our company commander that we had wives abandoned outside the walls of Moore Park, and if this order stood we could not rejoin them. Then we waited in a body on the adjutant,who assuaged our troubled spirits by assuring us that there had been a mistake that there was no intention to deprive men who had passes already, but that no more would be issued.
So our last few days we spent in peace and we departed towards the end of October, thanking the saints that our term had ended before worse things befell us. Those we left behind had a much more strenuous time then fell to our lot, and hold themselves lucky at the end if they were not turned down for some distaste in the mind of the Colonel to cut the end of their jib. He carried matters so far, indeed that he was requested, I understand from higher quarters to moderate his destructive zeal and was remonstrated with in a more energetic and southern Irish fashion by some of the local civilians who threw a bomb at him one day as he was out on his horse.
This little ebullition of popular feeling may have been due in part to the discovery of a considerable leakage of government property from the camp. A search was instituted by the police in Kilworth village and some hundreds of pounds worth of stuff unearthed in the houses of the inhabitants. The Government has always been considered fair game in Ireland, but this was pushing the doctrine a bit to far.
Having successfully cleared the last fences, I returned to Dublin with a few weeks leave in which to enjoy my new made dignity of an officer of His Majesty's army and to enrich the tailor with the fifty pounds provided for my kit. Had I been as wise as I was a few months later I would have saved part of this sum by waiting to get most of my kit from the Ordnance in France, but as it was I finished with the Dublin outfitters something on the wrong side of the fifty pounds.
Having been gazetted to the 11th Reserve Battalion of the Dublin Fusiliers, I joined them in Wellington Barracks in November and took my place in the officers' mess which I had humbly guarded as a private during the Rebellion.
In this battalion there were collected a number of officers and men waiting to be drafted to France. As there was so large a proportion of the former the duties were light, and fortified again with leave to sleep out of barracks, I spent most of my time at home or displaying the magnificence of my new uniform and Sam Browne belt in Grafton Street.
While in barracks the only work one had was to hang around watching bomb throwing instructions or drill or 'physical jerks'. One of the bombing instructers had had a remarkable escape in one of the early gas attacks, where the 8th Dublins were nearly wiped out. When the gas came over he put on his mask and began to fire steadily across the parapet. The barrage became very heavy and most of the men in his trench were killed. He tried to move along the trench when a shell blew out part of the parapet near him and buried him under a sandbag or two. Here he lay while the German bombers came over, and having first bombed the trench took possession of it and here he was found when the counter attack drove them out again. He was taken up blackened and almost dead from gas poisoning but strange to say recovered, though the effects remained to some extent in a pair of badly damaged lungs.
Towards the end of the year I found myself in orders for a gas course at Island Bridge, one of the final preliminaries to a visit to the pleasant lands of France. We were lectured on the chemistry of the new atrocity and the best means to combat it, and taught to handle the gas masks then in vogue. We were then put through the gas chamber, in which we had first to stay a few minutes with masks on and then to go in and change masks in the gas. These manoeuvres were completed successfully, and we were passed out as graduates on the subject of gas, after a short examination.
In the middle of January 1917, I, with several other officers were ordered to report at Southampton en route to France................
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THE MILITARY BARRACKS
