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.