A WAR VETERAN LOOKS BACK

Leinster Leader 3 August 1963

A War Veteran Looks Back

From Battlefields of France to Gandhi’s India

A 1914-18 war veteran stretched his tall, spare frame in Mr. Jimmy Gibbon’s hairdressing premises in Ballitore on Saturday and quietly recalled some of his war experiences.

He was Mr. Bill Dunne of Colbinstown, one of the best liked men in Ballitore district. A solider in the first Battalion of the Irish Guard’s, he fought in France. At the battle of Passchendaele Ridge in October 1917, a German bullet that hit his nose left on it a long scar that remains today.

In the battle he and 34 other British soldiers were captured and placed in a cage of wire mesh but all 35 escaped from it and got back to the British lines.

He received his first wound in February 1916, when a bomb splinter pierced his side and rendered him unconscious. He regained his senses to find himself in a hospital in Scotland. 

TOLD OF 1916 UPRISING

He was discharged from the hospital in Easter Week of 1916 and allowed home on leave. Unaware of the uprising in Dublin at that time, he arrived in that city in his khaki uniform and was surprised to find all the public houses closed during what would have normally been trading hours.

“Any chance of getting a drink?” He asked a man he met outside one licensed premises.

With a startled look at Bill’s uniform, the man explained that all the shops were closed because of the uprising that was then raging in parts of the city, and advised. “The best thing you can do with that uniform on you is get out of the city as quickly as you can.”

Bill promptly took his advice, and was in time to catch a train to Colbinstown station. During his time in the trenches Bill learned what it meant to be short for food. At the battle at Loos in 1915, he and his comrades were cut off in the trenches from their base and left without food supplies for six weeks.

On another occasion at Levante their supplies of food ran short, and, Saxon-Bavarian troops in the enemy trenches 150 yards away taunted him and his companions by displaying empty bully-beef tins on the points of their bayonets. “They even filled the tins with clay and fired them into our trenches with catapults,” he reveals.

For the war service Bill received three decorations. At the end of world war no. 1 he left the Irish Guards and joined the Dublin Fusiliers. Later he was posted to India, where he remained 18 months until the Irish regiments of the British Army were disbanded at the signing of the Irish Treaty.   

RECOLLECTION OF GHANDI

In India he was stationed in a jungle camp near the city of Multan. At the time he was there the district had not had rain for 30 years and none had fallen by the time he left. The winters were even warmer than the summers, he says.

On one occasion he saw Ghandi being arrested in Multan, and his recollection of him is that of a very small, emaciated man clad in a loin cloth.

After being disbanded from the British Army, Bill returned home, and was one of the early ones, to join the Irish army then in course of formation. He served in the National Army until it was reorganised in 1924. From 1924 until 1958 he was employed in his native district at agricultural work.

Now 70 years of age, he lives in retirement with his wife, Ellen, his son, William, and his daughter, Mary. The rigours and hardships of the 1914-1918 War eventually took some toll of his health and he is no longer able for ordinary farm work.

He is a native of Blackrath, which is in the same area as Colbinstown, and belongs to a highly respectable family that has had its roots in the area for at least four generations.  

Re-typed by Jill O’Connell