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 The 2nd Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the Tragedy of Mouse Trap Farm, April & May 1915, by Tom Burke

Published by the Royal Dublin Fusliers Association in Dublin in 2006, 45 pages. A5 size booklet (N7295PE)

This booklet provides a fascinating short account of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusliers during a 4 week period in 1915, when the men of the battalion were involved in bloody fighting along the Western Front...

It began when the 2nd Battalion was rushed forward from its position on the 23rd of April 1915 to stem a German breakthrough. This breakthrough was the result of the first gas attack of the war, and in order to prevent further German advances the Dublins went into the line at Mousetrap Farm.

Between the 25th of April and the 25th of May the battalion was subjected to a major gas attack, and over the period 127 men were killed and 1,094 were missing. The reality behind these figures is conveyed in the booklet through a number of personal stories....

From the rear side cover: Here in this booklet are many finely-presented details of the ferocious gas attacks visited on Irish troops of the 2nd. Royal Dublin Fusiliers (the Dublins) and the 1 st. Royal Irish Fusiliers (the Faughs), in the period April and May 1915. If, as Wilfred Own said 'the poetry is in the pity', then it is also true that 'remembrance is in the details'. That these extraordinary events of bravery and destruction were forgotten so long, or transmuted by necessity into silence by grieving families in a nascent Irish Free State, has been a tragedy added to a tragedy. In being uncovered by such staunch rememberers as Tom Burke of the RDF Association, who courageously has put his mind back into these fearsome scenes, and itemised such deaths and horrors for the sake of vanished men, and for the sake of their surviving families - in being uncovered now they gain the force of something that happened only yesterday. As if, in being forgotten for some eighty years and more, those eighty years and more in some guise never happened, and we may say, this happened recently. Which may explain the extraordinary force of the accounts in this booklet, of these early and murderous attempts to produce an effective 'lachrymatory' bomb; so that, the booklet itself is a kind of benign 'lachrymatory' bomb, because it cannot be read without tears.

Certainly the names cannot be read without a deep feeling of thankfulness for their human testimony. The places cannot be marked with the finger on the map of Flanders without allowing that here, in the tally of appalling deaths, there is a corner forever Ireland; places where the sons of Dublin and Armagh and a hundred other points of Ireland died. Tom Burke cannot just be commended by us for his work of remembrance; the very souls and remnants of those men must sing to him, in whatever haven they may have reached.

The condition of the booklet is generally very good. The covers are clean and bright, the staple spine is tight and intact, and all pages are clean, intact, unblemished and tightly bound.

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