bled into the water or dropped on reaching the
beach. This fearful spectacle was Father Finn's first experience of
the savagery of war. It terribly upset him. He at once jumped out of
the boat and went to the assistance of the bleeding and struggling
men. Then he was hit himself. By the time he had waded to the beach
his clothing was riddled with shot. Yet disabled as he was, and in
spite also of the great pain he must have been suffering, he crawled
about the beach, affording consolation to the dying Dublins. I have
been told that to give the absolution he had to hold up his injured
right arm with his left. It was while he was in the act of thus
blessing one of his men that his skull was broken by a piece of
shrapnel. The last thought of Father Finn was for the Dublins. His
orderly says that in a brief moment of consciousness he asked: "Are
our fellows winning?" Amid the thunder of the guns on sea and land his
soul soon passed away. He was buried on the beach where he died, and
the grave was marked by a cross, made out of an ammunition box, with
the inscription--"To the memory of the Rev. Capt. Finn." Gallipoli is
classic ground. It is consecrated by the achievements of the ancient
Greeks over the Persian hordes at the dawn of Western civilisation. It
is now further hallowed as the grave and monument of that warrior
priest, Father Finn, and the gallant Dublins and Munsters.

The next Catholic chaplain to lose his life on active service was
Father John Gwynn, S.J., of the 1st Irish Guards, who was killed in
the trenches near Vermelles on October 11th, 1915. Born at Youghal,
and reared in Galway, Father Gwynn entered the Society of Jesus in
1884. At the outbreak of the war he was one of the governing body of
University College, Dublin, and volunteering for active service he was
attached, the first week of November, 1914, to the Irish Guards, as
their first war chaplain. A big, handsome man, and soldierly in
appearance, Father Gwynn was fitting in every way to be chaplain to so
splendid and almost wholly Catholic body of Irishmen as the Irish
Guards. His experiences at the Front--the devotion he showed to his
duties and the risks he ran--prove more than the truth of the old
saying that every Irishman is born either a soldier or a monk, for
they establish that often he is born both.

Father Gwynn was the first chaplain of any denomination attached to
the British Expeditionary Force to be wounded. That was during the
memo