Great Britain. Army; World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns; World War, 1914-1918 -- Regimental histories
A Tipperary man, serving on the English Mission in the Province of
Liverpool, Father Finn joined the 1st Dublins on their arrival in
England from India for active service, in November, 1914. The Dublins,
with the 1st Munster Fusiliers, took part, as I have already
described, in the first landing of British troops on the Peninsula, at
Sedd-el-Bahr, on Sunday, April 25th, 1915. On the Saturday morning
Father Finn heard the confessions of the men on board the transport,
off Tenedos, said Mass, and gave Holy Communion. Then on Sunday
morning he asked permission of the commanding officer of the battalion
to go ashore with the men. Colonel Rooth tried to persuade him to
remain on the transport, where he could give his services to such of
the wounded as were brought back. "You are foolish to go; it means
death," said the officer. "The priest's place is beside the dying
soldier; I must go," was Father Finn's decisive reply. For these and
other particulars of the gallant action of the priest, I am mainly
indebted to the Rev. H.C. Foster, Church of England naval chaplain,
who was in one of the warships engaged in the bombardment of the
Peninsula at the landing, and highly esteemed Father Finn as a friend.
Father Finn left the transport for the shore in the same boat as the
Colonel. When the boats crowded with the Dublins got close to the
beach a hail of shrapnel, machine-gun fire, and rifle fire was
showered upon them by the Turks, hidden among the rocks and ragged
brushwood on the heights. Numbers of the Dublins were killed or
wounded, and either tumbled 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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