Field of Bones - An Irish Division at Gallipoli

?Ireland’s War of Independence generated a wealth of published material but very little from a British perspective. Yet many British servicemen left accounts of their time in Ireland from 1918 to 1921. They describe military operations, the IRA, the Irish, the actions of their own forces, morale and relationships with local communities. There is Brigadier Vinden’s strange tale of a drinking session with Michael Collins and humour in the sending of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders into a public house to eavesdrop in the belief that Sinn Féiners always spoke Irish to each other. The author has gone deep into British military archives to unearth these never-published accounts. Supplemented with unpublished photographs from the Imperial War Museum and the Irish National Library, these accounts form a landmark oral history told through the personal experiences of men from across the ranks.

The story of how the Tudor monarchy and its servants broke down Gaelic culture and society and, over the course of six bloody decades, built their supremacy on the Island of Ireland.

In 1500 Ireland was mostly outside the control of the English government it was largely Gaelic in culture, and with a religious split that reflected ethnicity rather than theology.

By 1600 (or at least by 1607), all of Ireland was subject to the English monarchy. Gaelic cultural and legal systems had been side-lined and outlawed. Old ethnic divisions between Old Irish and Old English had been superseded by new ones and the beginnings of a bitter confessional divide between Catholic and Protestant had been fostered. In short, the foundations of Ireland’s modern history were laid in this period. This ebook tells that story.

About The Author

John Dorney is the author of The Story Of The Easter Rising, 1916, The Story of The Irish War Of Independence and The Story Of The Irish Civil War.

John was born in Dublin in August 1980 and grew up in the southern suburb of Rathfarnham. He studied history and politics in University College Dublin and completed a Masters Thesis on the 16th century Irish chieftain Florence McCarthy entitled, Florence MacCarthy and the conquest of Gaelic Munster, 1560-1640s.

The Royal Highland Fusiliers came into being in 1959 as a result of the amalgamation of two regiments, both of which had strong connections with Glasgow and the west of Scotland: The Royal Scots Fusiliers, founded in 1678 by Charles Erskine, fifth Earl of Mar; and The Highland Light Infantry, or HLI, created in 1881 as a result of the amalgamation of the 71st Highlanders and the 74th Highlanders.

Two distinctive infantry traditions can be found in the names of these regiments, which have helped to form the line infantry regiments of the British Army. Fusiliers were armed with the flintlock fusil instead of the more common matchlock musket, and light infantry came into being during the Napoleonic Wars to provide the army with a corps of skirmishing sharpshooters similar to Austrian and German J�ger troops.

Amongst those who have served as fusiliers or light infantrymen are Hugh Trenchard, who became Air Chief Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Winston Churchill and David Niven, who joined the HLI from Sandhurst in the inter-war years. All these traditions and personalities went into the making of a regiment whose name lives on in the 2nd battalion of The Royal Regiment of Scotland, which was formed in 2006 as a result of the restructuring of the infantry regiments of the British Army.