276 sportsmen Parsons in Peace and War 



up his poor crippled right arm with his left to enable him to 

 make the sign of the Cross as he absolved the man of all his 



sins. 



Some of the Dubhns wanted to carry him to the pinnace 

 taking wounded back to the ship, but he would not leave his 

 men, though at the time he was practically bleeding to death, 

 being riddled with bullets. The last words before a bursting 

 shell fractured his skull were, " Are our fellows winning ? " 

 and amid the soldiers he loved so well and served so faithfully, 

 and the thunder of the guns on land and sea, he passed away. 

 None died more gloriously that terrible day than the young 

 priest, who was barely forty. 



The Rev. T. A. Harker, the chaplain who buried Father Finn, 

 in a letter home describing what happened, says, " The little 

 boats were trying to land, but just as they reached the shore 

 they were met with a fusillade of rifles and machine-guns ; the 

 slaughter was appalling, men drowned, men dying without any 

 hope of being assisted, and soon the only passage to the shore 

 was over the bodies of the dead and dying. ... It is un- 

 fortunately true that many of our wounded have been bayoneted 

 and outrageously treated." 



The landing that had been pronounced by many as im- 

 possible had been accomplished, but at what a cost ! Within 

 an hour of breakfast the Brigadier, the Brigade-Major, and the 

 CathoHc chaplain were lying dead, and a steam-pinnace by 

 8 a.m. was alongside the transport laden with broken men, the 

 first of many such loads. More than half the men who attended 

 Mass the day before on board the Clyde were dead. 



None who witnessed that gallant effort of the 29th Division 

 will ever forget the scene. On the beach more than a quarter 

 of a mile in width lay in heaps the shattered bodies of what once 

 were men, in the stillness of death, the happy heedlessness of 

 death. An hour before, all.were eager to " do or die," but what 

 chance had they ? One man, speaking of that day, said, " We 

 had no run for our money." Another, " It was a foregone 

 conclusion and a certain death-trap." 



It took the chaplains four days and nights, working un- 

 ceasingly, to bury the dead. 



News of Father Finn's death reached his brother at Hull 

 with the usual cold and official regrets, perhaps a trifle softened 



