more did the same, and I was
already flat on the bridge. Those two chaps were at each side
of me, but not for long, as the shrapnel was bursting all
around. I was talking to the chap on my left, and saw a lump of
lead enter his temple. I turned to the chap on my right. His
name was Fitzgerald. He was from Cork, but soon he was over the
border. The one piece of shrapnel had done the job for the two."

Thus men in khaki poured out of the side of the _River Clyde_ and
raced down the gangway or jumped from it at once on to the first
lighter. Two men out of every three fell. The commanding officer of
the Munsters, Colonel Monck-Mason, was wounded and put out of action
early in the proceedings. Soon the first and second lighters were
piled high with wounded and dead, twisted into all sorts of horrid
shapes, and the men who escaped being instantly shot were to be seen
stepping and jumping and even walking over the bodies of their fallen
comrades. Many of these flung up their arms, spun round, and, with a
cry of agony, went splash into the sea never to rise again. Then the
horrors of the situation were added to by a most unfortunate mishap.
The lighter nearest to the beach gave way in the current and drifted
backward into deep water. The men in it jumped out in the hope of
being able to swim and wade to the shore. Most of them were drowned by
the weight of their equipment. But the Munsters never quailed. All the
time they continued emerging from the _River Clyde_, in an unbroken
stream, two men out of every three still dropping on the gangway or on
the bridge, and the survivors still pressing forward with their faces
dauntlessly set for the land. Those who got to the shore rushed to
join the Dublins under the scanty cover afforded by the low sandy
escarpment. The first of the Munsters to gain the beach was Sergeant
Patrick Ryan. He swam ashore in his full kit; and got the
Distinguished Conduct Medal for "showing under heavy fire the
greatest coolness and powers of leadership."

Mr. H.W. Nivenson, one of the newspaper correspondents with the
Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, mentioned in a lecture on the
operations which he delivered in London, that he and others saw the
landing through their glasses from a ship some miles out at sea. One
of the party, seeing the men who had landed dropping on the beach, and
not understanding the tragic nature of the scene, remarked to Mr.
Nivenson: "Why are our men r