“la compagnie irlandaise;” REMINISCENCES OF THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR

This is the story of the Irish Company that fought on the side of the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 with Le Regiment Etranger. The man behind the idea and commander of the company was Capt Martin Waters Kirwan, a native of Galway and lately a lieutenant in the Royal Glamorgan Light Infantry Militia, who was most concerned the way the war with Germany was going against France. Irish sympathies for France manifested itself in the decision to form an Ambulance Corps (four ambulance wagons), for which three hundred volunteers were accepted – far too many. But a number of these much preferred the idea of carrying rifles rather than stretchers and these took advantage of a free trip to France so they could get into the fight. Kirwan was the man they rallied to and thus the Compagnie Irlandaise was born – all on the pay of a halfpenny a day. Mark you, it wasn’t as simple as all that but you’ll have to read the book to get the picture. There were two lots of Irish volunteers, one from London the other from Dublin. The London Irish were not very popular with the locals whereas the Dublin Irish went down better, and that had to be sorted out. Kirwan was very proud of his men noting: Your Irishman is surely a soldier by intuition. He can learn as much drill in one month as an English clodhopper will in two…..Personally, I am half and half so I presume he would give me six weeks to come up to scratch.
This is the story of what happened to them and an entertaining story it is. There was the Irish sentry challenging an unfortunate French local with shouts of “Qui, qui,qui – who’s there? the local was struck dumb, totally confused, while the Irishman kept roaring out “Qui, qui”. The Frenchman thought he had wandered into the German lines, the sentry thought he had caught a German spy.
But they fought well and despite some appalling conditions their morale remained high. One complaint was that by the time they got into action the war hadn’t got far to run. Kirwan’s comment on this is enlightening: We cannot forget that if we were late in the field, we were last out of it. We must treasure it as one of the most satisfactory of our reminiscences, that we heard the last shot and saw the last German souls sent into eternity, during the Franco-German war …..