poem that he wrote a few days before the battle survived. Perhaps fearing that the end was near, Kettle had written To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God for his young daughter Elizabeth, born on 31 January 1913. The final, poignant lines are still regularly quoted:
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for Flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the Secret Scripture of the poor.
Dalton’s daughter Audrey told the author that her father carried a copy of that poem in his wallet with him all his life, until the day he died.
The 8th and 9th battalions of the Dublin Fusiliers led the assault through Ginchy, their objective being the German support trench on the northern outskirts. The town, on a hill, had been well fortified by German engineers. It was defended by the 19th Bavarian Regiment, which had only recently arrived in the sector and was not fully familiar with the positions it was required to hold. About 200 of the German enemy surrendered, while others ran, pursued by the attackers. It was said that because of the loss of so many of their officers, the Irish soldiers, in hot pursuit of the enemy, carried on beyond the objective, and had to be brought back. Eventually the Irish consolidated their positions around the town.
Dalton’s 9th Battalion suffered heavy losses in the attack on Ginchy. Many of the officers were killed or wounded, and Dalton, one of the most junior of the officers, had to take command of two companies – or what was left of the companies. He deployed these as best he could and sent a runner with a message back to command HQ that they were now in control of Ginchy. The order came back that they were to hold their position. The capture of Ginchy gave the 16th Division a prominent salient in the German lines, and it was only a matter of time before the Germans mounted a counter-attack. Bavarian infantry came in on the offensive at 18:20 and 21:00 and met stiff Irish resistance.
As Dalton and his men came under heavy fire, he deployed machine gun teams in key locations to discourage the enemy, even managing to take prisoners after he came face-to-face with enemy forces after dark. Dalton and his men held out until relieved after twenty-four hours by a battalion of the Welsh Guards. Dalton and another officer, 2nd Lieutenant Nicholas Hurst, a noted rugby player from a Church of Ireland family in Bantry, County Cork, were the only officers of the 9th Dublins to walk out of the battle relatively unscathed. The rest were killed, wounded or missing.11 In the aftermath of the battle Dalton served as acting Captain.
For his actions on the day of Ginchy battle, Dalton was later awarded the Military Cross – his nickname afterwards would be ‘Ginchy’. The full citation reads:
At the capture of Guinchy [sic], on the 9th of September, 1916, he displayed great bravery and leadership in action. When, owing to the loss of officers, the men of two companies were left without leaders, he took command and led these companies to their final objective. After the withdrawal of another brigade and [while] the right flank of his battalion was in the rear, he carried out the protection of the flank, under intense fire, by the employment of machine-guns in selected commanding and successive positions. After dark, whilst going about supervising the consolidation of the position, he, with only one sergeant escorting, found himself confronted by a party of the enemy, consisting of one officer and twenty men. By his prompt determination the party were overawed and, after a few shots, threw up their arms and surrendered.
Many years later, Dalton would remember Ginchy as ‘sad … a glorious victory with terrific losses’.12 The 16th Division suffered very heavy casualties in the period 3 September to 9 September – 224 officers and 4,090 men killed or wounded.13
Dalton was wounded in the fighting and was to spend time in hospital in France. While Dalton’s father may have had misgivings about him joining the British Army in the first place, he seems to have had a considerable sense of pride about his son being injured heroically in the war against the Germans. A notice in the Irish Independent on 21 September 1916, that appeared to have been placed by the family, declared: ‘Lieut. Emmet Dalton, Dublins, wounded, is a son of Mr J.F. Dalton J.P., 8 Upper St. Columba’s road, and 2, Talbot St., Dublin.’ The notice was accompanied by a photograph of a youthful Dalton in military uniform, sporting a military-style moustache.
Dalton received treatment for his wounds at The Liverpool Merchants Hospital at Étaples, France. It was one of a number of military hospitals situated in a sprawling base camp near the old town and port of Étaples, which lies at the mouth of the River Canche, in the Pas de Calais region of Picardy. He was one of the officers to receive a letter from a distraught Mrs Mary Kettle seeking details about her husband’s death, and the possible location of his remains. On 14 October Dalton replied to Mrs Kettle, apologizing for the delay in answering the letter. ‘I presume by now that you are utterly disgusted with me for failing to reply to your letter, but I assure you that if I had been in a fit condition I would have replied before now.’ He described the last moments of Tom Kettle, clearly trying to be as sensitive and consoling as possible.
Although an articulate man, decades later, in his RTÉ interview with Cathal O’Shannon, Dalton would struggle to find the words to convey the horrors of the Battle of the Somme: ‘It would be very hard to describe the Somme – I don’t know if there has ever been a battle like it.’ The butcher’s bill for this long-running fight was enormous. It has been recorded that between 1 July and mid-November 1916, the British Army suffered a massive 432,000 casualties – an average of 3,600 for every day of the blood-soaked encounter.
Return to Dublin
Dalton, no doubt to the great relief of his family, was stationed in Dublin for a period following his treatment in hospital. His mother, in particular, fussed over him, sewing leather cuffs onto the sleeves of his uniform.14 By early 1917, Dalton was attached to the 4th Battalion, RDF as an instructor in a musketry course. This was located at Bull Island, off the north Dublin suburbs of Clontarf and Dollymount, which was commandeered by the British Army in 1914 for a military training ground. A School of Musketry was established there complete with rifle ranges and facilities to teach trench warfare tactics. The clubhouse of the Royal Dublin Golf Club was taken over as quarters for officers. Dalton had probably established a reputation as a marksman to be selected as an instructor for this particular course.
In March, Dalton worked as an instructor on another course in his home city – an anti-gas attack course at the Irish Command School, Dublin. Both sides in the war mounted gas attacks, inflicting heavy casualties, and causing much fear and trepidation among troops targeted by chemical weapons.
Awarding of Military Medal by King George
A few weeks after giving the anti-gas course, Dalton travelled to London to collect his award for bravery from the British crown. On 2 May 1917, at Buckingham Palace, King George V awarded a range of decorations to members of the British Army and Commonwealth forces, ranging from the Distinguished Service Cross to the Military Cross. Among the approximately seventy military personnel who received the Military Cross, there were just two from Irish regiments – Second Lieutenant Richard Marriott Watson, Royal Irish Rifles, and Second Lieutenant Emmet Dalton, of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.15 Dalton’s luck held out and he would, of course, survive the war. Marriott-Watson, a poet and only son of the Australian-born writer, Henry Brereton Marriott-Watson, was killed the following March during the retreat from St. Quentin.
Decades later, Dalton reminisced to an American friend about the day he was presented with the Military Cross. Even though he had opposed the Easter Rising, it appears that nationalist sentiment engendered by the Rising had been having an effect on Dalton. The execution of the leaders, and their bravery in facing death, had stirred up public sympathy. He privately told journalist Howard Taubman about his feelings during the ceremony held in the presence of the
