Private Leonard Edwin Pasquire
6th Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment
09/10/1915

Limerick Leader, November, 1915

Clare Man’s Escape.
Wounded by Bullet.
Which Killed Another.
Remarkable Incident in Instruction Class.

Letters just received by his relatives and friends in Clare contain details of the extremely narrow escape which a popular young Clare man, Corporal Dan O’Brien, of Clare Abbey, has had in England. An account of the accident appeared in the English papers recently, but his name was not given in it. Corporal O’Brien, who is well known in public life in Clare, being for some time Chairman of the Ennis District Council and of the Clare Sanatorium Committee, it will be remembered, volunteered for the front last spring, and joined the Royal Irish Regiment. His Battalion (the fifth) proceeded to England a couple of months ago, and he had bee at Blackdown camp, Canterbury. An instruction class was being held in the camp, and by some means a live cartridge came to be used. It was discharged, and the bullet passed through the fleshy part of the corporal’s right hip next passed through a wooden partition and struck a soldier belonging to a Guernsey corps who was in a class in the adjoining room, and finally through yet another partition. The corporal is progressing well.

In a letter from Corporal O’Brien, Connaught Hospital, Aldershot, he says;-

“I expect you will be surprised to hear I have got my baptism of fire, but not by a German bullet yet. Well, I am shot in the right hip-side of the buttock. It happened like this. A class of us (VCO’s) with an officer was having lessons in the mechanism of the Lewis automatic machine gun, when a live cartridge got accidentally mixed with the dummy cartridges for demonstration purposes. It got into the chamber and was discharged with the result that as I was sitting half sideways on the table, with the muzzle of the gun touching my hip, the bullet went through the right side of my hip, and through a wooden partition, and, the most unfortunate part of it, through the lung of a soldier named Private Leonard Pasquiers, killing him. I was removed immediately to here, and I expect will be stuck in bed for a few weeks.

However, I am lucky, for but a short time before that I was standing right in front of the gun. I am doing very well. Captain W Redmond and other officers of the Royal Irish Battalion(sic) called here to see me. This hospital is of course Royal Army Medical Corps, with men orderlies, and staffed with Red Cross nurses. The hospitals here are filled with wounded from France, etc.

All the Clare boys are well.”

 

 

Commonwealth War Graves Commission Record