Great War to Gaza: a family story

ON Tuesday of last week in City Hall, Cork, I attended the launch of the book ‘A Great Sacrifice – Cork Servicemen who Died in the Great War’.

With sadness I turned the pages of the book to the name of my grandfather, Christopher Lane, who died on the Western Front in December, 1914. His brother, John, my grand-uncle, died on the same battlefront in October 1915.

My late mother was the only child of the union between Christopher and Margaret Mary Lane; she wasn’t a year old when her father went off to the Great War, never to return.