incarceration in Ireland and exile in America were fresh in his memory.
"The Legion," Finigan says, "showed itself worthy of its predecessors,
the Irish Brigades of former days, during the reverses that constantly
befel the armies of France." He gives graphic accounts of the battles
they were engaged in, and how, in the defence of Orleans, he and a
number of his comrades were taken prisoners, among those being his
friend O'Donovan, who had been wounded by a piece of shell.

The Foreign Legion must have borne the brunt of the fighting. The fourth
battalion was cut to pieces at Woerth, Gravelotte, and Sedan; the fifth
battalion was reduced from 3,000 to some 300; the sixth battalion retook
Orleans, was compelled to abandon it, and covered itself with glory at
Le Mans and elsewhere; and the seventh was interned with Bourbaki in
Switzerland until the end of the war.

Although I often heard from him afterwards, the last time I met Edmond
O'Donovan, if I remember rightly, was in a North Lancashire town, in
which John O'Connor Power had been lecturing the same night. I forget
exactly who else of the "boys" were there--I think William Hogan was
one--but there were some choice spirits, and we made just such an Irish
night of it as Finigan describes they had when he and O'Donovan fought
in the Foreign Legion.

Edmond O'Donovan was the son of the famous Irish scholar and antiquary,
John O'Donovan, the translator from the Gaelic--with O'Curry and
Petrie--of that great Irish history, "The Annals of the Four Masters,"
and other manuscripts. The elder O'Donovan had made the acquaintance of
Sir Thomas Larcom, when both were young men together on the staff of the
Ordnance Survey. John O'Donovan appointed his friend Larcom to be
guardian of his children in case of his death.