Come, my countrymen, he’d pleaded in the armory two months earlier. And of those who responded, more than half the new recruits were gone. Kavanagh was dead. Lieutenant James Mackey, named by Meagher to replace Temple Emmet as his aide-de-camp, dead. Lieutenant Colonel James Kelly, shot in the face, dead. Same with Captain Felix Duffy, mowed down in front of his men. Captain Patrick Clooney, a fellow Waterford native, crippled by a bullet that shattered his knee, then shot in the heart and brain, dead. Several of the drummer boys—not even teenagers—killed by shell fragments. One lad died with
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