Near St. Julien, during the second battle of Ypres, the 2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers suffered near annihilation just one month after the Helles Landings. On May 24th, 1915, around 2.45am, the Germans launched a poison gas attack. The Battalion strength was 666 men. By 9.30 pm, only one officer and 20 other ranks remained.

St. Julien: One month after the Helles landings, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers suffered a similar tragedy. It was not Turkish bullets that did the killing this time, it was German gas during the second battle of Ypres on the 24th of May 1915. The Dublin Fusiliers were in the trenches near the village of St. Julien, about two miles north east of the Belgian city of Ypres. At 2:45 am on the 24th of May, the Germans launched a gas attack on the Allied lines. German poison gas came ‘drifting down wind in a solid bank some three miles in length and forty feet in depth, bleaching the grass, blighting the trees and leaving a broad scar of destruction behind it.’ By 9:30 pm, out of a battalion strength of 666 men, all that remained when the battalion ‘retired’ was one officer and twenty other ranks. For the record, in just eighteen and three quarter hours, the Dublin Fusiliers had suffered a loss of 645 men who were blown to bits, gassed, or driven insane by the effects of poisonous gas. In the years that followed the ending of the war, many of those who did survive the attack and suffered a gas wound, would die a very slow and painful death from weakened lungs. Outside the city of Ypres on the  road to Menin, stands the majestic Menin Gate memorial. There are 54,000 names engraved into the stone from which the Arch is constructed.

Engraved on that memorial are the names of 461 Royal Dublin Fusiliers killed during the Battles of Ypres. 143 of them are the names of Dublin Fusiliers belonging to the 2nd Battalion who died on the 24th of May 1915.

Late in 1915, Mr. and Mrs. Edward and Anne McDonnell from 46 Bride Street in Dublin, received the news about the death of their son, Peter. He was forty two when he died on the 26th of April 1915. They later received the news that their other two sons, John aged twenty two and Patrick, aged thirty two were killed in the gas attack. All three are remembered on the Menin Gate Memorial. By the end of 1915, the inner streets of Dublin were shattered with grief. Between April and May of 1915, hundreds of Dublin men were killed in Gallipoli and Ypres.