The German submarine UB-123 torpedoed the mail ship RMS Leinster near the Kish Bank outside Dublin Bay on 10 October 1918. More than 560 passengers and crew died only weeks before the Armistice. Victims included civilians, postal workers, nurses and military personnel from several countries.

Irish memorial poems and survivor verse emphasised the cruelty of deaths occurring when peace seemed close. Leinster's mixed passenger list also enabled poets to portray war at sea as a catastrophe dissolving distinctions between soldier, worker and civilian.