Life, Death, and Growing Up on the Western Front by Anthony Fletcher

Author:Anthony Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300195538
Publisher: Yale University Press

Yet letters home, one finds, contain far more material about the deaths of colleagues, their injuries and broken comradeship than about mud or the horrific physical aspects of trench service. Daily discomforts, whether of mud, lice or even falling shells, could be borne. Grief at the ever-present stalking figure of Death, who, often close by, regularly stared men in the face, occupied men's minds more intensively than anything else, testing their endurance to the utmost. So did frightening premonitions of wounding. Scanning newspaper casualty lists for people he knew became one of Reggie Trench's preoccupations. Sometimes he told Clare about friends and relatives who had been killed before she could tell him. Respect for all who made the ultimate sacrifice, known or unknown to him, was always present. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote in February 1918, ‘I found a body out in the open, which I am having buried with a cross on the grave: “to an unknown British soldier. R.I.P.”’17

Cyril Newman's deep piety helped him keep the fallen in his mind as, month after month, he maintained his patriotic effort as a hard-pressed signaller. On the last day of June in 1917, he shared his emotions in a letter home about the first anniversary of the Somme: ‘what memories are evoked – sad sad memories, yet to us who survived a sense of satisfaction at having stood the test. Nobility was there.’ Back in reserve two days later, debate grew quite passionate over one breakfast about whether it had been appropriate to hold a memorial service for 1 July the previous year. Three of Cyril's fellow signallers ‘did not agree with it. No good to recall memories of the fallen’. But surely, Cyril insisted, ‘memory of noble self sacrifice is good’.

Cyril was conscientious about doing all he could to keep in touch with the relatives of men in his section, whose addresses he knew, when they were lost. In May 1917, he heard from the mother of a missing fellow signaller, Walter Crook. They had worked together for nearly a year. When his body was found and he had been buried, Cyril performed the ‘sad duty’ of passing on the news. He found solace in sending home crucial information about such burials of lost colleagues. He was sufficiently well informed to be able to give the mother of Sergeant Hickman, another comrade, a detailed account of where he was buried.

The 17 November 1917 brought especially searing grief to Cyril Newman. Dr Clarke, medical officer for the Queen Victoria's Rifles, had been a wonderful friend to him, going out of his way to encourage him by providing the use of his hut for Cyril's reading and writing. He and two other officers, whom Cyril knew well, were caught by a huge shell which landed on the bivvy where they were sheltering. Two of the three were killed and the other, ‘who was my first platoon officer in September 1914’, was wounded. Major O'Shea, another officer who was good to Cyril, promised to hand on Clarke's address so he could write to his mother.

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