‘A terrible sort of night’
It’s not enough to say that a relative died, or even when, where, and how. In our reports, we try to put you there whenever possible. In this case, a client’s great-uncle fell on the battlefield just six months before the end of World War I:
The family lived in Southport, and that may have been where eldest son William pledged his service at the start of the Great War. He joined the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, England’s oldest infantry unit (formed in 1661) and which, over the course of the war, lost almost 7,500 men killed, or about a third of all who saw action.[1] It lost William, aged twenty, on April 27, 1918, defending against a German spring offensive that sought to win the war before the Americans could arrive. The West Surreys fought on the fields of northeast France in what came to be known as the Battle of the Lys, one of four bloody contests near the Belgian city of Ypres.
On April 25 headquarters ordered the 7th Battalion, alongside a division of French Moroccans, to attack the German lines first thing the next morning. The Surrey officers responded as any Briton of good breeding would—by serving themselves afternoon tea in the pouring rain—after which they restlessly waited while the men arrived and ordered their ranks. William’s Company D crawled into muddy shell craters located about three hundred yards to the rear, where they would provide support for unlucky Company B, the first boys to go over. As the hours crept by, the rain turned to a thick mist, making a dark night even darker, while the Germans unhelpfully sent over high-explosive shells and mustard gas.[2] In his novel of the Western Front, A Long Long Way, Sebastian Barry describes how the “gas boiled in like a familiar ogre. With the same stately gracelessness it rolled to the edge of the parapet and then like the heads of a many-headed creature it toppled gently forward and sank down to join the waiting men.”[3] It was a terrible sort of night, in other words, if, by the last spring of the war, also a familiar one.
Zero hour came and the Queen’s Regiment rushed forward, as did the Moroccans who, official records noted, demonstrated “such splendid style in the early morning, blowing the charge on the bugle.” As with the rest of the line, however, they were “met with tremendous resistance and suffered enormously.” Two tanks took the field but made no difference one way or the other, while Company D climbed out of their craters and helped plug a hole where too many men had already fallen. Eventually everyone staggered backward, and from noon to three the Germans again let loose with the gas. No one moved the next day except to count the dead: sixteen Surreys, including William, with eighty-six wounded, and forty-two missing.[4]
William’s comrades buried him at the British Cemetery in Crouy-Sur-Somme. His stone reads:
Father in Thy Gracious Keeping
Leave We Now Our Loved One Sleeping.
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Image at top: Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment at the Battle of the Lys, 1918
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[1]. This is estimated according to the figure of 7,399 men killed in a regiment that had 23 battalions of approximately 1,000 men each see active service. Of the 1st Battalion’s original 1,000, only 17 survived at the Armistice. See “First World Diaries; Introduction …,” The Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment (queensroyalsurreys.org.uk : viewed 5 Oct. 2022).
[2]. Great War Diaries, 7th Battalion, Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, April 1918, “Appendix I: Account of Attack by 7th Bn. ‘The Queen’s’ Regt. On Hangard Wood on 26th April 1918,” pages 4–5; in British War Office, “7 Battalion Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment)”; 55 Infantry Brigade; 18 Division; Part 1: France, Belgium and Germany; First World War and Army of Occupation War Diaries; Records of the Armed Forces from commands, headquarters, regiments and corps; Records created or inherited by the War Office, Armed Forces, Judge Advocate General, and related bodies; the National Archives; Kew, London, England; typed transcription by the Queen’s Royal Surrey Regimental Association (queensroyalsurreys.org.uk : viewed 22 Sept. 2022).
[3]. Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way (New York: Penguin, 2005), page 111.
[4]. Great War Diaries, 7th Battalion, Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, April 1918, “Appendix I: Account of Attack by 7th Bn. ‘The Queen’s’ Regt. On Hangard Wood on 26th April 1918,” pages 5–6.