

Walter Mepham

Born 14th March 1898

Killed November 30th 1917, Cambrai, France.
Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 M. Stow

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1503224627

ISBN 13: 9781503224629

Walter Mepham

Dedication

To the enduring memory of 7,048 officers and men of the forces of the British Empire who fell at the Battle of Cambrai, November 20–December 3, 1917, but have no known graves.
Chapters

Part One: Family

Chapter 1: Why We Went to War

Chapter 2: Father's Family

Chapter 3: Mother's Family

Chapter 4: Our Parents Meet

Part Two: For or Against

Chapter 5: Conan Doyle

Chapter 6: Lord Bertrand (Bertie) Russell

Chapter 7: Arthur Wells

Chapter 8: Alfred Byfield

Part Three: Sarajevo
Chapter 9: The Assassination in Sarajevo
Chapter 10: The Decision Is Made

Chapter 11: Reports of War

Chapter 12: France

Chapter 13: The Cambrai Operation

Chapter 14: At Flesquieres

Chapter 15: The Boulon Woods

Part Four: Louverval memorial, France, 14th March 1998 and November 30th 2017.

Author's Note

This is the story of Walter and his elder brother, Harry Arthur Mepham, of London, England, researched and compiled from the records of the time by his maternal distant cousin, the author, Malcolm Stow.

The idea for the story was prompted by a postcard found among the papers of the author's late grandmother, Henrietta Wells, with the starkly precise dates of birth and death of Walter, killed at the First World War Battle of Cambrai.

The story is embellished by selections from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The British Campaign in France and Flanders and Bertrand Russell's The Ethics of War. These two literary combatants were both contemporaneously implicated in the life of Walter, from the Mepham family history in Sussex, England, where Conan Doyle lived and supported encampment for soldiers travelling to the Western Front in 1915; and to Holborn, London, where Russell lived at the time, and who argued for a rational individualistic pacifism.

Both authors would have influenced Walter and Harry Arthur's decisions to go to war; and, in Harry's case, his refusal to return to the battlefront after 1917.

Their stories are fictionalised around such known facts, the brother's likely discussions, and their own decisions as the outcome of those shared deliberations. What did it mean to fight a "good" war? For love of king and country, for personal pride, for bread on the table? For their parents Caroline and Mark Henry Mepham, and for their families and children, and grandchildren yet to be born.
November 30th 1917.

Cambrai, France

Dear Harry Arthur,

I know how much it grieved you to hear of my being lost. How Mother was. How she told you not to go back, and how all the emotion came down on you, and nearly killed you both. How, if Mother had lost us both, as well as Father, then her heart would have...Well, you know it wasn't you who killed her; it was me.

She knew. It was the dreaded question: Why did we all have to go, leaving her alone to tend wounded and dying soldiers—strangers—in our places?

When Father went to war in 1915, well, that was one thing. Perhaps to persuade us that he would die for us and in our stead. He might not see his grandchildren himself, but Mother would. And that we—one of us, at least—would have a better chance of bringing children, our parent's grandchildren, into the world and their being remembered in both Father's, and Mother's image.

I don't think they wanted both of us to go to war, and as I am the younger brother, Father went in my stead. But then we did both go, and there was no stopping us. After you and Father went off full of gusto, not wishing but prepared to die, I was the insistent younger son wanting to follow in your footsteps. Prepared to die, to lie, too, about my age as Father did to join up. And then for all of us to be sent abroad.

When I did eventually go, Mother must have felt deserted by all of us. But by me in particular. She knew there was no stopping me, and she kept her hurt to herself, even when we were all together. Do you remember, Harry? When you were on leave during the zeppelin air raids on Croydon in 1916? It was then that I persuaded her to let me go, so that I could get back at those trying to kill us in our beds.

By the time I was trained and set off later in 1916, the year you returned for leave, only to return again, to the second Battle of The Somme.

When news reached mother about my being lost at Cambrai, you were home again. At the hospital, perhaps, and she must have known I would not be coming back. She persuaded you not to return. To abscond from leave, to desert, didn't she?

How could any of us be blamed? How could we feel disgust anymore, or hatred, or indifference now, or even some sympathy, perhaps, for those dressed up in self-serving political and religious conscientious objection, instead of the bloody uniform of war? They refused for the same reasons, in the end, that we did go to war in the first place: each of us to save ourselves, and our family's future.

For our family, Harry Arthur, you not only fought, but you found something in common with the no-conscription, white feather lot, the Peace Pledgers, didn't you? The same reason you absconded, Harry, and Mother persuaded you to so do; that you and yours, would be the next of our line, if mine were not...most of all, you found that my being missing, my uncertain death, although not glorious, would not be in vain.

To my brother, from your brother, Walter Mepham.
Part One: Family

Chapter 1: Why We Went to War

Aldershot Army Training Camp, Hampshire, England, 1916

To Harry: This is _our_ story I write here, awaiting orders to be set off to France, or wherever. We do not yet know and are not told, and should I not return...

This is our story:

I, Walter, was born at home at 56 Walterton Road in the civil parish of Paddington, and registered by our parents at Marylebone in the county of Middlesex (west). We lived off Maida Hill among the plush mansions of Maida Vale and the Harrow Road, the new London suburbs, the grand streets and mews off Kensington by Warwick Road and the Great Western Road.

Over the Thames river at Putney, then the Trade Roads to Surrey, and on to Sussex and Kent where our father and his father and our great grandfather, were born.

Our great-grandfather William Mepham was born in 1805. An agricultural labourer, he began working from a young age while living at cottages on Nethersfield Green, Battle, near Hastings, where, in 1066, the Norman invasion of England was said to have taken place. A date we remember from school—you and me, Harry, we always liked our history, didn't we? On their way northward, over the South and North Downs—we always laughed at those peculiarly named places too: Going up the downs!—on their way those Normans took in Meopham, a Kentish town of the ancient land of Meapha. Meapha was ruled by an Anglo-Saxon Jute king from modern-day Germany. Our German family name must have been derived from the original village of that name. The earliest recording of the Mepham family name, so spelled, and in Kent, was in the sixteenth century.

Great-grandfather William was born in Kent, and later moved to Sussex and then Hampshire, where you Harry, were born, in 1895; and then as far as the hilly north Thames shore, at Paddington, London, where I was later born.

Our great-grandfather William then lived in Sussex where William the Conqueror conquered all those years ago, and I born at London, where that William later crowned himself King William the First of the English.

Now there is another King William, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, cousin to our own King George, both cousins genealogically of the Royal Tsar Alexander of Russia. Now they, and all of us, are in this Great War together.

In 1914, the Kaiser threatened to invade England just as Bismarck, it was said, would have endangered our shores, if the Germans had won the Prussian war at Paris back in 1871, that anyway only then established The German monarchy and nationhood. As the Napoleonic Empire in 1815 may have invaded this "island of shopkeepers" (according to Napoleon) when the then-Prussian Frederich Wilhelm then came to our Duke of Wellington's rescue, at Waterloo.

Not far from The Somme, Harry; where we are now fighting these battles again, and I expect soon to join you. The German, French did not invade before, and they will not this time, either. We will see to that.

We two brothers and our father, Mark Henry, set off to fight together to stop the former allies and familial enemies. Us and them, as all wars end up. Even though we are all related in the end and we fight for our family; and for ours, and their royal families.

In 1815, great-grandfather William, at only ten years old, would have been too young to fight in that previous Great War in Europe. Although someone told us here at Aldershot, why I could not tell, that in the Napoleonic Republic, and also the American Independence republican-democratic wars, that in those wars ten-year-old flag-bearers and drummer-boys were sent ahead in battle; and took the full blast of rifle and cannon fire.

I cannot imagine the reason except the preservation of others—their elders, who could have more children to replace them by. As you and I—the "poor bloody infantry" as Conan Doyle had us—and as we will do again there in France, and Belgium again.

On June 18th 1815, the final Battle of Waterloo was fought, and our great-grandfather William would have heard about _that_ war spoken about in the houses, taverns, churches, and churchyards of Sussex. The battles would have been played out with toy soldiers, as we did as children in West London before this war, and as we do now for real, and for our certain victory. In the same Flanders fields as you described on your last leave, in Brighton with Mother and I there. We had no word of Father from Turkey or Africa. He was in the deserts of Africa—Egypt, we were told—or perhaps his workaday dream of going to Morocco was eventually fulfilled?

The land there in France is similar you told us, to that land of our great-grandfather's in Kent and Sussex: the village hamlets, wooded hills, and church spires. And ourselves like those toy tin soldiers with row upon row of cavalry, foot soldiers, and cannon, we will again fight side-by-side, as we fought as children, brothers in arms.

On the hillsides beyond figures emulating Napoleon and Wellington and Bismarck or Blucher, stand now again as the Generals and newspaper writers like Conan Doyle. Directing and reporting upon battle tactics and operations from afar.

Then, on the hills beyond, our enemy: the troops, infantry and cavalry fusiliers, and artillery of the new nation of Republican France, then as now. Then. The German Confederation—then The Prussian _enemy_ we with the Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon and Hanoverian. As our now our King George, The Fifth, of England. And we, there in line, awaiting orders. There, now that and both times around, the same line of copse and woods, fields and hilltop barns, and buildings taken and retaken.

The rising taste of gunpowder to fill the air, and, in the rain, the sweat and blood of men and horses. After the fall of Belgium in August 1914, and the threat of German invasion on France realised we went to read the newspaper articles and visited the British Museum, in Holborn.

Often, Father took us and told us all he knew—he knew a lot about it—and we liked our history. Especially that last bit about how this war, the Great War, got started. For most who took notice of these events, war at first seemed impossible; then more and more likely, and then simply inevitable.

Then, as if it just happened suddenly with that assassination in Sarajevo. No time to consider our position, really. France and Belgium were invaded by the German armies for no apparent reason, except that they were finishing off unfinished business from 1871, maybe even 1815. How we trade unrelievedly on the past! We had been warned by Arthur Conan Doyle about German trade and expansionism in Europe—as well as in the empires of France and Britain—in the newspapers we read, and then when you and Father left for foreign parts, this Great War was well underway.

What followed was the outbreak of this war— "The War to End All Wars. Which is really just another name for the disputes between Royal Families and their Colonial Trading Empires in the lands of Africa, Asia and the Americas; in Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, and as far as South Africa; in Japan, China, India, Australia, and New Zealand—countries that brought in the greatest empire the world has ever seen—The British Empire—and on which the sun would never set. We didn't know what we were really fighting for until afterwards, and even then there were big questions with much left unclear.

You see, as much as we thought we knew these things—the reasons why we went to war—these get all lost in the smoke screen, the fog of war. And then all that is left is ourselves, and our families, and my blessed—and my now _wretched_ soul, too.

Chapter 2: Father's Family

Great-grandfather William in Sussex had became a widower in 1830 when great-grandmother Harriet passed away soon after giving birth to our grandfather Mark, their only child. William and Mark, father and son, lived together by the tide mill in the hamlet of Bishopstone in Seaford, Sussex.

After William passed away, at the age of twenty-one Mark married Fanny, a young woman from Sedgecombe, a nearby village. They had their first child, Francis Lucy, in 1859 at Bishopstone, and the family worked and stayed on at the tide mill, on the tidal inlet, known as East Beach Creek, Sussex. Along the coastal Sheep Drove Road, the recently laid siding and station halt connected with the main railway line between Seaford and Newhaven, the then main Trade Ports on the English Channel and across to Europe.

There was a large sluice seawater millpond at Tide Mills Village, and a flour mill holding a full sixteen pairs of grinding stones. Mark worked there as a miller's labourer, and the family lived in a row of millers' cottages with other families of field labourers, grinders, sack men, and carters—all working for millwright Thomas Parks at the large millhouse.

One year after our aunt Frances Lucy was born there, our father, Mark Henry, was born. Named Mark after his father, and Henry after Fanny's family name. Father was only five years old when a terrible storm brought up flooding seawaters and shingle filled the millponds, destroying many of the buildings at Tide Mills. They escaped, just, on horseback and trundling carts, all terrified in the rain and wind, they could have been easily killed as some were through crashing stones and bricks, they said. Most of the houses became uninhabitable. The Tide Mills were eventually closed. The site was later used for artillery field practice by the Newhaven Fort, built in part from the rubble to protect the seaways and defend against invasion from the English Channel or the German North Sea, as it was known back then.

After the sea flooded the tide mill, our grandparents moved on. They lived for ten years and more at Hurst Farm at nearby Harking, Sussex, in labourers' cottages numbered and rent paid. Aunt Francis Lucy, Father, and eventually Aunt Mary, Aunt Ellen, and Aunt Marion lived in the cottage. All the children attended the mill village school at Tide Mills. Marion, as the youngest, was still at home on the day the census enumerator arrived in March 1871 to fill in forms with a portable desk setup and dip ink pen, as Father told us. He liked this best, going to school and telling mother about this when he returned home tired and hungry!

Grandfather Mark was a journeyman miller paid by the day. An itinerant worker, he moved around from place to place when needed and was paid for his work. But grandmother Fanny and the children stayed on at the cottage at Hurst Farm through the winters, tending the cows and sheep, mending fences and walls, and preparing the fields for the next year's sowing and milling, the next year's harvest. Our father, Mark, at eleven years of age, would be doing the same.

On the day of the census in March 1871, so Father told us, a lady shareholder from Abingdon, Berkshire, was visiting Hurst Mill. She and an engineer walked around the place with John Ticknall, a farmer of three hundred acres of mixed farming, corn and cows, and a watermill. The old mill was replaced soon after by a steam-powered mill. Such machinery needed only one miller, and with fewer workers needed, our grandparents, with our father and our aunts, then had to move on again.

For some time they settled at Uckfield, Sussex, along with the families of carters, cowmen, and sheepherders, by the village green, the corn mill, The Corn Mill public drinking house, and The Holy Trinity church and school. With the children going to school, and in the summer to the seaside and funfair on the new pier at Brighton, these were happy days, as Father would tell us.

They later moved on again, and lived at Warren Mill, Withyam, East Grinstead, Sussex. Here there was a combined wind and water mill. The family lived on the mansion estate of farmer Ramsbotham, by the baronial Buckhurst Park and farm, Crowborough Manor House, and Little Windlesham, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived.

Conan Doyle was a keen footballer, cricketer, and golfer, but is best known as the author of the _Sherlock Holmes_ mysteries, and the Professor _Challenger_ books we read and knew so well. Remember our favourite: The Lost World? That is what this world is became don't you think? Since the outbreak of war worlds are lost again. As we both will be someday, to this world, whatever happens? Soon, grandfather was a miller again, in his own right, at the combined wind and watermill.

In the summer, Father, like most agricultural children, worked for little or no pay in the fields and at the mill with his parents, who were paid only meagre wages and all the grain they could take. Maybe, for porridge and baking cakes, or the gruel they would make—remember the gruel, Harry? When we could afford nothing else, they said it was good for us, it would keep us warm in the bitter-cold winter's morning, and when snow was on the ground.

Father went to school, as we did later, in London, except when there was harvesting or other work to be done. He left school reading and writing well enough, and when he was thirteen, he left the mill for good. Living and working away from home, as an indentured labourer, he was apprenticed into retail at a shop on Vicarage Lane in Horley, Reigate, back in Sussex. The shop, where Father now also lived, stood alongside a row of farm cottages, the church and vicarage, and the shops of a butcher and a baker and, for all we know, a candlestick maker!

Rub a dub dub

Three fools in a tub,

And who do you think they be?

The butcher, the baker,

The candlestick maker.

Turn them out, knaves all three!

Do you remember the nursery rhyme? Maybe that is us eh Harry? Knaves, all three of us, with our Father, and bless him too! The Saint Bartholomew's Church of England vicarage in Horley, Sussex, had the luxury of a governess and cook, and possessed a kitchen garden and gardener's cottage. This was where Father told us he would visit the Reverend Peter's family, with none of his own family around there at the time. He would chat and do business, selling and buying the garden produce for the shop, and taking some to his own home, given out, no doubt.

Later, in his early twenties, Father, lived alone off the High Street, Tenterden. Back in Kent, where his father, and our grandfather were born. With the family by then in Sussex, he visited them rarely due to his working days, one day a week to rest, and travelling by horse-cart or coach back then can you imagine! He worked every day except Sunday, and could only visit on high days and holidays of which there were few. He lived in his own rented cottage, alongside the low, white weather-boarded shop of Henry Boorman of Hadlow Down, West Cross, Kent.

Father was doing well in the retail trade. He was classed as a grocer with the Boormans' family, who were German, maybe, or Dutch. In the shop, Father dressed in a grocer's green wide-striped apron with shirt and tie. Inside the shop were stacked sacks of grain and flour, locally milled, perhaps, by our grandfather William. Father would have been selling local farm produce and foodstuffs along with that imported from elsewhere and everywhere, packaged and tin-canned, home and colonial. It was a large, double shop Father worked in. As well as selling groceries, he also sold dress and suit cloth, hats, curtains, and pelmets. All kinds of furniture dressings were sold, all made to measure. Father had broadened his skills and knowledge, and he became a draper's assistant. Now, he was dressed in clean white overalls over the suit and starched collar he always wore to serve customers at The Moroccan Warehouse, in London later, do you remember that too?

Father had no wife yet. Even though he had become a master grocer, draper, and milliner, no less, of the local Kent Wealds. The trade in wool and collared dyed cloth was brought into the shop milled and woven, as he would tell us, to be cut to size and pattern, tailored to fit, or sold in rolls and bales.

England, then, was competing with the wool cloth and linen trade from Belgium at that time, and flax from over there, came from Flanders, and Holland. As is Kent and Sussex, another open, windy country, a land of high hills and watercourses full of ancient corn and cloth milling places. Foreign cotton and local sheep and goats' wool delivered in bobbins and bundles to go to the mills locally, then sent and sold in shops in Kent and Sussex, and London, as cloth and clothes.

There, in London, it was woven into fine garments for the fashionable West End department stores and displayed in the shop windows. Father would soon travel from the Kent and Sussex North and South Downs, through the village and small market town stations on the railway-line to Croydon and Putney, on the Surrey Thames River shore. Over the river to Middlesex (west) and eventually to the East End of London where, unbeknownst to him, our mother, Caroline, then lived.

Chapter 3: Mother's Family

Two years after the Battle of Waterloo and the Napoleonic Wars in Europe had ended in 1817, our mother's father, John Coulthurst Wells, was born in Bethnal Green, Middlesex (east). A ne'er-do-well, it was said, he didn't go to school and didn't seem to work either, but he always had money, so Mother's family always said.

In his early twenties, John Coulthurst Wells classed himself a "traveller." Although it's far from certain exactly how far—if at all—he had actually travelled. His name, Coulthurst, is baronial, from South Yorkshire and East Anglia. There are North and South American settlers named Coulthurst, too. He may have been the failed child of such a family, left behind to take the English-French feudal family name, and to then sully it.

He must have been a rogue, a vagabond, an itinerant, later staying at a boarding house in Brewer Street, between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square in the West End of London. John Coulthurst Wells lived in the shopping and theatre district, in one shared room of a narrow row of four-story stuccoed houses, the ground floors of which were converted into shops and stores—a watchmaker alongside a butcher and a home provisions store.

Each storefront shared a narrow arch stone corner and possessed an open winding balustrade staircase. The first floor held the largest rooms, for the shopkeeper's family. John lived above the baker's shop in a small attic room in a cramped garret with a casement window looking out onto the back of the swish Savoy Hotel. Below, flames lit steaming underground kitchens giving off flavours and fancy odours, through the below ground pavement grilles. These warm vents were frequented by tramps and entire homeless families hungry for food, as well as warmth, all day and night.

The winters could be very cold, and in summer, the sunshine hardly reached the pavement. Grandfather John Wells spent maybe two or three years there, huddled in front of a small coal fire, if any, kept awake by the noise from the nearby roads busy with horse and carriage and cart traffic all day and night. A gentleman named Wells (but not Coulthurst) owned property on a corner of Golden Square. This family apparently prospered, along with several of the same family name, earning a living as goldsmiths. John Coulthurst Wells may well have been trying to ingratiate himself to the local goldsmiths of the same, perhaps also acquired, Wells name. But John Coulthurst Wells shared rooms with a Suffolk baker, John Noiman, and returned home from the West End, disappointed.

Back in the East End, John Coulthurst Wells became a baker. In those days, if you knew how to bake bread, and had a bread oven in which to bake, you could become a baker. John sold bread from his front door or front room window, with it's Victorian drapery, if any, and he went out onto the street delivering door to door. Our maternal grandfather, John Coulthurst, met and married Harriet Tilbury, a dressmaker, and John and Harriet lived at Providence Place, Bethnal Green. They lived with Harriet's family, her parents and seven siblings, as well as Henry Ward, a baker from Roysten, Cambridgeshire.

John Coulthurst Wells and John Noiman shared the rent of a bread oven in Bakers Rents, an alleyway off the Hackney Road by Shoreditch, and the new Liverpool Street Station with it's steam trains taking well-to-do passengers to the coast and seaside resorts, the cheapest workman's trains, for the poor as our family were. They made their living, as many others did, as irregular bakers: sharing the cost of a sack of milled bread flour, yeast, and water, and the use of a kneading board and oven; carrying trays of freshly baked bread and cakes on their heads to the place of sale.

Soon, John and Harriet's eldest son, John, was born and died only of "the sickness" they were told, and hardly any mention made of it since. The next eldest, Uncle Arthur, was born soon after; and then the first girl, Aunt Harriet; and then Aunt Emily. The family moved around many times as the children grew up; much as Father's family had done in Kent and Sussex, and they got to go to the National School nearby.

Mother Caroline was born in 1865 at Old Ford, Bow, and brought up at 10 Beale Place, a cobbled street cul-de-sac off the Hackney Road. Mother was brought up in Beale Place by grandmother Harriet and her older brothers and sisters, our aunts and uncles. There were so many children, and when there was no longer room in the house, the older ones moved away, into service, or to marry and then if they could, started their own families, and our first cousins. Our grandfather John Coulthurst Wells died by the time Mother was six years old, and she did not remember him much.

Grandfather Wells wore long whiskers, she was told, though no beard or moustache. Though she did not remember much of that really, Mother told us the stories of him anyway. When John Coulthurst Wells died, no one stayed to continue the bread-baking. At Beale Place, they lived among silk-weavers: Huguenot refugees from France with French-sounding names and accents.

Grandmother Harriet, who may have been French herself, was now a widow, and she worked at Beale Place winding cotton, freelance, you may say. The youngest child, Uncle William, took up silk and cotton weaving from bobbins. For a young boy—under ten years—it was an arduous task, and noisy with the constant whirring of pattern looms.

Aunt Emily, Mother's sister, and the next oldest at fifteen years, was a general servant living at home and bringing in pay. Uncle Arthur Wells had left school at thirteen years. He was an errand boy, running deliveries and messages to and from the local shops and businesses for small pay. All the children went to school. They must have attended the Ragged School or more likely the new National School on St. Stephens Road where others of the Wells then lived. The Wells's dropped the "Coulthurst" for reasons unknown; perhaps it was too difficult to spell, or even pronounce!

John and Harriet lived near the site of an old monastery, and the church house of Saint Stephens; and, some said, an ancient castle where roamed the ghost of King John. The first and last John of England, King John managed to lose lands in France taken by conquerors and crusaders, back in olden times. King John was forced by the English barons to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. He usurped the throne, and in turn was usurped by Richard the Lionheart, his French-speaking royal brother, on return from the Crusades in the Holy Lands of Palestine and the Turkish Ottomans, by North Africa where our Father fights to this day! On Richard's return, King John was deposed, and after taking refuge in Nottingham and London, he supposedly went on to do battle with Robin Hood and the poor of England. If Robin Hood ever actually existed, that is. We expect Robin Hood did exist in some way or form, but mostly because we want to believe the hero of the working poor could have been seen in _ghostly_ form as we played bows and arrows along one of the walls of the so-called King John's castle, at Old Ford on the River Lea.

Do you remember playing with our cousins Henrietta, Clara, Harriet, and the others? On the muddy unpaved streets of Bethnal Green and Bow—so-called the "rotten boroughs" for the corruption and poverty commonplace there. We played as children with our cousins who lived there on our regular visits. Down to the river Thames in the east, the East and West Hams, and the Abbey Mill at a place called Street, or Stratford—where some other of our aunts and cousins' families also lived. Near to the great London Docks, the tidal Thames River running along by brick terraces and cobbled streets built and unbuilt lanes and alleyways where over the Docks hung huge cranes winching on and off coal-fired steamships from the Middlesex and on the other side the Kent shores moored there. Noisy and odorous, choking funnels blazed, pouring smoke and steam over the streets of East and West Hams by the Lea rivers and marshes, flowing with filthy mud into the river Thames. In the streets, horse droppings from the trade carts steamed and were scooped up and sold by anyone who would and for the small backyards and allotments the new Lee Navigation and the Hertford and the Great Northern and Grand Union canals.

The men and horses led off loaded barges through Old Ford Lock where we would watch them disappear up to Kings Cross and St. Pancras travelling through to the Paddington basin, in west London, from where we had visited for the day! On the Lee Navigation and Hertford link, the Thames riversides were rat-infested, pestiferous factories and tenements, hardly different in small-size and close-together, cutting out any sunlight, with rows of small windows, if any at all. These factories and tenements were for large communities of itinerant and immigrant labourers from all over the world, those working in the so-called "base trades."

Our cousin Mathilda, or "Milda" as she was known, lived with our grandparents John and Harriet even after Mother had left home to work at Hackney, and then Paddington in the west of London. Milda was also a domestic servant, not living-in. She would walk daily to her place of employment, at one of the big houses in Hackney. She didn't go to school any longer than she had to, and left at thirteen years old, as did Mother. Mother left the overcrowded family home and was in service, too. Mother was living-in at the house of Mr. Daniel Pearson, vicar of St. James, in the ecclesiastical ward of St. James, the civil parish of St. John's, Hackney.

This was a wealthy suburb of professional people—lawyers, businesspeople, and churchmen. The vicar's wife, Mary, was from the west country—Devon or Cornwall—and almost fifteen years the vicar's junior, which was not unusual for the time, especially for the upper classes and clergymen. Mary Pearson was a teacher and member of the Middlesex School Boards and Mother may have taken lessons with her as she learned to write and read, as did father in the southern counties; and as later, did we.

You and me, Harry, reading every and anything, we could get our hands on!

The vicar's family were from Surrey, now living-in at 58 Kenninghall Road, Hackney. Mother was a domestic servant and living-in there since leaving school. Mother was a children's nurse, and served the religious family, along with the governess, another Harriet, from Berkshire, and Mary Pack, housemaid from Hampshire. Mary Pack was a cook—from whom Mother learned something, no doubt—of those country parts then of Father's family. The eldest of the vicar's ten children was called Mr. Henry Pearson. A name Mother liked repeating with a fake posh accent, as in jest. Henry was an undergraduate at Oxford University, and a regular weekend visitor along with one Raoul de Bouble. A "continental name," Mother would say, using another funny fake accent, this time French. Or as maybe not so contrived as her family were likely Huguenot and French themselves.

Raoul was a student at Aldershot, Hampshire, attending the military college here where I write this, in the knowledge I that we shall soon be set off from training to the _real_ war.

To The Somme, most likely, and with you again, dear brother, Harry, short for Henry. This Henry, Henry Pearson, was studying religion at the college of divinity at Oxford, and they met, perhaps with the vicar of St. James, there and then discussing together the ethics of training young men like ourselves.

You and I, Harry, at Aldershot, Hampshire, trained to fight and get killed in some Great War, as then for them yet to happen. "Fighting and getting killed for what?" they may have asked — God, King and Country? For Empire? For our Parent's, our Children, and our Children's children? For Their's? What and who are we fighting for in the end? For our own lives and livelihoods — there is no doubt of that now; of that, there, is no doubt.

Chapter 4: Our Parents Meet

In 1891, when Mother was twenty-six, her services as a children's nurse were no longer required in the house at Hackney, and so she moved employment. She lived and worked at the house of Charlotte Cotton, a fifty-one-year-old widow, and her grown-up daughter at Warwick Road, Paddington, West London. The late Mr. Cotton hailed from the county of Norfolk. Mrs. Cotton was now living on her own means, and perhaps the family's wealth had originally come from the cotton trade, as their name. Built on slavery abroad and indentured labour at home cotton then as now shipped via India and America to the river ports and canals of London and Liverpool, and on to the factory mills all over the north of England, contributing greatly to the wealth of the still Great British Empire.

As for the family, whether Cotton was their original name or not, it certainly defined the family's position and purpose in life. They had made their name on one shipment across the great Atlantic Ocean, either from the former American colony or the colonies of the Far East, and from that profited and made more as such.

Cotton came from India through Egypt and the Suez Canal—opened in 1869, and a wonder of the world we saw in pictures at the museum. Perhaps it was taken through the canal and overland by horse and camel drawn, the same cotton silk Mother Caroline's family would wind at home in Beale Place, finding its way eventually as clothing and drapery in the London warehouses and department stores.

Those grand stores sold everything from clothing to carpets and furniture. Many of the large houses and small shops and buildings in Oxford Street along where _in olden times_ prisoners were once taken from the conqueror's Tower of London at Newgate Prison, to be hanged or drawn and quartered for their crimes. This road now Oxford Street, named by Oxford (University where mother may have gone "for a day out" she would joke!) with new buildings gifted, owned, and so built. These large warehouses and department stores have replaced the small shops with their broad windows and wide doors transformed into larger, grander buildings. Their upstairs quarters are as if gutted by fire inside and joined together outside along the pavements. The department stores were given large windows and gallery floors filled with everything. Delights from the empires, British, and Father's exotic French Morocco.

Brought from afar, from the coast and countryside along the Kent and Sussex Trade Roads, from Hampshire and the Surrey-shore, and then for people to wander around and view. Around Piccadilly Circus, and the shops and theatres and music halls where John Coulthurst Wells roamed, there were tearooms and public liquor houses. The Cottons, Mother said, would call for a carriage to take them anywhere. Some of the neighbours in Warwick Road even had their own coachman and stabled horse.

These were the professional classes, arts and craftspeople living along there —a house furnisher, a silver and heraldic engraver, a printer, and a barrister of law from South America. Mother would mimic them, too, speaking with a not-so-familiar Spanish or Portuguese accent. There was a small private church school with a chaplain, and a boardinghouse serving several clerks at the London Stock Exchange. They all had their domestic live-ins, as mother was. There was a retired pharmacist and others living on their own means with their small families and domestic servants, like the Cottons.

Mrs. Cotton's daughter in Warwick Avenue was the same age as Mother, mid-twenties, although I suppose they conversed little. 'Lizard' Cotton, for that was her name, apparently, was an actress. Born in Africa as of some colony, she may have been intentionally named as the Cotton family itself. There are many lizards abroad, in the hotter climes, or so Father told us; or maybe there was an error of transcription—Liza, perhaps?

Anyway, as Mother said, "Lizard" suited her better!

There was even an exotic ostrich feather and umbrella- and glove-manufacturing company—German-owned, would you have it—in Warwick Road! And no doubt closed, at the commencement of hostilities in 1914.

The Moroccan Goods Warehouse would also close at the start of hostilities; but at that time it was there, and where Father then worked. Moved up from Kent, Sussex, and Surry, over the Thames river to Paddington. Mother was living-in as a domestic servant in Paddington, and it was there she met Mark Henry Mepham.

Mother might have seen Father there, or he saw her, when the Cotton family were out buying additional accoutrements for their already elaborately and over furnished home—reminders they would have cherished, perhaps of Africa and colonial times. Or, perhaps, Father was delivering to the Warwick Road by cart and horse or maybe, by then, motor lorry.

Mother would have been walking back along one of the swish side roads of South Kensington. Returning from shopping for the family with the cook, Sarah Olive from Sussex, who taught Mother to cook soups and stews, as we were brought up on, and roast meat and gravy on a Sunday and Christmas. Sarah Olive and Mark Henry Mepham had something in common, and they talked together about Sussex.

But it was Caroline who Father was to court, marry, and have two sons by. Caroline Wells and Mark Henry Mepham married in 1891, and Mother became Caroline Mepham. They lost a male child at birth, in London I think, the year before you, Harry Arthur, were born at Droxford, Hambledon, Hampshire, in the summer of 1895.

There were still bread-flour mills on the nearby River Hamble, which flows into the Solent, between the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, and the troop-carrying navy ports of Portsmouth and Southampton.

After losing her first child—and as our grandparents John and Harriet in Bethnal Green had also died—Mother went to stay with the Mepham grandparents Fanny and Mark, in the Hampshire countryside until you, Harry, were born. Mother told us she enjoyed the fresh air, being away from the London smog and fog. Expecting another child—you, Harry Arthur—Mother wanted to make sure you would survive.

She was looked after by our grandparents, Fanny and Mark there, while the family were now living in Paddington, Middlesex, father remained in a row of four-story terraced townhouses with bay windows, front steps, and three rooms on each floor.

We rented the first floor at 56 Walterton Road. I was named Walter after the street we lived in, having survived birth there. Various tradesmen and their families lived on each of the landings. The townhouse had an indoor staircase and a fire escape at the back leading down to a small paved yard.

How we loved playing on that escape and on the steps in front of the house, in the street where there were mainly horse-drawn coaches then, they were the more dangerous than the occasional motor vehicle chugging along, barely moving. Slower than us children running alongside. It could be dangerous: Many deaths were caused on the roads with horse-cabs going so fast, rattling noisily past. Even when we were told not to, we would venture out.

On the top floor of our house was a watchmaker who used the better light up there to work. Next, there was a lead-worker and a plumber and roofer, who came and went smelling of oil and metal. We were on the first floor. The spiked railings at the front were removed when the war started to be melted down for weapons at Enfield — "Lock and Barrel!" as we would say! In the basement below us lived an old army officer, retired, pensioned. A veteran, we were told, of the 1865 Crimean War, in Russia.

Do you remember that poem of Tennyson's we were all taught to recite at school? _The Charge of the Light Brigade_. "Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred."

Only a few, like Father, still with his gentle rural accent, were from the English countryside. None was from the East End of London like Mother with her sharp, cockney tongue. We heard many accents from all over the European and colonial worlds, as you do there at the Western Front.

As you would tell us, Harry, and you and Mother would mimic the accents of India and Ceylon. Each landing of that building, built to last, had three rooms including their own kitchen extension with a shared toilet and washroom, and backstairs to a small yard. At the front, steep steps led down to the narrow pavement and wide road where you and I, Harry, we would play.

Along the front and corner walls we fought each other, as brothers do, playing make-believe games and war games with the other children. Even then, only one of us could have survived. Grandfather Mark Mepham worked on an ancient water mill before he died, at Hambledon, in this same county of Aldershot, Hampshire, aged sixty-five years. You, Harry Arthur, were nearly four years old when I, Walter, was born in the warm spring of the year; and in the late winter cold of that same year, 1898, Grandmother Mepham died also "of the sickness" and was buried with Grandfather Mark in the same churchyard, at Uckfield, Sussex, England.

The house and basement at 56 Walterton Road, as of 2014.

Part Two: For or Against

Chapter 5: Conan Doyle

France, September–October, 1917

From 1906, throughout the Great War, and until his death at Windlesham in 1930, the well-known Scot Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived at Crowborough, Sussex. The epitaph on his tombstone there reads, "Steel true, blade straight, knight, patriot, physician and man of letters," and sums him up. As from Windlesham Manor, Crowborough, Conan Doyle raced cars before the Great War. Conan Doyle supported the building of a tunnel between France and England before The Great War to avoid being cut off from food and supplies in case of any conflict. He had seen the build-up of the German navy in the Baltic, and the development of tanks and airplanes for military purposes, and he warned against the possible attrition of the English seaways by the new German U-boat and submarines.

Conan Doyle started calling this war "The Great War" before it had even begun.

He regarded the coming conflict as inevitable. He took part in the Prince Henry of Prussia Cup. The international road competition against the Germans ran from Hamburg to London, and each car carried a military observer from the opposite team. There was hostility growing even then. With Conan Doyle and his beloved wife, Jean Leckie driving, in 1911, the British team won.

The British Bentley outdid the German Mercedes-Benz. Conan Doyle and Jean, along with their automobiles, crossed the English Channel on board the paddle steamers from Newhaven or Portsmouth.

At the age of fifty-five in 1914, Conan Doyle was rejected for service abroad, and instead organized the Home Guard. His unit became the Crowborough Company of the Sixth Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment.

When offered the command position in the new battalion, Conan Doyle refused. He wanted to show his countrymen that all were equal in the defence of Britain, and he entered the group as a private. He volunteered at the Crowborough army camp, resting and feeding the troops on their way to the south coast ports and on to Western Front. From Windlesham Manor, in 1917, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that he could hear the sound of the cannon and machine gun from The Somme across the English Channel. As did Prime Minister Lloyd George, who was famously said to have heard the guns from his office in Downing Street, London. Whether he did or was speaking metaphorically, as if he could have heard them, David Lloyd George had cautioned his government not to announce the true numbers of dead and wounded, as the people would not accept the war. They would reject it and refuse to fight on. The peace cry would get louder, and the pressure to sue for peace, stronger. We needed to be seen winning the war in the hope the other side would capitulate, with a retreat, armistice, and peace treaty like that of Versailles between the French and Prussians in 1871.

By the time the Great War started most agreed with Conan Doyle, and Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, that not only had war been inevitable, but that it had also become unavoidable. The lanes and roads became busier in those days with farm traffic—horse-drawn carts and a few motor tractors, motorcars, and lorries—and then also the marching of feet, and troop carriers onward toward the coast.

Toward France and the battlefront.

The Crowborough camp is where our father, Mark Henry, passed through in 1915 to serve at Gallipoli, Turkey; as you, Harry Arthur, in the same year, to the Somme and Ypres; and I, soon now, to serve at France, as we are now told.

Chapter 6: Lord Bertrand (Bertie) Russell

Soon after I was born in 1898, we moved residence from 56 Walterton Road to Coptic Street, Holborn, which had a W1 postal code, making it West London even though it was east of the city, and to the north. We moved there because our parents could no longer afford the rents in Maida Vale. The housing they could afford was in Stedham Chambers, Holborn, near to the British Museum, and from there father would walk to work, along Oxford Street.

There was going to be a great depression, some warned, and things were difficult. Eventually, father lost his job at The Moroccan Warehouse and they went out of business due to the war.

But instead of two rooms, we now lived in three. The new building's apartments were constructed with tall chimneys where decorative red brickwork swirling like the wind, forming ears of corn and figures of birds: cranes and storks. There was a courtyard with open, shared balcony walkways of reinforced concrete and wrought iron, and a communal lawn and garden below where you could meet others in pleasant surroundings, and go about your business.

Cobbled alleyways took you to the busy paved streets and the salubrious surroundings, which included interesting shops and cafes. I wondered if we moved there because it was called Stedham Chambers. Stedham is a well-known and picturesque place in Sussex, with a manor house and water mill. It may just have reminded Father of who he was and where he was born. He might have liked to visit there again someday.

The Stedham Chambers, Holborn, was built and named by a family of Sussex grocers who sold up and made good in the Covent Garden and Spitalfields, the fruit and vegetable markets. Our rooms were opposite the dairy at Pied Bull Court and Yard, where milk churns were brought in from the dairy farms in Middlesex, Hertfordshire, and Essex. We lived among the service workers employed in the markets, and the grand houses and university colleges at Cambridge Circus. The School of Oriental and African Studies was nearby, as well as the British Museum, and we would visit there with Father and talk about all The Treasures of History, therein.

There was a connection with The Morocco Warehouse, where Father worked, and before this war he was then _top_ salesman. He needed to know about the items he was selling, specialising in the exotic furniture and ornaments, carpets and cloths of Morocco where he wished he would be able to visit someday.

He would take us to visit the warehouse, and the museum. From six years to thirteen we both went to the National School nearby, where we learned to read and write, and we did well.

We liked our history, and took after our father in that way. I had a job as a newsboy, as well, selling newspapers and calling out the headlines to passersby on the corner of New Oxford Street. Then I joined Barclays Bank in The City, clerking. You, Harry, were good at numbers too, and became a bookmaker's clerk at the Sporting Club, the gambling club and casino favour whose doors opened onto the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street opposite the Shaftesbury Theatre, and was favoured by the toffs and rich foreigners. There were a few famous people around the place: actors and writers called "The Bloomsbury Set".

At the time, one of the Set was Lord Russell, otherwise known as Bertrand "Bertie" Russell, a famous mathematician and philosopher. An atheist and a pacifist, Russell moved into the nearby Russell Chambers, built and named by his formerly aristocratic family, offering basic accommodation for the poorer professionals and academics of the London University colleges.

Russell, who was well-known for his antiwar sentiments, lived at number 32 Russell Chambers. He wrote pamphlets and books about his beliefs, spoke about them, lost his job at Cambridge University, and even went to prison because of views of war and this Great War in particular. He didn't join the Public Schools and University Men's Force, commissioned as officers in 1915. Russell said it was a war of imperialism. Even if the Kaiser had already moved into the Netherlands and Belgium, heading for France and the English Channel, he still believed an invasion of England was unlikely. Most people, however, including Conan Doyle, disagreed with Russell, insisting we had to go to war.

It was preferable to sue for peace, Russell argued, preferable to go for early appeasement, which is what the Kaiser wanted as well apparently, but we were not told this until afterwards.

Peace was what the German people, especially the workers, and the soldiers by implication, and conscription, wanted too. It was what the British may have wanted if we were asked. We might have accepted peace, since we, or they, surely did not want the Great War, either. Even if we did lose our sea power and our Empire that was just what this war was all about: the prestige and power and jealousy of the rulers. There was nothing for us, the people, to gain from it. Russell said that meeting force with force was wrong and two wrongs did not make a right. Fighting fire with fire was stupid, when a bucket of water was required. A war of offense, even as defence, was not justified, Russell said, because of the horrors war brought. Each side setting out to annihilate the other, without remorse or remedy.

"Hatred, by a tragic delusion, perpetuates the very evils from which it springs," Russell wrote.

Here at the front, that is just what it is: Kill before you get killed.

Well, we never think we ourselves are going to be killed, do we? Always dream, and hope to return in one piece, at least.

Yet, we always know it could be any of us, anytime.

In the end, there did not seem to be a choice. It was paid work, of a sort, for our families when there was not a lot of work available. For the fighters, as for the objectors, it was never really going to be glorious.

Workers and soldiers at the newsstand on New Oxford Street, The City offices talked about these choices, or decisions, if that was what they were: to fight or not to fight, and for what? For whom? Against what? Against whom? The whole world? This is a World War soon enough: the Great War.

Bertrand Russell and Conan Doyle corresponded regularly on the subjects of life after death and spiritualism. Some of it was written up in the newspapers I was selling and reading then.

Conan Doyle was agnostic and a transcendentalist, believing a greater truth was somehow out there. Russell was a rational idealist, believing only reason can point to the truth. Their debates were repeated on the streets of London, and everywhere else literate people congregated, sometimes as rowdy mobs including at the newspaper stand and outside parliament and at street corners, speaking off of soap box stands, shouting and arguing.

Eventually Russell and Conan Doyle fell out over the question of an afterlife, life after death, and no longer communicated.

I wonder how they feel about that question now coming into 1917, with so many dead?

Conan Doyle subscribed to the Society for Psychic Research, whose members attempted to prove communication from beyond the grave through spiritual contact by "automatic" or "spirit" writing and other means. But what would the fallen say now? What would he, we—you and I—say now?

Russell held that there was no life after death. He said all was obtained in the here and now, through the faculty of reason, and that we held a moral responsibility, individually and collectively, for either the existence of heaven on earth or the unleashing of hell on earth.

The question that ultimately divided them was whether to go to war with Germany, and with our Allies Russia and France and Belgium, with the Entente Cordiale already signed-up. Whether going to such a war was a good thing or a bad thing. A just war, or not? Is any war just? Is reneging on cordial agreements made many years before, in 1907, was this just reason for such bloodshed?

Conan Doyle would say yes, it was necessary. Russell would say it was up to every individual to decide for himself, whether to fight or not, in a righteous war. Russell believed conscription was wrong, and that was the real issue. The war may be right or wrong...What mattered was how many believed it was right or wrong. How many felt this worth fighting for? Them who would actually fight? On either or any side? They all would have their rational reasons, for or against.

In the end, it came down to each of us having to decide for ourselves. We were told we had to fight to avoid invasion or blockade from the English Channel and the so-called North German Sea. France, the ports in Belgium, and the colonies all over the world were the prizes worth fighting for here on the Western Front, and the free passage of trade from the Atlantic lest England be starved into submission.

If we survived, or even if we died, we would be pensioned so our families, our children—if we had any—and our children's children could continue in freedom and peace. This was the war to end all wars, we were told, and we would be able to continue with life for our descendants...And that is why we are out here fighting in these killing fields. That is why I am out here, ahead of Cambrai, as we know now, in these terrible fighting fields.

Chapter 6: Arthur Wells

It was not that far from west to east London. Paddington to Bethnal Green and Old Ford. You could do it by barge, along the canal, but we would take the omnibus to Old Ford, then Bethnal Green. Then over Tower Bridge, or through the new Rotherhithe Tunnel, under the Thames, to the New and Old Kent Roads. Toward the end of every summer we would visit our mother's brother, Arthur Wells, and all our Wells relations living in the village sprawl of the overcrowded East End of London. From there, we would go down to Father's Kent countryside, for the hop-picking season. Some walked all the way, while others, like us, took buses and trains to the southward-facing rolling hills of the Kent Downs, where the early Roman conquerors and the French Normans planted vineyards, producing wine right up to the end of the seventeenth century, when Samuel Pepys was writing his diary of London life. By the time we were travelling south, the summers were shorter and colder, and faster-ripening hops were grown instead for adding to the traditional English and British ales, and they have been ever since

These hops had to be picked, of course, and doing so gave us a taste of the sort of country life Father must have lived as a young and unattached suitor to Caroline Wells. Before 1914, for a few weeks of every summer, the Wells and Mepham families gathered together to work, sometimes for a month or more picking hops and cutting them down for the next year.

While the adults worked, we children amused ourselves with hop battles. One of us would throw a hop, others would join in, and then we had a war! We played around between the rows of huts where we slept, cooked, and ate, and had to be quietened down to sleep. Every evening we sat up late, while the adults drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and talked outside.

We enjoyed those days with Uncle Arthur and Mother's family. Seven years older than Mother, Uncle Arthur could not write his own name, or at least that's what Mother told us. It was why she was always so adamant that we go to school, and learn to read, write, and do sums. Uncle Arthur put a cross on the marriage certificate when he married Aunt Clara (Wilson) from Carlisle.

Uncle Arthur could not read words very well, but was a virtuoso by the fact that he could sight-read music. He played the violin, viola, and cello. He also had a mechanical piano player with the tough paper rolls scored, and played for the notes. The music was played by the moving of foot-pedalled levers. He would pump the pedals for accompaniment, hammering at the keys, and play along on the violin, both hands and feet occupied.

He would be half-turned to the room full of relatives, neighbours, and friends.

His audience sang along and danced on the uncarpeted floor. Uncle Arthur obtained his best violin, viola, and violoncello from Aunt Clara, who had connections in the trade. She had been apprenticed at fourteen years, making musical instruments in one of the furniture factories along the Lee Navigation canal up toward the famous gunpowder mills at Barking Creek and Waltham Abbey. Nearby to those, also, is the Lee-Enfield Rifle Works, at Enfield Lock, where our rifles here at the front are meticulously manufactured and brought out to us ship and by the horse-drawn cartload, as along the metalled army roads from the back trenches.

Uncle Arthur had a horse and cart. To transport his similarly meticulously woodworked and upholstered furniture about. From St. Stephens Road, Bow, rather than facing the expense of hiring a cart or a lorry as some did, they would go down to Kent on their own horse and cart.

They worked together, Arthur and Clara, fully self-sufficient, they would say. They grew fruit and vegetables at their allotment and in the yard at the back where the horse would be stabled, through the gateposts around the side of the house and leaving its manure for their garden! Aunt Clara must have done all the reading and writing, all the paperwork. They lived and worked together as cabinetmakers and upholsterers—now the Wells family business.

They bought and brought their wood and materials along the River Lea and Lee Navigation, imported cargoes from Kent and Sussex, and from all over the world. They may have turned out furniture, fixtures, and fittings for the palaces and grand houses that were occupied for the London Season of the royalty and aristocracy and other hangers-on in those days. For the balls and dances which became fashionable for the burgeoning professional classes of the inner and outer leafy suburbs, as by the Imperial Piano Company at Leyton, Essex, on the other bank of the Lea Valley where another Uncle Henry worked and got Arthur the shifting jobs, no doubt.

Urban and urbane, Uncle Arthur and Aunt Clara lived and worked at St. Stephens Road, close to the cottages at 10 Beale Place where Grandmother Wells had lived, and at 19 Beale Place where our cousins spun silk and cotton. Arthur and Clara moved to the tidy terrace in Bow by the long Roman Road street market and their old terraced house and yard in St. Stephen's Road. This was where the horse stuck its head through the kitchen window, over the butler's sink in the back-scullery, and knocked plates and cutlery off the shelf to general pandemonium! Do you remember that?

I do, or at least think I do! What a commotion! Or so we were told...

They were wonderful days, weren't they, Harry Arthur? Of our other cousins our age, there was Florrie, Clara Eleanor, Gracie, Emily, and Charles who died of tuberculosis. Then our cousin Etty, for Henrietta—another French name. Because of their names, I often wonder if the Wells were French. William and Harriet were French Huguenot, or then perhaps back to the invasion of 1066 and all that! Sixteen years older than Mother, Henrietta, Etty married Alf Byfield in 1908, at the civil parish church of St. John's, Hackney Road, where Mother once worked for the churchman, and might even have set up the wedding for them at a discounted price!

As with the furniture for the house, through the trade.

It was a grand do, that wedding, by all accounts. According to the photographs taken with the phosphorous flash-camera at the photographic studio on Kingsland Road, Hackney, a beautiful lace and silk dress was made by family in the millinery trade, and tailored suits with bow ties hired for the men; and us lads at the time in long socks over our knees!

Uncle Arthur Wells supported the war from the start.

He said there were always those who did not support war under any circumstances. He was too old to sign up anyway, but by 1914, at fifty-eight, Uncle Arthur kept the horse and cart at 101 St. Stevens Road, Bow, for any war service as may be required. Our aunts in Bow continued weaving, knitting, and sewing, now making the uniforms for the troops. Other women were working in munitions in the Barking Creek factories, packing the bullets and shells into boxes and wooden crates to be sent out here to the Western Front.

Uncle Arthur and Aunt Clara's terraced house had a back room and kitchen scullery beyond the front room. There were two or more rooms upstairs, and outside were shared toilets with the whole row.

When our cousins got married and moved out Clara and Uncle Arthur had lodgers. These were John and Harriet Wicker. He was from Scotland, but this Harriet was a local girl. They both worked at the Bryant and May matchbox factory in Fairfield Road, Old Ford, Bow. The factory was a large and imposing place, like the tenements were as well, like warehouses, and they were making damp-proof matches for the troops like us, and this was dangerous work. Floors and floors of men and women breathed in the poisonous yellow phosphor and sulphur fumes not unlike the poison of the gas bombs we get here on the Western Front.

Before we were born, the matchgirls went on strike, and people still spoke about it for years afterward. The employees refused to work for poor wages and in such deplorable conditions. Do you remember us being told about it? Annie Besant and The London Matchgirls Strike they called it because only the women walked out while the men continued working and earning wages.

But the products could not be finished without the women. The bosses—the wealthy Bryant and May families—were Quakers and pacifists, and they had a social conscience. They either had to close the factory or pay fair wages and provide safer working conditions. Whether what they paid afterward was ever going to be fair is another question. As with war, fairness doesn't really come into it. It is like everyone for themselves, and together with their comrades, like here with us. Harry, me and you. Fairness, and not fairness, I'd say.

The girls refused to work, went on strike, and won. Just like when we strike their matchsticks at the front, now, eh? No second chances. All or nothing! Those workers could have been fired. Like Father was in 1914 from the Morocco Goods Warehouse. "Let go, "they said, "Laid-off". No trade was going to travel from Morocco to London now.

Only U-boats from the so-called North German Sea into the Atlantic, disrupting trade with Africa, the Americas and Canada, and the Far East. Then, in 1914, there was nowhere else for us to go except back to Sussex and safety from the Zeppelins and the German bombing.

And now we, too, have to stick it out. Now we are here. Strike first, surprise strike. Survive it only if you're lucky, eh? Like being down a shell hole, waiting for the next attack.

"Put that light out!" is all we would get now. Like the Home Guard at home. Here it is strike once and hope there are not any sharp shooters around hiding in the woods and thickets. Light a tobacco quickly, cupped in hand, and draw. Then keep it away from you, cupped in hand. If you're unlucky, you might only lose a hand and not your whole bloody head! Unless they were such bad shots, eh? You never know, especially in the dark. Not so bad if you lose a finger and spend the rest of the war in Blighty, eh?

Of course, we all thought ourselves invincible. It couldn't happen to us, until it did. Then there really was no going back. There were times when I almost wished one of those cigarettes might be the last, if only just to end the suspense. I might just think to myself, _Well, if this is going to be the last one, so be it!_

I don't know so much now. I don't mind, so just get on with it. Let's win, and get this thing over with! So we do get on with it, don't we? We cannot strike now, can we? Even matches. Silent marching. No songs or stories, no birdsong. We cannot refuse to fight now. Not once we're here getting shot at. Not now we are here at the Western Front, eh?
Chapter 8: Alfred Byfield

Alfred Byfield is Mother's brother-in-law by her Aunt Etty, our cousin Henrietta. He was against the war, any war. He would have been the age for enlisting or conscription. He was a self-employed glazier and younger than our father, who did enlist voluntarily even before conscription.

Alf could have enlisted, but he said if he had children, if he had boys of fighting age, he would not let them go, and he would not go either. Uncle Alf did not have children then, and he did not agree with the war. By the start of the Great War in 1914, he had married Etty, and Cousin Gracie had married Uncle Walter, my only familiar namesake. Walter was opposed to the Great War as well. This Walter Southgate had been brought up in Hackney Road, and learned to read and write. He was trained from the workhouse there in the art of making quill pens for the Stock Exchange and banks in London. As well as being then a Trades Union clerk, he continued making quill pens his whole life, serving the city, as I did in some way when I became a messenger at Barclays Bank in Lombard Street in 1914—a short-lived employment, evacuated with Mother as the Zeppelin strikes on London began.

Uncle Alf said the war was imperialistic and all about money! All about the expansion of empires and rivalry in Africa, and although it was fought out in Europe with workingmen's blood. Uncle Walter said workingmen would never be the winners. Instead, they fought the battles of the Royal Families and Generals who directed operations from afar. Walter joined the No-Conscription Fellowship, a group allied with the new Socialist Labour Party and the Suffragette Movement, a campaign to earn women the right to vote. Walter went to the conscription tribunal, and was found employment on a tomato farm in Kent, which made him an essential worker, and therefore exempt from duty in the war. The farmhands and labourers would chide and mock him for being a faint-heart and a coward, and yes, a traitor. He received short shrift and anger from others once the war had started up. Some of his fellow workers even shut him out of the air raid shelter when the raids started.

That soon changed, when those "Conshie" ("conscientious objector") haters were themselves called up in the conscription. The farmhands quickly made a pact with the landowner and farmer to put their names down also as essential workers. As a result Walter Southgate was sent away as the work was being done by _these_ "cowards and traitors" which they were far from, and Walter and the others were no longer needed.

Walter continued as an itinerant agricultural labourer in Hertfordshire and Wiltshire, like the itinerant agricultural labourer of Father's family a hundred years before. Walter Southgate worked "feeding the people, not the war," he said. Alf Byfield also went to the conscription tribunal, and went as a non-combatant medical auxiliary to be a stretcher-bearer on the front line in France, we may even bump into him there!

There were plenty of those auxiliaries, and they were needed, saving lives. Carrying and collecting the wounded and dead is as risky as the fighting. The stretcher-bearers are for the most part unarmed, but are as likely to get sniper shot or bombed as any of us out here.

So, Alf and Walter Southgate were against the war even though we were told we were going to be invaded if we did not fight and stop the Germans. France and Belgium had already been invaded by the Bosch, and we were next if we did not take the fight to them. Even into North Africa, Egypt, and French-Morocco, as Father had told us. We had to crush the Hun, we were told, or they would end the Empire.

And us? What would we do about it?

I don't know if we would have been invaded if we didn't fight, or if we'd have lost the empire. I have no idea what state the world would be in if the Great War had not happened. Then again, neither does anyone else. We could not take any chances, could we? We could be against the war, but that doesn't matter now. It has started without us having any say at all, so it seems. No vote. But isn't that always the way in wars? Chickens don't vote for Xmas! It's all the same. It may not have made any difference to us in the end if we had been invaded, or if we had sued for peace. If that was possible.

The Germans were after The Empire; and we were Home and Colonial after all. Indian, Ghurkha, Australian and American and Canadian, African and Caribbean, and everyone else out here from our worldwide empire

It was the rich and ruling classes in London and the shires, although. The aristocratic lords and ladies who had socialist housing estates and capitalist shopping streets named after themselves. Who were at risk of losing their wealth, as well as all of ours! All our families were related somehow to this wealth, but only at the distance they remain from us now. The politicians and generals and royalty remain at home and in the back camps, far from the front. For each of us fighting at the front line, whether off the land, or offices and shopworkers, the debate was almost, if not totally, inconsequential.

Many tens of thousands resisted, and refused to fight. Either exempted or escaped, they avoided the conscription, one way or another. The rest of us, perhaps, did not have the guts to stand up against it, or to run and hide, or to face the tribunal, go to prison, or to carry stretchers, or simply to grow food for the people.

There was a lot of encouragement to join up, to put it mildly.

We were entreated by God, king, and country, and by popular entertainers from the music halls and cinema, who would perform for the public and troops at home and abroad some of them.. But few of these would actually end up fighting. Some would, and some—many—would die in the fighting as well. Many writers and poets. Many families decided among themselves who would stay behind and who would go. One way or another, they found their various ways.

Most of us who went to war may have had little to lose for ourselves but for our family to continue; and thus, we had everything to gain. Our own father Mark Henry had reasonable cause to go in our places. Maybe it would all be over by Xmas, or before I would be old enough to fight.

We—You and I Harry, in the indestructible moments of youth—we went anyway.

And so here am I in a field in France. Now you have heard of the Kentish and Sussex Mephams and the London Wells. A Frenchman from the trenches told me the Wells name in French is "Dupuis" meaning "by the well," just as "Dupres" means "by the field," or Byfield. In France and in Belgium we might yet have distant cousins by blood or marriage. From Roman, Norman, Anglo-Saxon, or more recent Georgian German times, people with whom we are fighting with, or against.

The German Mephams still, of some ancient King Meapha, who we are now fighting against. To kill or be killed—the same.
**Part Three** **: Sarajevo**

Chapter 9: The Assassination in Sarajevo.

The assassination in Sarajevo was all over the newspapers.

Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated by a lone student in Sarajevo, June 1914. He— _they_ —royals were expendable, an excuse for starting a war. Austria sent an ultimatum to Serbia, bringing in the Russians and Germans. The headlines on the newspapers read:

ASSASSINATION IN SARAJEVO!

CRISIS IN THE BALKANS! CRISIS IN EUROPE!

WAR IS DECLARED!

In July, tsarist Russia mobilized against Austria-Hungary in support of Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. In August 1914, France—bound by treaty for mutual protection with Russia—was invaded by German troops via Flanders. France immediately withdrew its troops six miles from the German border onto the ridges of Alsace-Lorraine and along the plains ahead of the German-held railway junction at Cambrai.

The Germans after the initial unprovoked invasion continued to threaten northward, toward the then-North German Sea and the English Channel and on to Paris itself. London would be next, we were told. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm, dynastic cousin of the British king, pleaded, apparently, with his Generals to pull the German troops back from France and Belgium.

The German chief of staff, Von Moltke, veteran from the Franco-Prussian war, had unfinished business and ignored his Kaiser. The British—allies of France, Belgium, and Russia—immediately declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. Winston Churchill, of the aristocratic Marlborough family, was First Lord of the Admiralty. He was the head of the British Committee of Imperial Defence, based on friendly trade relations with France in Africa, and determined antagonism toward Germany.

This committee had started making war plans in advance of 1914. Under their initial command, The British Expeditionary Forces immediately became entrenched across great swathes of land in Belgium and France and began to push the Germans back with some success: back to the Somme river, Mons, Ypres, and the Hindenburgh-Siegfried line at Cambrai. In 1915, following the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, which Father survived, Churchill was stood down and commanded briefly the Sixth Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers at the Western Front before returning as secretary of state for war and munitions.

As a personal friend of Churchill, Conan Doyle advised and recommended that the crews of military vessels, submarines, and ships should be supplied with lifebelts and lifeboats; and, for the first time, front-line soldiers were to wear body armour. That is why we wear flak jackets now as we wait for the orders to advance on Cambrai.

Now, I can imagine Grandfather Mark and Grandmother Fanny Mepham buried together at Uckfield, East Sussex. I can imagine our mother Caroline nursing the injured and wounded from the Western Front. She could have heard the roar of cannon from Flanders fields in the spring and summer, and into the autumn, at Paschendale, and into the winter of 1917.

I came to France in May 1916. By 1917, Harry Arthur, you were returned home after the battles to the north in Ypres and the Somme for rest and recuperation. Mother was at Croydon, then Brighton, nursing the dead and wounded. You with the many thousands of others expected the informal winter truce sparing us bombardment, and then home, to be returned for the expected final push the next year in 1918.

I fought with the Third Army on the Siegfried-Hindenburg line and now at Cambrai. Taking your place, Harry, at the back camps and the battlefields, we are digging new trenches further south, moving closer to those of the German army and the Hindenburg Line, south of yours at the Somme. Although we are never to meet again, Harry, I know what you know, as mother despairingly knew—that I am not to ever to return home; or to see you, or her, again.

Chapter 10: The Decision Is Made

Prior to 1914, Germany had been stockpiling guns, motorized cannon, mechanized tanks, warships, and aircraft. As Churchill and Conan Doyle had warned they would threaten our empires, with the Austrians and Hungarians, the Ottoman Turks, and eventually across the north Baltic Sea into Eastern Europe with the Russians in Crimea again, and to the Far East, Japan and China.

Eventually, with the colonial and former colonial realms of Australia, the East Indies and the Americas, the Near East and North Africa Egypt, and then Morocco; and the European colonies in Africa, where it had all started. The German War. The European War. The Great War - A World War they could not have then imagined.

Overruling the Kaiser, Hutier and Hindenberg formed the German Supreme Council. The imperialistic military and industrial dictatorships of the new German nation established by the "Nation-Builder" Bismarck were effectively deposed, as was the Kaiser from the seat of power. Germany was once again asserting itself in Europe, wanting to take the colonial worlds of Britain and France.

It was a glorious summer in London, and at the seaside at Hastings in 1914, and I, Walter, was just seventeen years old, you Harry Arthur, nineteen only. By then, the Morocco Warehouse where Father worked had closed, and there was no work in London. Father had no other city trade than that of warehouseman and salesman, and an economic depression loomed or had already started, according to some. Many of us, the people we knew and family, believed the economic slump was brought on by the greed of those at the top, and restricted trade for the rest of us!

The Great Depression of the 1920s, it was later said, was delayed only by the start of the Great War.

We were living back in Catsfield, near Battle, Hastings. Father and you, Harry Arthur, both out of work, signed-up for the war, 1914, at Ore in Sussex.

We never really discussed if any of us would or should sign up. Father must have been too old at fifty-four years if Conan Doyle was at forty-four, but he signed up anyway. He must have had something special to offer, although what a miller's labourer, grocer's and draper's assistant, warehouseman, and salesman had to offer exactly, I could not tell. Unless it was some knowledge and experience of Morocco and North Africa for which he yearned. Perhaps the running of the army stores.

Father did see action throughout and latterly back here at the Western Front, too. The last of his days, as he never returned home, as I did not either. To see you, or our Mother again. But we knew he wanted to go and died to no avail, of this, from his first journey overseas, he was never to return. He may have lied about his age—many did that—perhaps to fight instead of you and me, Harry Arthur, and he was accepted as you were. Once recruited and trained, all of us at Aldershot!

Father was never questioned further. Father joined the Royal Sussex Regiment as Private TF201401, Fourth Battalion. He trained at Horsham, went to Egypt and Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, in August 1915, aged fifty years. You, Harry Arthur, joined the Royal Fusiliers, Ninth Battalion, and went to Aldershot, mobbed from Croydon to Crowborough Camp, Sussex, and landed in France in 1915.

The Army would not take me to start with, and Mother and Father seemed relieved. It would not last long, they said, this war, and I would do a better job at home in a trade that protected me from enlistment, even as an agricultural labourer. Unlike our father and his parents and their parents before them, I had never done agricultural work in my life, apart from the casual hop-picking.

I'd never held a gun, either, or fought a battle except with you and our cousins, hops, and small stones, which were dangerous enough.

At first, not enough men signed up to fight. Why would they? Why wouldn't they?

This reluctance or willingness was perceived rational self-interest, according to Russell, or "work with pay" in anyone else's terms. It had nothing to do with national pride or Socialism at home, or Communism in Russia. It had nothing to do with duty under God and King, according to others. Although either of these would have been perhaps the more rational, as well as spiritual, reasons to fight, or not to fight.

There was a weighted choice, and a decision to be made, as well as livelihood, and family. The government said they had to meet force with force, and did not have enough troops to confront the Kaiser's army. They introduced conscription in 1916. As Uncle Arthur said at the time, it was like facing a firing squad with guns aimed at your head. Who would fire first?

Uncle Alf said he would shoot the bastards first. Whom he meant was unclear—those who avoided conscription, or the enemy? In 1916, The Conscription Act of Parliament called on all able-bodied men without dependants, nineteen to forty years old, to join up. At the end of the war, there is an unwritten promise of pension paid to the family, should we die, or be unable to work, with unemployment benefits.

The alternative to conscription, is imprisonment. Word spread quickly that some deserters had already been shot by firing squad in France. Whether this was true, we did not know, but it had an effect. We did know then what we know now—that they were "shell shocked" as we start to say out here, with fear, and had turned their backs on the battlefield and refused to fight anymore.

As you did, Harry, as you did.

As their individual sense of reason told them to do: for themselves and for their families. An irrational, or rational action, in whose rationality?

But they could not go on, whatever the threat to themselves. Would that have made a difference? If we had known that? As you, Harry, must have known. As I have come to know? As everyone at this front, at this point in time and place, knows. As you told mother on that final leave of duty: as some said "The hell that is war but for some heaven of winning." But we believed the propaganda and threats, most of us, whether death by firing squad or invasion.

Whether it would really happen like that or not, we would take no chances. I was only sixteen years old, anyway, by the time of conscription, and I lied, as Father did, and I enlisted. No questions asked. We had moved again, Mother and I, to another rented place in Croydon, South London, this time: 28 Boswell Road. It was near to the hospital where Mother was a nurse administering to the troops who made it back, patching them up—physically, at least—to be returned to the front.

You stayed with us that one time, when you were home on leave from the Western Front, Harry. You had been at the first Ypres battle in Belgium, but didn't tell us much about it. back to make up the numbers from the hundreds of thousands killed at the first Battle of The Somme; you in time for the second, 1916, as bloody and deadly.

Mother knew anyway, and told me, about the injured she saw, who did return, only then few survived, they had brought the hospital to Brighton because they were dying on their way to south London, Croydon.

I could not say I did not know for what I was signing up.

And when you survived the second, then at The Somme.

We talked about most things growing up in Paddington. Then when we moved to St. Giles in East London, and we carried on our ways.

We were all back in Hastings by the start of this war, 1914. Then, when you and Father went, Mother and I moved back to the outskirts of South London, to Thornton Heath, Croydon, Surrey. Where the Germans dropped their first RFA 501 zeppelin incendiary bomb in 1915. The hospital was hit would you believe it? This was called the "theatre-land raid" as the bombs fell on that area of London. We knew about the deaths and injuries of civilians and workers, essential workers, fire-fighters, and agricultural workers in the fields in Surry, Sussex, and Kent. I could have done that work instead. But I did not.

I wanted to get them back. Using the River Thames for guidance, the Zeppelins bombed our factories and airfields, then dumped the remainder on our homes in Croydon, and the factories in the East End of London before they fled back to Germany.

When we were all away at the war, Mother moved back down to Brighton to nurse the returning wounded there. The soldiers were dying on their way to Croydon from Brighton, she said, and she would be nearer to us, her two sons, across the English Channel. Despite what you said to Mother, and Mother said to me, I signed the form.

I joined the London and Scottish regiment, Twenty-Sixth Battalion, 12685, registered private in the Royal Fusiliers Ninth 23792, signed up at Woolwich, London, and was taken out to Hounslow for training. I could not be sent abroad until I was nineteen anyway, so they said. I trained enthusiastically, my theatre of war then being then at Aldershot, Hampshire, as described on my papers.

After only a few weeks' training—learning offensive actions, attacking straw bags with bayonet and wooden club, digging and trenching, and so on—we were taken by train from Aldershot to Paddington station, then on to Waterloo station and the south coast. From Aldershot to Paddington station, then along Oxford Street nearby where we used to live by Bloomsbury. Still busy in the daytime, another newsboy calling out the news from the newsstand at the corner of New Oxford Street.

There were few people in and out of the remaining small shops and the large department stores. Everything was quite normal except the streets of London were empty, and the windows of buildings boarded and blacked-out. The banks and trading offices ceased, almost emptied, once the City Clerks Battalion had so enthusiastically been started in 1914. I was relieved anyway from my short-lived work at the post room at Barclays Bank in London. I was too young then to go to war, and went with you and Mother and Father back to Sussex. It never occurred to me, even then, that I might never see those streets and buildings, so familiar to our growing up, ever again.

This time, I went on the army commissioned tram through empty streets—empty of once enthusiastic crowds. Some few of them kept up the façade of hope and shouted good wishes. Others, no doubt, glad it was not themselves or their brothers or sons going to war. But by now no one could dissent in public for fear of white feathering, or arrest. Words and plucked feathers were thrown like stray bullets, insults of treachery, cowardice, and laggardness, and, no doubt, worse. Russell was imprisoned.

Conan Doyle was in France reporting for the War Office and newspapers.

As we went over Waterloo Bridge, there was no cheering into the station, and it was no longer festooned with banners and flags. We were then taken directly and away to France. No stopping off at cosy Crowborough Camp for us. By overcrowded paddle steamer we were ferried over the Channel to Havre, and onward south by crowded train, like cattle herded. Marching on foot to set up camp behind the front line, our only orders — Stay Put and Be Ready! I was nineteen years old, and six months when we moved into battle formation, facing distantly the church spires we had seen, and the Ridge overlooking Cambrai.

Chapter 11: Reports of War

We knew the Great Conan Doyle, of course. He was here at Cambrai to send reports to the newspapers, magazines, and also the war office. Most of us knew the early serialisations of the Challenger stories and the Sherlock Holmes mysteries from rough paperback books sold in bookshops, and at street corner stalls.

The resemblance to Suffolk and the chalky South Downs here is remarkable, and we feel a strange connection to our homeland across the English Channel. Occasionally, during this long last march, we encounter lookout posts behind. Some with tents and huts, tables and chairs set out. On them sit the Generals and Field-Marshals, and once, we were told, just before we were called to order and set to moving up, there sat Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Conan Doyle was visiting as a medical officer, and reported on "The Great War". He was on the line between Villecourt to the north and Villers Ghislaine to the south. At the strategic high ground at Bourlon at "the important town of Cambrai," he wrote described the Western Front as made up "of trenches and cannon at the Siegfried Line so-called of the German Hindenburg Line."

He wrote in admiration of the "impressive fortifications "a Cyclopean work...Huge and solid a modern monument, and a wonder of the world...enormous excavations of prodigious length, depth, and finish...object lessons both of the strength of the Germans, the skill of their engineers, and the ruthlessness with which they exploited the slave and captive labour with which so much of it was built."

In the summer of 1917, British General Plumer had taken the Messines Ridge at Flanders to the north of the Siegfried Line, with an initial heavy bombardment of artillery, then with Lewis machine guns. With rifle grenades and skirmishing infantry groups. Plumer had the express but unrealised strategic aim of reaching, attacking, and destroying the German U-boat submarine fleet in the Belgian ports, and so headed north rather than south to Cambrai.

As Conan Doyle had predicted, the German fleet had been harassing British supplies in the English Channel and North Sea. Conan Doyle's reports from the Western Front, however, now reported "severe losses and no ground gained, and no advance on the coast...attacks from further tank and infantry attacks at Ypres, Somme, and most recently at Paschendale. The Germans had withdrawn to their Hindenburg line Arras to Rheims arched west just four miles in front of Cambrai, facing the British and Allied lines." Cambrai was taken by the Germans in the first invasion in 1914.

The cathedral city was a significant German supply railhead, and rest and recreation point for their early successes, won by the rapidly deployed trench warfare along the hundreds of miles of the Western Front. Strategically significant in blocking any newly attempted advance toward Paris, the City of Cambrai was now also a diversion from the stalled aim of stopping a northward and the coastal German advance northward through Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland.

The French were all but defeated in the south. With many of their tanks destroyed at Arras and their armies slaughtered from the German high ground along the Alsace line, for the iron and coal mines, the French troops deserted, went into hiding early on, and some of them openly mutinied.

Those many that remained now joined with the British and commonwealth allies under Marshal Foch. The Canadians, Anzacs, Chinese, Indians, and Americans were now arriving. All of us drawn up in camps and trench lines. The Allies were now holding the north up to the coast, while the French continued to fight the Germans for the coal and iron ore fields of Alsace-Lorraine to the south.

The Russians fought the Germans in the east, extending the Eastern Front to the Turkish Ottoman Empire, also drawn into the conflict early on. Neither side on either front was able to outflank the other. Soldiers faced each other with increasing ferocity on all fronts, lost in the clouds of flamethrowers, artillery and machine gun barrage, poison gas, mines, and grenades.

Our aircraft support glided over the increasingly vast area of concrete shelters and underground works at the Siegfried Line.

We had "ineffectual counter battery artillery fire," according to Conan Doyle, Conan Doyle however praised Field Marshal Haig taking over from Churchill as chief of the command and his "brain and his daring planning at the assault on the Hindenburg Line at Cambrai," and "for his determination to strike the first blow, without prior bombardment warning."

Hidden, camouflaged tank regiments were now to lead the surprise attack at Cambrai with air support, for the cavalry and infantry following on.

As the summer of 1917 came to a close, the weather conditions worsened. It was apparently a widespread belief among the general staff that there were sufficient infantry remaining and assembled "with some of the most seasoned fighting material in the army battered, but fighting fit, to take advantage of a surprise attack toward Cambrai," according to Conan Doyle.

In early November, we were moved up from Peronne, toward Cambrai, south of the devastated Somme battlefield. Leading up through Flanders to the coast, the ground was burned and blown to smithereens, the Somme river below as dark as the muddy fields. Mud was all around, and we were dug in all along the line from Soissons to Rheims.

Our division was one of the newly recruited Kitchener armies. K1 conglomerated, along with remains of other depleted regiments, merged into the massive Third Army, which in the end included Canadians, South Africans, Indian, Chinese, Scots, Welsh, English, and Irish all mixed and merged to make up the numbers. A thousand men went into each battalion with five companies of two hundred each under thirty officers. Sergeants and a sergeant major, then the corporals, lieutenants, leading captains-major remained behind with the Generals and general-staff on the high back hills watching as we marched ahead.

Each of us privates was under a non-commissioned officer platoon group with four platoons to a company. There were signals on bicycles, and drivers of horse-drawn vehicles, pack horses, and draught horses pulling the armoury and ammunition carts. As well as the water carts, rations carts, tool carts with shovels, hand axes, pickaxe, spares, and other parts for the gunnery, and for the brigade of machine gunners drawn up ahead, ready to be armed and fired into action.

Horses hooves and wheels broke up the sunken roads and high fields as we crossed. We marched at night, in single line, along the wooden planked and boarded corduroy roads, toward the new front. Bicycles ferrying messages and accounts to the rear trenches as we went.

Rifles and bayonets were handed out and prepared. Medics and stretcher-bearers, the drummers and band musicians walked silently behind. We marched at ease at night. No talking, no smoking. We were to rendezvous at Fins at three o'clock in the morning of 20 November 1917, just getting light, ready for six o'clock signals.

The French troops moved south.

We freshly of the infantry were brought up from the farmlands. The sun just started to rise in the cloudy sky. With the newly allied and colonial troops, we remained at dawn awaiting orders. Section leaders had colour charts indicating streamer and light signals to be made out on maps.

It was like a great game with us as pieces, set out as on a board. We infantrymen—we did not know anything of what was going to happen. We were always last to be told. It was overcast with weather conditions worsening. It had been steadily raining and despite the conditions, the sun only just appearing through the clouds. As if lightning and thunder let loose, the attack was launched at dawn.

Chapter 12: France

Behind the lines in France, we are far enough away from the fighting to imagine there is no war going on and everything is normal as it was at home, except for the shortage of eligible bachelors, like you and me eh?! Here, we are nightly going forward, digging in and reinforcing supplies, communication and reserve trenches. Navvy work really. Construction Pioneers we are called. Navvies under cover of night, soldiers by day. We returned to the safety of valley villages. The French played cards, sang songs, drank beer and wine, and we all had plentiful rations.

Over the fields and hills to the north and east, bangs and explosions split the air often for days at a time. I think of you, Mother, and Father frequently. Harry Arthur, wondering whether you were thinking of us. Mother may have been able to hear the rackety noise of warfare back in Sussex, and even in London, sending all the birds out of the trees into the sky and away from the threat.

Few of the troops passing through return this way. They go straight to the front, and the very few we see again are dead, or severely injured and soon transported back to hospital in Blighty. They experienced the horror of Ypres and the Somme river valley but like you harry, they do not speak of it. Others limp back from Paschendale, infantry and dismounted cavalry, while their riderless and unsaddled horses gallop as far away as possible, fear in their snorting heads. They crash wildly into ditches and collide with trees, disappearing who knows where. Some were butchered, we were told, for army food.

Light aircraft occasionally fly over, photographing our positions and strafing us with almost harmless machine guns. Otherwise we live a quiet country life with the cavalry horses in the fields and the local French girls and their families continuing their lives as if little had changed.

But they still live in fear and subdued hatred as we do. Their loved ones are often lost; in fact, I don't think I remember any French soldiers returning, injured or otherwise. There were some deserters, refusers in hiding, we were told, and others with French Marshal Foch to the south of us here. We dig trenches at night, and not by the full moon, so we can take cover as soon as we hear the enemy spotter planes overhead. In the daytime they are sometimes shot down by our hidden anti-aircraft fire, before they can return radio messages.

But the German ground bombardments draw nearer and become more intense from the northeast it seems, often continuing all day and lasting for days on end; and it is as if the war is being lost. We stay put. Even though we are anxious and want to go in, it is as if we are being saved for something special, we in the infantry—the poor bloody infantry—we are always the last to get the command. No time to think about it, just get on with it. We help retrieve and re-saddle the riderless horses that somehow find their way back to the camps, but we are never allowed to ride them across the fields and farms. The horses have a wild and terrified look in their eyes, as do the troops returning on foot. They become fewer and fewer as the days pass. We pass our time with the sworded dragoons, the lancers, and hussars, and an Indian regiment of cavalry who know horses as we, most of us, do not. These dark-skinned soldiers, some with turbans over their helmets, laugh and chat in a strange language of their own.

Their English strongly accented. Some Chinese are here as well, digging trenches with us. That's how we know it is a colonial war and a world war, all right. Some of the Indians wear full beards and long hair in turbans, which they aren't allowed to trim for religious reasons, we discovered.

I, however, do manage to shave. For me, once a week is all that was needed. I was then, since March 14th 1917, just nineteen years and six months old.

Chapter 13: The Cambrai Operation

The Cambrai Operation, the Third Army under General Byng, Phase One: A ten-kilometre front consisting of tanks and a thousand heavy artillery guns with fourteen squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps standing by; and two divisions of horse cavalry to break through the enemy lines, followed by the six divisions of infantry.

Lieutenant Colonel Fuller of the British Tank Corps had recommended attacking with tanks in the dry, wide plain between the St. Quentin Canal and the Canal du Nord. This would take them over chalk soil rather than over snarling marshes and heavy muddy clay. This recommendation was taken up by the Third Army Commander Byng, the commander on the ground, and then vetoed by Commander-in-Chief Haig who had taken overall command in 1916 (replacing the British General French, who was sent to quell the Irish Republican Army Easter Uprising in Dublin).

Generals Haig and Kitchener wanted a quick victory to finish off the year of defeats. Haig, as Conan Doyle noted, changing his former praise to scorn, "disingenuously ordered a surprise tank attack on the Germans at the Hindenburg Line and eventually at the town of Cambrai."

Byng then changed the plan to destroy enemy positions with tanks and withdraw. In order to make a breakthrough on the German lines, he ordered the cavalry and infantry to the front to follow the tank attack. This, "for the last assault before the winter," the surprise attack "necessitated the absence of preliminary bombardment," as was otherwise usual with attacks against enemy positions "as this would have been a pre-warning of the infantry assault to come."

The orders to move up were given, horses were harnessed, and the cavalry saddled up, riding the line around and ahead. Overhead, light aircraft buzzed among shouts of command, and the order was carried out. As we moved ahead, tanks prepared weeks in advance, camouflaged and hidden, were appearing from buildings and wooded undergrowth. In lines, they moved forward in the hundreds, the cavalry now flanking, and we the infantry following on.

This was to be a massed tank attack successful, it had been said, at the Somme; and we now "crawling toward the trysting-place, with the colossus," Conan Doyle wrote, "as if some new yet ancient legend or tragedy with a yet recent unity of time and place were being played out."

General Ellis in the forward tank fired the shot, and the whole lot went off.

The cavalry followed around, and we of the foot infantry followed in ranks behind the tanks. Falling-in, as instructed, behind our colour-coded marker tank just after dawn. The ditches ahead leapt by the horse cavalry, and we followed on traversing over cut trench wires, posts crashing down, and burning bundles of wood fascines flamed fearsomely as grapnel tanks tore aside the heavily barbed wire, rolling forward, crossing and occasionally crashing into the gaping ditches.

A smoke barrage hid just about everything. The numbered marks on the rear of the tank we attempted to follow could hardly be made out. The tanks lead, firing ahead all the time, blazing across trenches as remaining German troops fired on, and on fire surrendering even as they died. The motorized tanks drove straight through, over the charcoaled, burning remains of bodies. We followed on in a single line many miles long, silent with fixed bayonets. The cavalry moved through the breaches, the tanks rolled on, ever advancing. The smoke choked us, and the horses were utterly terrified.

The tanks were reinforced steel, but looked flimsy despite their size, great tractor wheels, and guns pointing forward. It was the first time I had seen them from the infantry lines, and they did look as Conan Doyle described, "like a herd of gray African elephants charging ahead, blowing dust from the fields, as the chalk dried in the wind."

Below, a whole field lay out, muddier toward the centre where trenches lay like water-filled irrigation moats. Concrete bunkers set out the connecting points between miles and miles of intercrossed main and support lines. "Deep, the size of a three-story house, and reinforced like an underground city," this was Conan Doyle's colossus: the Siegfried Line.

Missiles flew ahead from the tank's gun turrets. The gunners shouted down instructions to the unsighted driver as mud splattered into the quagmire. We cheered as German bodies flew into the air, the smoke cast a pall over the early morning and created its own deathly haze.

A tank crashed into a water-filled trench, un-retrieved dead, it's and their war over.

Some of the tanks were hit by the German forward gun batteries which were concealed behind the remaining walls of deserted villages and farms. As we trudged on in the mud and rain, many of the tanks careened to a halt, stuck in the mud and ditches, guns pointing at ugly angles. Some were hit by artillery fire, shattered with all inside.

Those Germans surprised by the sudden dawn appearance fled at first sighting, were killed or taken prisoner, or had fallen back to let their overhead artillery assaults freely devastate our ranks.

We took prisoners. We disarmed them and sent them through to the back lines; and we were to continue now in pursuit of the others fleeing. The tanks and infantry had done their work, and not a sound hardly from the Hun now. Their dead and injured were allowed to be carried off, while the remainder retreated to the wooded tops of the next hills.

At several hundred yards distance, we were ordered to hold our positions in and around the deserted and shattered village of Havrincourt. Thankful to be alive, we hunkered down for the night. Eight thousand prisoners were taken on that first day and sent back through the lines, lucky beggars, and a hundred gun positions were also taken out.

The sun rose late the next day. It was autumn anyway, but the foggy thick pall of smog lay everywhere, moving up with an eastward breeze, not yet settled into the day. Once in clear, frosty, autumn midday sunshine, we were moved up toward Flesquieres.

As the air cleared in the breeze, it felt like a walk in the country. Hardly anything stirred. The sound of birdsong filled the quietness. In midmorning, the warring sides waited during the informally agreed breakfast truce. We were accustomed to this well-established routine used to recoup and recover before stating our deadly intentions. On this day, the human combatants were as an assuming army of reoccupation. The songbirds were soon distant, and on silent desertion from the scene.

This was not the most joyous of days. The marching songs were not sung, and we stayed alert, awaiting the first firing shot, commencing the day's work.

The Germans had retreated and were nowhere to be seen. Even on the hills, they had retreated further than the day before. But our progress was slow, now in the salient land marked out on the maps, culminating at Cambrai. The tanks and the cavalry were held up by the canals and the mud, but we of the infantry marched on alone and without cover. Through the devastated landscape, we trudged southwest in the tracks of the retreated Germans, and our own stalled tank attack.

Along the canals and roads, through villages and ruined hamlets, toward Marcoing. The bridges had been blown up at our advance and completely destroyed. Little was left anywhere, but for great holes in the ground, and battered walls half-standing owing to our artillery the previous day, it seemed. Making the trek more treacherous. But, at least giving cover at times, even if it was up to your ankles or knees in muddy, dirty water. Sometimes bloated bodies floated in the water. We came under constant and unpredictable barrage from well-hidden Germans, with superior machine guns.

Still, we trudged past the blasted village and canals, across open country utterly changed with the ruts of squadrons and brigades marching across. With the cavalry on horseback, and the last few tanks remaining, the canals could not be crossed.

The Royal Engineers were hampered with their makeshift bridges. We encountered obstacles all along the way. Where the ground had been cleared even of bodies for miles, there were the burning stumps of trees and water wells deliberately blown-up. Wires and cables destroyed across the meadows and fields ploughed in, not for the harvest, but so as no cannon or tank could cross.

The villagers had long gone, north and south, to Noyen and Roye since the first days of the war. Carrying everything they had: clothes, furniture, sewing machines, ovens, chairs and tables, doors and window frames. Nothing remained before their homes were summarily destroyed by the Germans. Blown to nothing but rubble for the building of the defences at the Siegfried Line. Most Frenchmen and some women of serviceable age had signed up and gone with the beaten French armies in 1914. While some had deserted and were on the run, many had been taken prisoner and put to work by the Germans building, the Siegfried Line.

The sites are eerie now, ghostly with their departures and the leaving of so many now dead. Without support, we trudged across open country from bomb crater to bomb crater, not knowing how far the Germans had gone. The enemy stopped to assault and hold up our advance from the higher ground and woods, which were our objective, overlooking the Cambrai plain, and the cathedral City of Cambrai itself.

It was as if they knew who we were, and where we were headed, and had planned their own defence and retreat in advance of our arrival. They had such information now, and so planned, it turned out. They kept moving back as we moved on along sunken and almost impassable lanes, through villages and hamlets, evacuated and gone, destroyed and deserted. Then, coming into a trap, several explosions ripped the ground and air, and we could not breathe, thrown to the ground.

But we stood again, and kept on walking, following orders and commands as we went. The population of this area had been moved long before. The buildings were blown up and destroyed by the Germans. As our mortars were being fired, our gunners thought they were hitting German targets, but instead they were reducing the ground to more scorched earth in the dust and almost impassable mud through which we now trudged.

Keeping up the appearance of trench warfare, snipers and mortars, the German aircraft now flew over, trapping us and bombarding road and train supply lines ahead and behind us. Whiz-bangs shrieked; gas bombs fired, sounding like duds. When the windlass showed the yellow wind was blowing north-easterly, we masked up, or got out of it quick, out of our shell holes to opening fire. We moved over miles of trenches, a morass of shell holes, bombarded by further heavy mortar from both sides, field gun and machine gun fire, and poison gas.

The slow-moving tanks were gradually being taken out—exploded, hit—and crew abandoned them for the mud.

We headed northeast now, along the canals, passing the wrecked tanks along lanes circling the woods and copse. We came out into a field that turned out to be the lower reaches of a quagmire through which we had to wade. We continued onto the dry, chalky slope of another hill, and toward another bombed-out village, where we were stopped and entrenched. On lookout in shifts, we camped for the night. The gunfire calmed down from both sides in an uneasy truce, and we slept uneasily into the next day.

Chapter 14: At Flesquieres

The tank attack had lasted a full two days, 20–21 November 1917. The three-trench system of the Siegfried Line had been pierced for the first time in the war. The German Second Army under Marwitz had retreated, first to Flesquieres, and then to the hilly woodland beyond.

The next morning, the Allied armies covered the miles from Hermies in the north to Gonneleui in the south with the centre of the attack now on the long approach to Flesquieres. A tangle of heavy gauge wires surrounded the village, set with gun batteries firing molten lead flame. The château on the hill, the manor house below, and the village were heavily defended, but eventually destroyed by the Allies along with those Germans who had been ordered to stay and defend it.

The remaining tanks, in ragged order, about forty of the initial four hundred, drove straight forward again. Shells were going off all over the place. The tanks now bogged down machine gun fire and light ordnance. The battle was at first victorious, and as we spread across and around Flesquieres, the firing ceased, and the cavalry charged ahead.

We followed on, shouting and yelling the whole time as we were instructed to do. The tanks stranded at the lower reaches fired in anger, and may even have hit some of us. They were no good down there and soon quieted. As we huffed and puffed up the hill, bent forward after the horses, the cavalry spread out, charging again toward the wrecked village. Many fell, swords aloft, useless against the remaining sighted German guns. It was reminiscent of the disastrous charge of the light brigade at the Crimea in Russia some fifty years or so years earlier, as described by Tennyson in The Charge of the Light Brigade:

" _Forward, the Light Brigade!"_

Was there a man dismay'd?

Not tho' the soldier knew

Someone had blunder'd:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Remember? Harry? Where are you now? Or Mother? Or Father?

Lined up around the hill, we did not really stand a chance. We followed on, climbing over dead and injured men and horses of both sides. It did not make our job any easier, leaving dead, dying, and injured men and horses. The infantry were called up, and we rushed up the hill with fixed bayonets at the ready, charged and firing.

Ahead, we were stopped and stood watching as the sworded cavalry rounded the moated perimeter of the village. The Canadian cavalrymen were led by Lieutenant Strachan who took over command from the fallen squadron leader. He later received the coveted Cross. The cavalry leapt forward, bridging the river at the edge. We pursued the enemy, taking out a single gun battery. They retreated without their horses, which we took to make up for ours lost, but with several prisoners, and dispersed the rest of the German Sixth and Twentieth infantries.

From the north, the Scots Highlanders kept up a battle all day.

We of the infantry continued in from the south. The Highlanders secured the village surroundings, and by nightfall, Flesquieres was taken. I could have imagined the calling of a newspaper-seller — The newspaper headlines back home in New Oxford Street, London, called-out :

VICTORY AT CAMBRAI!

Chapter 15: The Boulon Woods

Church bells were rung across Britain for the first time during the war, so the newspapers said.

We did not hear them; we were hardly even in sight of Cambrai.

They—the newspaper reporters and politicians, Generals and Churchmen—led us all on. Both sides called this a victory, despite the many fallen: the men, horses, and tanks of the apparently triumphant leading infantry divisions. We could not overcome the last of the German resistance. They were soon ensconced on the low hills at the Boulon Woods and beyond, toward Cambrai, preventing our advance from reaching its full limits, whatever they were. If anybody did know, we were not going to take Cambrai.

The cathedral spire rose up in clear view on the plain below. If it were possible of reaching, taking control of, or destroying Cambrai, we would be victorious, as the newspapers and Conan Doyle had prematurely claimed. Afterward, we doubted that there were any clear strategies or objectives. The Generals, Commanders, and other officers, who appeared occasionally, only to hastily withdraw to the rear again, seemed to be making it up as we went along.

The orders remained indecisive. We received few and sometimes contradictory orders down the ranks. We remained camped outside Flesquieres, and the next day the Highlanders entered the village and discovered it deserted. It was the same with the strategic Bourlon Wood, overlooking Cambrai. For the next few days, there was little sign of the Hun, who had withdrawn from the area, or at least it seemed so.

Most of our tanks had halted with mechanical problems or had been ditched after being hit. Low flying attacks were made by the air corps on the wood beyond, but with little impact. We were dug in around Flesquieres and Bourlon Wood, as it would turn out, four or five days.

With the remaining North Country troops, we stormed the last line beyond and then held out against the remaining German divisions. Hidden in the Bourlon Wood and thickets beyond with their heavy guns, the Germans waited, and we were halted. We remained throughout the third and fourth days, waiting on orders from headquarters, four miles away at Fins.

Things quietened down, where we were. Along the line, skirmishes continued into the night, until a self-imposed night-time ceasefire on both sides allowed us to regroup and recover some dead and wounded. Throughout the explosion-filled days and nights, we wondered all the time where the enemy were, and if they might be moving, where to? Observing enemy movements was all there was to do until someone fired a shot, and it all went off again.

We also wondered where the remains of our platoons were. Whole divisions and battalions had become separated, survivors joining and forming up with others as best they could. The Ninth Battalion London and Scottish Royal Fusiliers I was now with, had stayed more or less intact. Communications lines had been broken from headquarters' command. Following loss of radio contact, there was no one enabled to direct operations on the ground

We saw the Germans withdraw from Bourlon Wood as they had withdrawn from Flesquieres—with heavy resistance—back toward their trench lines on the Cambrai plain and the surrounding high ground. The now-deserted wood was taken easily by the Highlanders, as they had taken the village previously.

But then they were repeatedly bombarded with lorry guns and artillery from what remained of the roads and villages beyond, and from the air between us and Cambrai.

With no tanks or heavy guns in position to respond, the Scots infantry divisions were sent into the woods by their commanders, and they were destroyed. All we could hear were the explosions and the screams of men bogged down, trapped in the woods. The Germans strafed them from the air, ground bombed, and gassed the poor wretched souls who were gradually and completely annihilated into a deathly silence.

At the village we were numbed with fear and bitterly cold, awaiting the delayed commands of the Generals in their tents, back in safety beyond the real war. We believed we were trenching down now for the winter around the woods, beyond the shattered village, and only just in view of Cambrai.

Snow was in the air.

Each day started dull and dirty rain from an iron sky. No birds appeared from the trees. Communication and supply trenches behind us were strafed, and we were cut off by the Germans despite their initial retreat. We fought sporadically for days, beyond the deserted Flesquieres village. But we were held, pinned down by the artillery fire from the plain below and hills around.

We remained on that escarpment there for several days with hardly any sleep, rations going short, and our communications and supplies at the rear broken off.

For those days, we forgot about food. It was just for the sleep and the rest from tiredness and the war. We rested in collapsed trenches or out on the open ground, in bomb craters and over-looking the plain. Rum or whiskey helped to dull the pain, the hunger, even to lift tiredness off the body to superhuman effect. We added it to our tea, not to raise spirits now, but against the cold, and the constant and unpredictable firing, artillery barrage, or aerial bombardment. It helped us to sleep when we desperately needed it, but were unable; it calmed the mind and thoughts. And we returned fire.

We would find a gap in the trench, or wall, or among brushwood, and scramble out, climbing over bodies and not stopping for any injured man screaming. Later, we returned, going back for them with a stretcher-bearer, and all was eerily quiet again.

We had blind faith in non-existent orders. Staying-put with irrational expectation of rescue. Looking for any success, in this developing disaster, far from victory. The medics arrived during the night, carrying off the injured on stretchers to the tented town and hospital we had left behind.

If they even made it, we never knew, nor did we want to know.

We fought on where we were, and waited for any change, and for it all to come to some kind of end. I had a week's growth of beard. My socks were embedded in the mud in my boots. Frosty morning dew and cold November drizzle settled, melting soggy and soaking through our greatcoats and thick scarves, knitted from home, and wrapped around our helmets.

Sometimes taken from the dead to not perish into the ground with them, and to keep the living alive. In shifts, we hunkered down to gunfire and explosions all night long. Every day we advanced to just short of the tree covering, opening rifle fire on the heavy German artillery hidden beyond, but we were no closer to Cambrai.

The German Armies were now under General Ludendorff, effective head of the third supreme command of the so-called Central Powers, who initially had ordered a counterattack at Flesquieres and Bourlon Wood. It had ended in some failure, as the Germans considered withdrawing from the battlefield back to the town of Cambrai.

But Marwitz brought up more troops—twenty divisions—to begin the counterattack from the hills and plain of Cambrai. These divisions were made up of exhausted men from the failed Eastern Front, released by the cessation of action in Russia after the desertion of the Russian troops from the tsar, and the success of the Bolshevik communist revolution.

The Russians refused to fight for their former master, the British King and German Kaiser's cousin, the Tsar, anymore. There was no chance or choice for us. These newly arriving troops from the Eastern Front were complemented by refreshed and younger troops brought in by road and railway from Germany.

A counter-offensive was launched from Cambrai using the Hutier method: a surprise attack at several vulnerable points on the enemy line. First in the northwest, then closing in to the centre, as again at Flesquieres. As retreat was turned to victory over the stranded British and Allied troops without tanks or big artillery guns remaining or operable, the Germans were revitalized and reinvigorated. They broke back through at several places along the Siegfried line—impenetrable once, taken, and now retaken.

The Allied Guards Divisions were brought forward, supported by sixteen of the remaining serviceable tanks, holding Gouzeaucourt to the north, and moving onto the Gauche Woods to the south, ending German moves on the village town of Metz.

The counterattack at Flesquieres and at the Bourlon Wood started in dense fog. It began at seven o'clock in the morning on 30 November 1917 with flamethrowers and aerial bombardment. The Germans were taking specific points along the line. We did not know where they were, or where we were in relation to them, or each other.

By nine o'clock in the morning, we were dug in again, and we came under sudden and renewed attack. Bodies lay still where they had fallen. Some, injured and untended, died where they were—to the left, to the right, ahead, and behind us all was in a mist, a quietness, a gloom out of which more and more German troops appeared.

The lines of the German infantry, re-grouped and re-equipped, came to meet us over the hills and over the ridges. We heard the screams of the rockets cannoning over our heads as aerial bombardment struck the back trenches, destroying supply and communication, and cutting off our retreat.

Suddenly, the bombardment ceased and marching shoulder-to-shoulder in a gray line toward us was the freshly arrived German infantry. We fell in again, as the back trenches and shell holes filled with rain turned black with blood.

Before us now was the opening ranks of the Germans' gray infantry. At each side still more German troops appeared through the early morning mist, fog, and gun barrel smoke. Turning back and around, and back and around again, with the enemy in full cry at us, we fought shoulder-to-shoulder. But there were thousands of them, infiltrating at so many points and all along the way, we could hear only the screams of the injured, the dying, those blown to pieces.

It was the worst. The worst many of us had seen of the war. Some of us fell, kept falling, as we turned. We trudged blindly back the way we had come the previous four days in utter disarray.

I was now less sure I would not get hit. I knew now, as I knew all along, it could just as well happen to me. We fought hard. All of the gained ground was being taken back. Back across formerly taken trenches, theirs, then ours, and now theirs again. They charged again, with guns blazing and bayonets fixed, and again we fought back.

Falling back all the time, we turned, forcibly retreated. We were defending, moving toward the back trenches, avoiding shell holes all around, full of dirty water. I may or may not have fired a last time. I don't know what felled me—a bullet, a piece of shrapnel, or the stab of a bayonet—but with the blast of a shell landing nearby, I stumbled, and I fell.

The shock instantly blinded me. I may have screamed. I was utterly winded, gasping for air, only breathing burning gas, and then there was nothing but silence. As it continued raining, I was crushed with a searing, saw-like pain. Then, I was numb to the pain, had no longer had any fear. I drowned, buried and mired in a muddy grave, not to rise again. I had freedom now from any fear. Perhaps a white stone, perhaps a white or red poppy, black with pollen, swollen as with gunpowder; perhaps a yellow ear of corn in a ripened cornfield, is growing there now.
In Memoriam

At the Cambrai Memorial, Louverval, the epitaph reads, "To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die." At the memorial: "Remembered with Honour."

The Memorial Arch at Louverval, France where Walter Mepham is commemorated states, "To God...and to the enduring memory..."

Mark Henry Mepham is commemorated at Soissons Memorial, France, nearby to Louverval. Mark Henry was killed at Quenney Copse, at the retaking of the Somme battlefield, where Harry-Arthur had been fighting last. Mark was killed on July 29, 1918, three months and eight days before the ceasefire, and armistice, November 1918. Mark Henry was awarded the Victory Medal, posthumously. As Walter, his body was not recovered.

Next pages: At the Hindenbourg Line, France, November 1917:

British troops going through a shattered village and fields and forest, at the plain of Cambrai ridge, 1917 (above and below):

**Part Four: The Louverval Memorial, France. 14** th **March 1998.**

Dear Walter,

I am back. I have been back. I have returned to this place many times. In just a few days, the cost of the battle of Cambrai amounted to fifty thousand German losses, and forty-five thousand Allied British and colonial lives. Altogether, a quarter of those taking part in the entire battle. For "the poor bloody infantry" the odds were not even; they were not even that good.

In the newspapers, there was no mention at the time or after of the "failed assault on Cambrai," as Conan Doyle latterly recorded, and took lofty notes for his war office reports; and hardly a word about the lowly infantry, except how many fell in numbers "as if as one great befalling." Four miles of ground gained and lost again for nothing, except perhaps this: not victory that day, but the end of war, _that_ war, had commenced.

For all that, the bodies of the British and German and others fallen would provide nutrients for the ground now useless for growing anything. The gas and gunpowder rendered the soil dead for many years—decades—and it is only now slowly becoming fertile for growing flax and corn.

Of the people of Flesquieres, and all those other places passed through, who fled their villages, only some returned, and no one on either side or of any country returned home unscathed. Men and women had been taken from their farms and dwellings and used as slave labour, digging the trenches of the Siegfried Line, and fighting bloody battles that only ended in victory, for all, on all sides, when that Great War ended.

Many had fallen, cannon fodder to the shells as we unwittingly aided the death and demolition of the land that you, Walter, struggled across. God knows to where the women and children with their few possessions were gone. Shrugging their shoulders. Gallic, Alsace, or Provençal, some returned, settled down with their children and children's children. The trees and woods had fallen, burnt alive, and all that was left were trampled muddy fields and concrete, and broken tanks, many removed by the Germans in the withdrawal, and used later.

Along the thousand-kilometre length of the Siegfried Line, the rivers flooded and canals and roads disappeared until there was nothing recognisable left for the people to return to. But now, with new pastures seeded and life springing from the soil once again, you, my brother, Walter, you would not recognise it. A small cemetery field of white stone and a memorial arch has been erected amid pastoral grazed grasses again. The grains have been sown anew and harvested once more.

As our ancestors did with horse and plough, but now with great machines like the caterpillar tanks, but great tractor-harvesters cutting-down and threshing the wheat. The crops are now stored in great communal silos instead of each farm having its barn house, and the grain is ground to bread flour in great mechanical mills, for the bakers and their families to earn a living.

I did not cry much, Walter, when we learned of your being missing, and with certain lonely death. If only they could have brought you home. But they did not, and you did not come home. There were so many, so many who did not return...and you, my brother, a newspaper seller and short-lived bank post-room clerk, I a gamblers-den doorman in London.

But, you were among those who did not return at all; as was our father, Mark Henry. For us, and for our parents, the Great War was the ultimate gamble. When death was so close, living, fighting for life, day-by-day, hour by hour. We told ourselves we were fighting for us and our families, and our comrades at the front.

It was this that kept us going, somehow, and turned everything into a great adventure. An adventure the likes of which we could never have imagined, or wished to have imagined.

It was a chance to break out of our ordinary lives, and do something extraordinary, and seemingly greater than each of us alone. Except when it came to the actual death and dying—then it was easy to question things.

We were being sacrificed, but for what? To preserve the freedom of those dissenters and their families who stayed behind; or those who refused, or deserted?

As I did, too, eventually, as I did. As chance and fate would have it. Chance that I, Harry, was home that time. Fate that I was with Mother, and she knew not to let me return. Not for those Generals and Royalty and literary folk on the viewing posts, camped at the rear or tucked up in their beds back in England, or in prison.

We told ourselves, eventually, it was not for them. Not for our country, or for our Empire. No, once we were there, it was only for ourselves, our families, and for each other—comrades in arms, and at our paid work.

We _were_ preserving our British and colonial way of life not at the risk of their being without accession, without succession, and possibly extinct without a personal existence beyond the grave; but ourselves.

When we heard about you, Walter, missing in action, I was on leave.

One of us had to survive, to carry on, as Mother said. I refused to go back. I ignored orders, deserted, and showed cowardice, perhaps, in the face of the enemy. What few understood, however, was that the enemy for me was not death itself. The enemy—for you, me, Mother, and Father—was the death of both of us.

Anyway, I gave myself up. I was arrested, and we knew I could face a firing squad. Hundreds deserted from the very start and more by the end—but as soon as we got to the front and found out what it was really like.

Early firing squad executions of such poor souls who fled the field, unable to face going on or going back. These assassinations were used, as I used you, as a warning to thousands who had not volunteered, or who had volunteered to something they could not possibly have imagined what no one could. Like me, like us, they wanted to live, and could no longer kill to live, and by living, could let others live.

I was only reported for "absence without leave." I was arrested, detained, and sent back to Aldershot for incarceration. I can only wonder, now, how our father might have felt about it all. Mother knew all by then, and that I, at least, would survive.

Mother died in September of 1917, at Brighton, Sussex, aged fifty-two years.

Did Father know of Mother's dying, of whatever it was that killed her? Some disease from the front? Despair? Heartbreak? Knowing?

Perhaps Father knew about you, and then about Mother's death, somehow, _spiritually_ perhaps, as Conan Doyle, our childhood hero, may have said.

We did not get any word back from Father. It was not customary to tell soldiers of deaths in their families while they were away, to keep up morale. And so, Father did not know about me deserting either, I am sure of that. He believed I was back at the Western Front, and that we would meet up in our final victory.

With you and Mother, perhaps he knew, somehow, and it was already too much, and Father did not want to know the worst. His death, then, almost the more tragic: to be one of the last of those who would be killed, in the final months, days, hours, and minutes of war.

An end to hostilities was signed the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of November 1918. The Entente between Britain and France was now truly Cordiale, with the enemy the only remaining Central Power: Germany. The tsar of Russia had already been assassinated along with his family, Russia would become enemies and allies again in the second World War in 1939 to 1945.

Believing that it had all come to an end, and that he had still a family to return to, Father took his part, as you had taken yours, in death. I had taken mine in life, and for all of us, for life and family the same. I had taken mine, but differently. I had deserted duty to my King and Country, but not my Family.

Father, Mark Henry Mepham, had finally been to North Africa. However, he would never actually see Morocco, that place of his dreams. He was one of the few survivors rescued at Gallipoli, Turkey, in 1915 with the Aussie and Anzac brigades. He was taken from there to Alexandria, Egypt, fighting the Germans and their allies across the deserts of North Africa.

Then, in 1918, he was conveyed with the Fourth Battalion from Alexandria, scene of much previous conflict, to French Marseilles. With the remnants of the original British Expeditionary Force of 1914, he was moved up to Picardy, France, and Flanders, in June 1918.

In the final rout of the German armies, he was lost, assumed killed in action at Quenney Copse, a small woodland, at the retaking of the Somme battlefield. Father was killed on 29 July 1918, three months before the armistice and ceasefire. His body was not recovered. He was awarded the Victory Medal posthumously, at the Soissons memorial, France, near to where you, Walter, lie, too; and where you, Walter, brother, are remembered, here at Louverval, and always.

In November 1918, as a kind of reprieve for desertion while on leave, I was signed up again, this time to the twentieth regiment at the armistice, to hold the ground retaken in France and Flanders, and up to the German borders.

The would-be invaders were stopped, and we as good as invaded them instead. The exhausted remains of the armies were returned home—we, along with the Americans and the soldiers of the new Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia in the east. The German armies retreated home. Finally pushed back and suing for peace at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the German democracy was returned.

Hindenburg was to be tried as a war criminal, but he was never indicted. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated in 1918, not to be replaced, and went into lifelong exile in the Netherlands. Tsar Nicholas was executed, shot dead with his family in 1918 following the Bolshevik communist revolution in Russia. King George remained on the throne.

Hindenburg was elected the first President of the Weimar Republic and at his death in August 1934, he surrendered the German Reichstag to Hitler, who, in 1914, had been a messenger at the back trenches of Cambrai, at the eventual allied victory there, the German Defeat in 1918, Hitler bore that grudge fatally, as dictators often do, again in 1945, at the end of the Second World War. Perhaps the Second World War was another case of unfinished business, as the first was from the Prussian defeat of Waterloo in 1815 and the Paris Commune of 1871.

In 1939, following the failure of British Prime Minister Chamberlain's pre-war appeasement, Winston Churchill was again elected First Lord of the Admiralty, and this time for the duration of the Second World War with Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945.

Unfinished business.

The Second World War was a virtual repeat of the first. With the German invasion of Belgium and Northern France, again, and as with Russia, Britain stood alone in defence of our country and remains of our British Empire at home and abroad.

Our enemy again bombed our homes and factories by air, in both directions destroying cities and lives again. Until the Americans came in at the Normandy landings in France in 1944 and also defeated Japan in the pacific with two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The dictators Hitler and Hirohito were defeated in 1945, in Europe and North Africa, and in Asia in the Far East. China would become a new communist dictatorship under Mao, as Russia was under Stalin and destroy many more lives without the excuse of war. Nazi-Germany tried again to take over the British and French Imperialist Empires, and failed, again.

As before, we all had victory in eventual peace alone. War failed in the end; no winners, only survivors. Imperialists and dictators will always fail in the end, and their families fade away, as our family very nearly did and as our empire continued to do, until it was no longer an empire but simply a monarchial commonwealth, of independent states.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died at Windlesham Manor, Crowborough, Sussex, in 1930. After losing his eldest son, Kingsley, to injuries and pneumonia sustained at the Somme in 1918, he returned to agnostic spiritualism, and belief in a spiritual afterlife.

Of Bertrand Russell's wars, the two world wars of the twentieth century, Russell survived.

It was a personal victory for both and their family, who might otherwise have all been slaughtered, lost their own lives; and as for all those who did not fight, those who did fight, and all those, who lived again. It was still a victory in the end for all, as for us.

As for us, Walter, Mother and Father, and myself, Harry Arthur Mepham.

Russell had many children, and went on to start the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Although the League of Nations and the subsequent United Nations efforts have not ended war altogether, appeasement, peace talks, and decolonisation continues, oftentimes with their own war in India and Africa still.

There have been many more wars since 1945: in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Congo and Rwanda; Israel and Palestine, Serbia and Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and across Africa. With these wars comes disproportionate tribal and racial genocide every few years, this seems to happen a lot, somewhere, most years: war and natural disasters, too. Why?

Because there are not enough resources to go around?

Rubbish! There are, at least, if some had less, and more had more. Riches and greediness. Power and wealth. The global banks and Internet companies that is what it is all about now, as then, in 1914, World Trade. Global corporations, some of them larger than many small countries put together, support or are made to support, the largest countries with their former Empires.

With five or six corporations in every sector, global corporations now rule where once monarchs and dictators did. And still, there is killing in the millions— in Europe, China, Africa, Asia, and South America. The religious, political, and personal racial vanities and hypocrisies of misguiding leaders persist, toward misguided individuals.

Brother and brother and sister and sister are set against each other.

Wars of conquest, land, and natural resources to be taken from that land including its human populations. One group over another, or attempting to be so. For trade, for the wealth of the planet. With the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and after witnessing the horrors of two world wars, and the end the second at Hiroshima, it is surely time for us to take to heart the later words of Churchill "...after all, to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." Maybe without the warmongering in 1914, we could have won a kind of brokered peace after all. The first time anyway, and maybe the Second World War would not have occurred, incurring such losses on all sides, and from all over the world. But we will never know that.

Although we do know now that some attempt at appeasement was made by the Kaiser in 1914 and rejected by his Generals. The German general and dictator Hitler, like Napoleon, may have then invaded England. The dictators may have taken command of the Baltic and the North German Sea now simply known everywhere as the North Sea.

But they did not.

And maybe only because we fought them when we did, and some, like you, Walter, and Father fought to the very end, and you and father gave with your precious lives.

The Central Powers and the Nazis may or may not have overrun our islands and our empire on which the sun has now been slowly setting. The British Commonwealth and European Union; North and South America; and Asia, China, and Australasian; and African trade groups are working to keep the peace in order to trade safely among each other. This seems merely a dream. But that is what we fought for, you and I, and after all that fighting, and refusing to fight anymore, it was not in vain.

I, Harry Arthur, was demobbed, "disembodied," it was called, and "dispersed" at Crystal Palace. I lived back in Croydon, South London. I married in March 1922 and I survived through the post-war unemployment and economic Great Depression, which happened on both sides of the Atlantic, anyway. Pensions were not paid to non-dependants, and those that were paid to surviving dependants were hardly worth anything through devaluation of the currency.

The old gold-standard for money, was gone. Churchill did that as Chancellor of the Exchequer between the wars, to attempt to fix the Great Depression of 1929. Maybe that _is_ all we were fighting for? Gold, trade, and employment. Bread on the table; money in pocket.

There was a failed General Strike in 1926, but employment hours and conditions were eventually better controlled, and basic education became compulsory. Pensions came in for unemployment and old age; and only women over 30 years and with their own capital did get the right to vote in 1918; only later, before the next war, for the rest and full franchise as the men. And we held on to these victories after 1945, too.

Capitalism and free-trade borders in Europe are not fought over with weapons, but political-policies, which included the Socialist Labour Party in Britain; the National Health Service and eventually equality at work.

I, Harry-Arthur Meopham, became a newspaper printer and compositor at Gresham Street in London. "Bread for our mouths and clothes on our backs," as Father might have said. I am printing the news, rather than selling it as you did, or making it, as we all did. I had many children, the first, Arthur Harry, was born in 1923 and fought in the Second World War. At twenty-one years, he was killed in France, in the Allied Normandy landings of D-day in 1944.

As our father, Mark Henry, was killed, shortly before the end of the Great War, so he, Harry-Arthur the second, gave up his life at the end of that one.

Of ours, and every other family, some fought, and some survived.

The Second World War was fought mostly from the air and sea this time, and on land using tanks and infantry, much as those at Cambrai; until the D-day landings in Europe, and the final rout again.

Some soldiers were conscripted in 1939 for national Service, and others volunteered. Many refused, had dependants, and worked in various protected trades and employment. Some went on the run and hid; and others signed-up, and then deserted. But we never heard about them. This news was too dangerous for the newspapers, or history, to tell. As _our_ story, now told.

So, did I encourage my children to fight back in 1939? Or did I encourage you as mother discouraged you, Walter, for that matter, in 1917? Knowing what could happen, what did happen?

No, I did not, and would not again, and it pains me yet, knowing what I know now, and what I knew then. I would not have encouraged you, Walter, and did not so Arthur Harry in 1939. For me to go in his place, as I would have, and you then died in my place. The conscription came in at the start of war that time. 1939, for military training, then afterwards National Service.

Many did refuse and despite everything that happened before, and knowing about you Walter, seeing my eldest for the last time, Arthur Harry went, and we had to let him go.

Arthur Harry, my son, your nephew, was killed like you, in France.

The other children were younger, and they were evacuated, moved to safety outside of London.

They went to stay with Gracie and her husband Walter Southgate, at their small holding in Ongar, Essex. I stayed on in London with Alf Byfield as a fire warden. Alf, who had refused the first time around, had children—daughters—born during and just after the First World War.

If Alf had gone to war that time even as a non-combatant, he would have stood as little chance as you and me in the fighting, and his children may not have been born. Nor their children's children, our cousins, second and third generations, and yet distant cousins to come.

He did his bit to keep the family and country alive, as I did. Fathers age, but they would not take me anyway, I stayed with the Home Guard, to repel invasion if it had happened in 1914; and then in 1940, as it was threatened again, and The Blitz on London, Coventry, Glasgow, Belfast. This country, England, Great Britain, was bombed by air, torpedoed at sea, and land battles were fought.

But not the appalling trench warfare of the first Great War

Instead an heroic retreat from Dunkirk. As that first time around the Nazis bombed, and perhaps did want to take back the islands that the Anglo-Saxons had peopled, from the ancient Britons, Celts and Vikings, Romans and Normans, all those centuries back then. Germans, Franks, Latin Mediterraneans, African, and Asian from all corners of the once empire reside here, on our islands now, and we mix and chamge as they did. If I had gone back, Walter, after you were lost, and been killed as well; then they, your nieces and nephews, would not be here. They would not have been born.

After the First World War, through the 1920s, I watched our children grow up and become parents, and we became grandparents.

I watched over our children, your nieces and nephews, and now our grandchildren are growing up, and marrying into other families. So, we Mephams and Wells, we go on. Everyone in the family was mostly named after each other. No one else was named Walter after you; or Walter Southgate, who lived to a ripe old age, and was presented to a Socialist Labour Party, conference as one of the originating members.

It might have been bad luck, afterward. Anyway, it would not have been right not to be done, not after what happened.

There are many Harrys though; and another Mark and Caroline, and with them; another Harry-Arthur now in Sussex, at the close of this 20th century.

Now that the Great War is done, and that other war too, another Harry is born at Hastings, Sussex. So, together now, we have our children: cousins, nieces, nephews, and their children, too. So many of them. We have our father and mother, and now our story is told. Our grandparents, and their parents before them, and you, my brother, Walter; now your story too is told, and mine, and both of ours now, to carry on...

Your brother, Harry Arthur Mepham (1895-1998)
**Postscript** **. Louverval 30** th **November 2017.**

The voluntary military covenant in the United Kingdom is enshrined as the Ministry of Defence view that "serving soldiers should expect to be valued and respected as individuals, and that they and their families are sustained, and rewarded." A serving British soldier, who is a last surviving sibling, is given permanent home leave if requested.

In 1948, the sole survivor policy in the US military was introduced for brothers not to be attached to the same unit and to be excluded from the draft in wartime, so that one brother at least has a better chance of remaining to continue the family line.

Although voluntary, these policies have been enshrined in real and cinematic life ( _Saving Private Ryan_ , 1998). This also applies, in most cases, to sisters who fight on the front lines.

In 2002, Britain and the United States, along with various allied forces, went to war in Iraq based on the lie of weapons of mass destruction, later shown to be false propaganda for the purpose, it then seemed, of waging another Great War: a War on Terror. Despite the flying bombs and strategic ballistic ground-to-air missiles, as well as drones and suicide bombers now in this new twenty-first century to attempt to terrify populations, we are only made stronger.

Warfare, today, like some kind of Great Third World War, is not as those, and we should never make those mistakes again.

It is a European, American and Asiatic, and African wars the same though. It is a war of Middle Eastern Semitic cousins, and brothers. Of the Zionist and Islamist states, conscripting males from every family and the women and children in support, fighting globally to retain or capture land, and nuclear power, with Arabian and African, and Russian oil and gas. A World War, except we say Global War now.

A War of and on Terror worldwide, stopped and started again somewhere else. If the previous World Wars had not been started...but then we could go all the way back through history...

As of 2014 Russia invaded Crimea, as they did in 1865, and that famous poem was written. As The Russian Federation has replaced the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War, ancient Colonial borders are still being fought over in Africa and Asia and Trade wars are fought in South America and all over the world, challenging trade, and peace.

Re-populated borders are re-written in the aftermath of wars, and as perhaps borders will continue, they will always to be fought over. Old empires re-emerge and are revised. The War on Terror is not a war on terror. It is a war _of_ terror. It could better be referred to as The Fuel Wars or The Money Wars. Or it could be called the Weapons Wars for nuclear power, virtual, or real. After the near-collapse of global world banking at the start of this new century, another depression occurred.

A global crisis, we are told. Despite religious and other unconscionable excuses otherwise, these trade wars are fought as viciously and desperately as any war since the dawn of civilisation. Following the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria, the so-called Arab Spring of 2008. The Credit-Boom and Banking-Crash. Wars in Libya, West and East Africa. Wars as battles, in Georgia and Chechnya, The Russian Federation. Now Syria, Iraq again, and the same great swathes of Africa from Somalia to Nigeria; as well as the Israeli-Palestine battle continues, endlessly it seems.

But then so did apartheid in South Africa seem forever, but for peace and reconciliation.

Now is like a Third World War, computer games, but for real. With soldiers entrenched behind digital screens and computer-screens, with remotely controlled roadside-bombs and armoured-vehicles and rocket-launchers, on land, in the skies nuclear-armed planes, and battle-drones.

Yet, everything still is money, power, and trade—the same as before, and each of us can only eat and consume so much. Policies like the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and treaties, to reduce weaponry and hostilities amongst buffer zones; newly independent states with democratic, non-monopoly trading relationships, may be the only way now.

In the early second decade of this twenty-first century, we may attempt to limit the escalation of conflict, through peaceful trade agreements, and continuous peace and reconciliation. Rather than a doing of the most atrocious acts globally we as a people must learn our history, for ourselves and others, lessons, and stop repeating the same mistakes, certainly on such a scale

Armies of Humanitarian Aid!—not pirates and privateers. yet the aid is too often squandered and stolen by the new dictators, and there are plenty of them. There is, and may continue to be the more usual international response to such outrageous wars of theft and revenge, and body bags arriving home. The slaughtering of thousands, or even a few, or one.

Atrocities to deliberately Shock and Awe and reap converts, to begin and continue wars using invasion and insurgency, now from the air and possibly outer-Space, in this twenty-first century. The Cold War between capitalist America and communist Russia ended in the last century with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Global trade continues in the relative peace of a kind of perpetual battle, which may never disappear

Like the computer games we now play, the stock-markets! The banks and the social media accounts we follow and blog and blag about: The Global Religious and Trade Wars, as we may now call the tendency toward world domination, are perpetuated by a final hopeless few, who only really believe perhaps in permanent war without end; or hopefully ending with their own death, it is _their_ wars alone. Like Royalty with their hangers on to the end, or deserting. The Generals and Chiefs of Staff; police and armies, workers and modern-slaves, trafficked around the world. To answer with non-lethal support (radio's etc.) for protection, and not colluding with. But opposing _any new_ deliberately stated renewed Allied Central Command in Europe; North Atlantic Treaty Organisation...African Union, as before, Dictators and Generals of war die, too. But they return continue killing until all everywhere as before, are killed, and we all die out on this planet. What other end is there?

Suicide missions and bombings and executions are still with us—still daily somewhere on the globe. Maybe men and women will always go to war to protect and defend their own family and others' families, as we see it for ourselves at the time— for bread for the table, money from the pocket.

Humanitarian-Aid given-out and then stolen and sold-on.

For World-Trade. For survival.

For impossible ends? For (relative) peace? Everywhere? Maybe we will not always so readily deny responsibility for each other, and each other's families, for all of us are family. Our decision to go to war starts at home, and at the time no-doubt called-for and fought for for our own selfish, and self-righteous ends, perhaps. In the end, war can only be for reconciliation and peace, for all. So why even start a war? To continue win-win as most the time, trading fairly, who can lose? And for survival of the generations to come, not to lose-lose?

Through the inability to truthfully discuss and resolve problems, issues, when no-one is starving or seeking shelter, The United-Nations? Perhaps we, the human species, will always fight and make peace, and fight again and again. Each of us fights every day. For family, for livelihoods, and whatever else is on radio and television, social- networking, worth fighting or standing-up at least, for.

Trolling if we are not careful with what we say and do, starting another war—a cyber war, a virtual war as they could then, in 1917 imagine only in the science fiction of the Conan Doyle stories; or be warned of by the pacifist peace makers, like Russell.

Perhaps we all will learn to live peacefully together without starting wars, over one single outrage committed and video'd and social-media'd? All of us _spiritually_ , not only us ourselves and our families, but with all others, too. Maybe there is a real democratic ratio of for and against, at any stage? Perhaps a vociferous, then popular assumed majority that starts wars; in the end another majority that finishes wars.

At some point, people refuse to go on in hatred and fear, refuse to fight any longer, or talk and play along, ignoring the reality of wanton death and destruction, or feeling unable to do anything about it. If we can, we, most of us, spend all of our time avoiding war—avoiding conflict, that is—walking down the street, meeting at the cafe, at work, at home; and we generally take few chances, generally avoiding conflict at all costs.

Defusing the words, bombs, and bullets of fear and hatred, we can act in favour and blessing, with family, friends, and strangers, stepping out of the way, turning away, disappearing from the scene to relative safety; rather than into battle, into war.

We do this seeking of reconciliation in peace everyday, From ignorance and lies, in personal deception and denial of our own actions, of our willingness to fight or not; but owning our actions and decisions with integrity whatever they are, and listening to others. Living, listening to what others think and believe, appreciating their actions and words, as well as our own.

To feed and protect ourselves and our families, as we see it at the time maybe threatened by a sense of injustice, and disenfranchised. But for coming to acceptable terms, we can speak out for safety and security. Most of us all the time for faith and no faith, secular and political, all! Neither psychologically, physically, nor cynically violent; but generally nonviolent at any moment in time, we always, even by suicide, seek peace in the end, always. So why go to war in the first place?

Ourselves within our family, and those with whom we are in daily contact, are our priority—not to kill or be killed.

Perhaps one day there will be no more wars. No more battles that cannot be sorted out laissez-faire democratically gradually not instantaneously, but with persistent kind words and kind deeds. Until then, in any wartime already started, once the decision is made, it is made integrally and sincerely for then, and for ourselves, as others, forever, it now seems, eternally. Although wars may be started, from unthinking and deliberate anger and hatred, real fear and a perceived necessity; eventually, in death or in peace and reconciliation as any decision in life that we should not be expected to take of ourselves or another—either to kill, or be killed. To war permanently for anyone or for all peoples is impossible anyway without ourselves and those we love being killed in the process. To live in perfect peace and love for always, may seem humanly, naturally impossible, but always we must keep trying.

In righteousness and wrongfulness, in redemption, and with honest understanding, once committed, any act of history can only ever be assuaged by a personal, honest, and truthful account and redemption, as this is ours, yours,

For yours and for my family, now, too,

Harry Arthur Mepham, born 1998, Hastings, Sussex, England.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month 2017.

This Remembrance, Armistice Day, Louverval, Soissons, France.

Aged nineteen years. Peace.

Notes

All quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from Conan Doyle's _The British Campaign in France and Flanders_ , published in 1928 in six volumes.

Bertrand Russell's "The Ethics of War" was printed in the _International Journal of Ethics_ , January 1915, and discussed in the newspapers of the time until suppressed to the end of the Great War (1914–18).

All photographs acknowledged and copied with permissions sought.

Also by M. Stow

EarthCentre: The End of the Universe

Universal Verses: Books 1–7

WarFair4

