Critical
AGAINST THE BARBARIANS
FREELY HE GAVE UP
AN EVER JOYOUS LIFE
LIEUTENANT VAN DYKE FERNALD
"An ever joyous life" was not the only thing Van Dyke Fernald freely gave up; in January 1916 he freely gave up his American citizenship and became a naturalized British subject in order to be able to join the British Army.
"Lieut. Van Dyke Fernald R.A.F., who is now reported as having died as a prisoner in Austrian hands, was born in San Francisco in 1897, and was the son of Mr Chester Bailey Fernald, the dramatic author. His American ancestry dated from 1630, through a long line of English colonial blood. At the period when America's entry into the war seemed doubtful, his protest was to surrender his American nationalitiy in order to enter the British Army. From Trinity College, Oxford, he entered the Univeristy Training Corps, and was gazetted second lieutenant in the Royal West Surrey Regt. He was subsequently attached to the R.F.C., qualified as an observor, and saw six months' service on the Western Front. He then qualified as a pilot, and was sent to Italy. He was last seen on July 23rd over the Austrian front, where, having finished a reconnaissance, it is believed he stayed behind his escort, on the joint initiative of himself and his observer, Lieut. Watkins, in the hope of meeting an enemy."
Flight magazine October 3 1918
One thing surprises me about this inscription: the use of the word 'barbarian', or to be more accurate, the fact that the War Graves Commission allowed Van Dyke Fernald's father to use the word barbarian. The Commission, which had given itself the right to censor inscriptions, refused: "He died the just for the unjust", where the Germans were the "unjust", since they didn't like inscriptions that insulted the Germans. I would have thought that calling the enemy "barbarians" was much worse but this one was permitted.
I AM HERE
AS THE RESULT
OF UNCIVILISED NATIONS
CORPORAL JOHN COLLIN GOODALL
Although the War Graves Commission were happy to allow next-of-kin a sixty-six-character inscription for the base of a headstone, this came initially with the proviso that the Commission would censor any that were plainly unsuitable. Their rationale being that it was "clearly undesirable to allow free scope to the effusions of the mortuary mason, the sentimental versifier or the crank". After a public outcry, the Commission backed down and whilst there is evidence that they did censor inscriptions, they did allow through some that they might not have originally countenanced.
In July 1922 the Vice-Chairman referred an inscription to the Committee which read: "He died the just for the unjust". The minutes record: "The Commission agreed to the inscription being refused". Over a year later the Vice-Chairman submitted another inscription of a very similar hue: "I am here as a result of uncivilised nations". This time the minutes say: "After some discussion the Commission agreed that this inscription might be accepted". This is Corporal Goodall's inscription, the indefinite article having been changed for the definite on the actual headstone.
However, both inscriptions seem to have the same ambiguity to me: in the first, who are the 'just' and who are the 'unjust'? In the second, who are the 'uncivilised nations'? You might assume that both the 'unjust' and the 'uncivilised' refer to the Germans, but they could just as easily refer to all the warring nations - British, French, German, Austrian, Russian etc etc. Nevertheless, one inscription was allowed and one wasn't.
John Collin Goodall, a bicycle maker from Brisbane, enlisted on 4 April 1915 at the age of 18 and embarked for Egypt that May. Unfortunately I cannot quite read the details of his wartime service, which his mother outlined on the Circular for the Roll of Honour of Australia. It looks as though he served in Gallipoli until the evacuation and then in March 1916 was sent to France. Here he was slightly wounded in the back before being severely wounded. He spent six months in hospital and then, after a period of convalescence, he returned to the front. He was killed in action on 20 September 1917. According witnesses, "Goodall was sniped, being shot between the eyes and killed instantly ... I saw his body and examined him. He was my mate and I never heard what happened to his body afterwards"; "He was shot through the head by a sniper just as we were on the point of reaching our objective. He was just in front of me at Glencorse Wood. He had to be left there."
And it was "there", at map reference J.8.b.5.5., that Goddall's body was discovered in April 1921 and buried in New Irish Farm Cemetery where 3,271 out of the 4,719 burials are unidentified.
BORN AT KOBE, JAPAN
9TH OCTOBER 1890
SACRIFICED TO THE FALLACY
THAT WAR CAN END WAR
SECOND LIEUTENANT ARTHUR CONWAY YOUNG
This is a very famous epitaph, regularly included in battlefield tour itineraries. It expresses what we now want to hear, but is it what the casualty would have wanted to hear?
Arthur Conway Young was the son of Robert Young, the editor of the Japan Chronicle. Robert was an atheist, a republican and a fierce pacifist. Despite this, all three of his sons joined the war effort: Arthur as an officer in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, Douglas George as a captain in the Royal Flying Corps and Eric Andrew as a corporal despatch rider.
However, it wasn't Arthur's father who chose his inscription. Robert Young died in 1922 and the inscription was signed for by G. Young Esq, Conway House, Brent Garden Village, Finchley. Was this Arthur's brother, Douglas George Young? More likely it was his father's brother, George Young. Conway House was a Utopian co-operative housing scheme, where thirty-three households shared communal facilities, including servants, who were housed separately in Brent Lodge.
We know very little about Arthur Young except from a letter he wrote to his father's sister, Margaret, which was published in Laurence Housman's 'War Letters of Fallen Englishmen'. The letter describes the Battle of Ginchy, which took place on 9 September 1916. Describing his feelings on learning that he was to take part in the attack he writes:
"I will tell you the whole truth and confess that my heart sank within me when I heard the news. I had been over the top once already that week, and knew what it was to see men blown to bits, to see men writhing in pain, to see men running round and round gibbering, raving mad. Can you wonder therefore that I felt a sort of sickening dread of the horrors which I knew we should all have to go through?"
He continues:
"You read no end of twaddle in the papers at home about the spirit in which men go into action. ... It's rubbish like this which makes thousands of people in England think war is a great sport. As a famous Yankee general said, "War is hell," and you have only got to be in the Somme one single day to know it."
And yet, as they joined in the attack, this is what he has to say:
"By this time we were all wildly excited. Our shouts and yells alone must have struck terror into the Huns, who were firing their machine guns down the slope. But there was no wavering in the Irish host. ... The numbing dread had now left me completely. Like the others, I was intoxicated with the glory of it all. I can remember shouting and bawling to the men of my platoon, who were only too eager to go on."
And when it was over, he writes of the aftermath: "Our men were very good to the German wounded. An Irishman's heart melts very soon. In fact, kindness and compassion for the wounded, our own and the enemy's, is about the only decent thing I have seen in war". The letter finishes with Arthur telling his aunt that the great Irish charge at Ginchy "will never be forgotten by those who took part in it, for it is an event we shall remember with pride to the end of our days".
So, what would Arthur Conway Young have thought of his inscription, which now meets with such general approval? Does it represent his views or is he commemorated by someone else's. It's complicated.
THE PURPOSES OF LIFE
MISUNDERSTOOD
PRIVATE CHARLES DOYLE
Mrs Elizabeth Doyle, Charles Doyle's mother, makes no attempt to wrap her son's death in religious, patriotic or chivalric language. To her, life is for living, not killing. Given the chance to express herself publicly, even if only on his headstone, her response to her son's death is uncompromising - 'the purposes of life misunderstood'. But Mrs Doyle had another reason to be unimpressed by the war, her husband Charles Edward Doyle had volunteered to fight, despite being beyond the age of military service, and had been killed in Mesopotamia/Iraq just five months before her son.
Charles Doyle served with the Royal Army Medical Corps and in September 1916 was a member of the 18th Field Ambulance unit attached to the 6th Division. On the 21 September they went into the trenches at Morval on the Somme and on the 24th the unit's war diary recorded, "one of our stretcher bearers killed by a shell & one wounded by shrapnel". The dead stretcher bearer was Charles Doyle.
Charles Edward Doyle, a serjeant in the 6th Battalion the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, part of the 13th Division, went with it to Gallipoli in August 1915. Following the evacuation, in January 1916 the Division was sent to Mesopotamia to reinforce the Tigris Corps in their attempt to relieve the Anglo-Indian garrison under siege at Kut-el-Amara. On 6 April it met the Turks and after three days savage fighting, when four Victoria Crosses were won and the effective strength of the Division was reduced to 5,328 men, it was stopped at Sanna-i-Yat on the 9th, the day Serjeant Doyle was killed. Whether he orginally had a grave or not he doesn't now and is commemorated on the Basra Memorial, he was 42.
It's interesting to note that Mrs Doyle hadn't always expressed herself in this manner over her son's death. On 18 October 1916 the following announcement appeared in the Manchester Evening News:
DOYLE C - In loving memory of my dear son Private C Doyle 20001 RAMC who fell in action September 24 1916
Mother, sisters, brothers
A good life is often too short
But a good name endureth for ever
SLAIN BY THE HAND
OF A RUTHLESS FOE
OUR BOY IS AT REST
WITH GOD WE KNOW
PRIVATE WILLIAM BRADBURY
William Bradbury was a hairdresser from Wallasey in Cheshire. He joined the 3rd Cheshire Regiment in April 1917, a month before his nineteenth birthday, he transferred to the 8th Inniskilling Fusiliers and went with them to France on 27 June that year. He died just under two months later, on 17 August, from wounds received in action at Passchendaele the previous day.
William's elder brother, George, had enlisted a month earlier and died on 7 November 1918 from illness contracted on active service.
The War Graves Commission did not allow relatives to insult the Germans, see my article His Loving Parents Curse the Hun, but they did allow William Bradbury's parents to call them "a ruthless foe". His brother George's inscription was chosen by his wife and is much more conventional - "His duty nobly done R.I.P.
A BURSTING BUD
ON A SLENDER STEM
BROKEN AND WASTED
OUR BOY
PRIVATE THOMAS LEONARD MICHAEL QUINLAN
There's no disguising the bitterness of this inscription, nineteen-year-old Thomas Quinlan, 'a bursting bud on a slender stem broken and wasted'. This is an interesting inscription, it sounds like a quotation but I don't think it is. The end of the inscription refers to 'our boy' but I have a feeling that Thomas Quinlan's parents were dead, either that or they were no longer in the country as they both disappear from the census record after 1901.
Thomas Quinlan, however, appears in the 1911 census as a boarder at St Nicholas Industrial School for Roman Catholic Boys, Manor Park East Ham. Many industrial schools were for juveniles who had never been convicted of an actual offence, but whose habits indicated that they might lapse into crime if not "taken in hand in time". It sounds ominous and indeed the regime was usually quite strict and there was often little to distinguish these industrial schools from reformatories. One of the other boys at the school in 1911 was only 5 so there's a possibility that St Nicholas was an orphanage too.
We have no idea why Thomas Quinlan was at the school, nor where he went afterwards but we can assume that he joined the army since he was serving in the 1st Battalion the Royal Warwickshire Regiment when he was killed near Ypres on 9 April 1915, which would indicate that he was a regular soldier. And if he wasn't a regular soldier he was certainly a volunteer.
Who chose his inscription? The War Graves Commission's register states that he was the 'son of Michael John Quinlan' but gives no address. The person who confirmed his inscription was Mr H Quinlan, 16 de Walden Buildings, Henry Street, St John's Wood - a brother? 'A bursting bud on a slender stem broken and wasted'; Thomas Quinlan doesn't sound like a former reformatory boy - it would be good to know more.
WHAT CRUEL FOLLY IS WAR
IT ROBS US OF OUR DEAREST
PRIVATE LAURANCE HERBERT HEBDITCH
Although the War Graves Commission had given itself the right to censor inscriptions, and there is evidence in one of my previous blog posts that it did, it appears to have been happy to allow inscriptions that criticised war in general, this war in particular, and even those that questioned the cause for which men had died. Private Hebditch's father rails against war, echoing the sentiments of General William Tecumseh Sherman the Union general famous for the devastation he caused on his march through Georgia during the American Civil War, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it". And there are other inscriptions here that one might have thought the Commission considered very carefully before permitting - which to its credit it did. This list will no doubt grow as the Epitaphs of the Great War project continues.
IF THIS IS VICTORY, THEN
LET GOD STOP ALL WARS
HIS LOVING MOTHER
PRIVATE FRANK HITCHIN
This epitaph comes very close to suggesting that the dead might have died in vain. However, even though the War Graves Commission had given itself the right to censor inscriptions, it let this one through. To see what inscriptions they did censor read His Loving Parents Curse the Hun, His Loving Parents Curse the Hun.
MAN'S INHUMANITY TO MAN
MAKES COUNTLESS THOUSANDS
MOURN
CORPORAL GEORGE MORRIS
George Morris died of wounds in a Casualty Clearing Station at Estaires. His widowed mother chose his inscription. It would not have been the sort of inscription that the War Graves Commission originally had in mind. They were thinking in terms of simple dedications and religious texts. Nevetheless, although they had the power to censor inscriptions, they were happy with this one. And Mrs Morris wasn't the only person to choose it. It doesn't insult the Germans, the British Government, or the Army etc, it just laments man's inhumanity to man. The quotation comes from verse seven of 'Man Was Made to Mourn' by Robert Burns (1759-1796).
Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves,
Regret, remorse and shame!
And man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, -
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
SACRIFICED
PRIVATE SIDNEY JOHN CANNELL
This is a difficult inscription to gauge. At first sight it looks like a bitter criticism of Private Cannell's pointless death, but perhaps that is to be reading it with our twenty-first-century preconceptions. Sidney Cannell was wounded on 1 November in the desperate fighting around Ypres as the Germans pushed again and again to break the British lines. His wife chose his inscription. I wonder if she was simply acknowledging that something she held very dear had had to be given up for the greater good, which is the meaning of sacrifice, rather than that her husband was the victim of a callous military command.
A BELOVED SON
WORTHY OF A BETTER FATE
PRIVATE OSBORNE DYE
Osborne Dye was one of three brothers killed in the war. The surviving brother, William, appears to have decided his other brothers' inscriptions (see previous two inscriptions) but their mother signed the form for this one. Her disillusion and bitterness are unmistakeable. All three brothers are described as 'beloved', which is the only similarity between the three inscriptions.