French
J T'AIME
SERJEANT GEORGE WILLIAM CLOUGH
Je t'aime - I love you. I've seen declarations of affection on headstones before but I've never seen such a plain declaration of love. And the fact that it is in French means that Mrs Clough, assuming few English speakers would ever visit Tyne Cot Cemetery, decided to write it in the language of the country where her husband was buried. Not of course that Tyne Cot Cemetery is in France, but it's close, 16 kilometres away, and everyone would have known what she meant anyway, just as we do.
Serjeant Clough was a Yorkshireman, and from what I can tell so was his wife, Mabel. He served with the 9th Battalion London Regiment (Queen Victoria's Rifles), a territorial battalion, and is commemorated on the Hendon, Middlesex war memorial, so must have been living in London when the war broke out. His army number indicates that he was a September 1914 volunteer but his medal card says that his period of service in a theatre of war - France and Flanders - only spanned 21 March to 16 August 1917.
Clough was one of the many casualties the 9th London Regiment suffered on 16 August when the Fifth Army's offensive operations in the Ypres Sector were resumed. The battalion war diary describes how:
"In spite of big progress at the outset under cover of a terrific creeping barrage, the 169th Infantry Bde was compelled to withdraw to the original front line at dusk. The casualties in the Bn were severe."
After the war, when the battlefields were cleared, Clough's body was found at map reference J7G80x40 in June 1920. George William Clough is also commemorated on the Moor Allerton memorial in Leeds, Yorkshire
KILLED IN AERIAL COMBAT
IL Y A DONC QUELQUE CHOSE
DE PLUS PRECIEUX QUE LA VIE
PUISQUE NOUS SOMMES ICI
CAPTAIN FRANCIS LEOPOLD MOND
Captain Mond and his observer, Lieutenant Edgar Meath Martyn, were shot down and killed on 15 May 1918. Although their bodies were recovered they were then misidentified and buried as Captain JV Aspinall and his observer Lieutenant Paul Dornonville de la Cours, see the previous inscription epitaph 352.
Thanks to Mond's mother's persistence (as described in the previous inscription) the mistake was eventually discovered, the bodies exhumed and correctly identified and new headstones erected. For personal inscriptions, Edgar Martyn's widow chose 'Greater love hath no man than this', and Francis Mond's mother a quotation from Georges Duhamel's 'The New Book of Martyrs'. Writing about his wartime experiences, Duhamel, a French surgeon, describes coming across a burial ground:
Mais le cimetiere que voici ne doit rien la vieillesse et a la maladie. C'est un cimetiere d'hommes jeunes et forts.
On peut lire leurs noms sur les cent petites croix pressees qui repetent tout le jour, en un choeur silencieux: "Il y a donc quelque chose de plus precieux que la vie, il y a donc quelque chose de plus necessaire que la vie ... puisque nous sommes ici."
[But this burial ground owes nothing to old age or sickness. It is the burial ground of young, strong men.
We may read their names on the hundreds of little crosses which repeat daily in speechless unison: "There must therefore be something more precious than life, more necessary than life ... since we are here."]
Mrs Mond shortened the quotation to: 'There must therefore be something more precious than life since we are here'. The meaning is that our country is more precious than life since we have given our lives to defend it.
Francis Mond joined the Territorial Artillery in July 1914 and volunteered for foreign service on the outbreak of war. He joined the Royal Flying Corps in February 1915 and was invalided home with shell shock that autumn. He returned to the front in 1916 but in September that year was posted to the Air Board in London. At his own request, he returned to active flying in March 1918 and was shot down on 15 May.
The Western Front Association relates the story of the discovery of the true identity of the bodies. After the war, Francis Mond's parents endowed the Chair of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Cambridge in his memory.
The Monds were originally a German family. Francis's father, Emile Moritz Schweich Mond, was born in Cologne in 1865. Emile's uncle, Ludwig Mond, came to England in 1862 and set up Brunner Mond in Northwich, Cheshire and the Mond Nickel Works in Swansea. Ludwig's son, Alfred Mond who became the first Lord Melchett, was the inspiration behind the establishment of the Imperial War Museum in March 1917, and oversaw the establishment ICI. Francis Leopold Mond was his wife's nephew and his cousin's son.
SANS PEUR ET SANS REPROCHE
SERJEANT JOHN STONE HEPWORTH MM
The phrase may translate simply as fearless and faultless but it resonates with associations to the Age of Chivalry. 'Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche' was the tribute attached to Pierre Terrail (1473-1524), the Chevalier Bayard, who, according to the chroniclers, was the epitome of chivalry: a brave and skillful commander and a fair and honourable foe. Association with Bayard implied piety, generosity, honour, independence, truthfulness, loyalty, courtesy, modesty, humanity and respect for women, as enumerated by Kenelm Digby in his 'Broad-Stone of Honour or Rules for the Gentlemen of England', published in 1822. The story of Bayard was given a further boost with the publication in 1911 of Christopher Hare's 'The Good Knight Without Fear Without Reproach', the title incorporating the description Bayard himself preferred. The association was a great compliment whether one was the English general Sir James Outram, hero of the Indian Mutiny, buried in Westminster Abbey under a slab inscribed with the words 'The Bayard of India', or John Hepworth, a serjeant in the Duke of Westminster's West Riding Regiment killed in the First World War.
AU REVOIR
DAD
PRIVATE HERBERT ERIC ADAMS
A widowed father's farewell to his nineteen-year old son. The French for good-bye, in so far as it translates into English at all, means, until I see you again, or good-bye for the present. In this way Private Adams' father could be neatly indicating a belief in eternal life without being overtly religious ... or he could just be speaking French!