Relation Killed Ww2
Read the article: Relation Killed Ww2
HE WENT TO WAR
FOR THE SAKE OF PEACE
HE DIED WITHOUT HATE
THAT LOVE MIGHT LIVE
PRIVATE SIDNEY MILHAM
Sidney Milham was a gardener with St Leonard's-on-Sea Borough Council when he attested on 15 November 1915. He had not volunteered before this; he was a thirty-five-year-old married man with two children, Frederick Albert aged two and George Edward who was only three months old. However, the Derby Scheme had been introduced in the autumn of 1915 and men between the ages of 18 and 41 were being asked to attest their willingness to serve. Mrs Alice Milham perfectly expressed the terms of her husband's willingness in the inscription she chose for him.
Milham joined the 1/4th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment. After service in Gallipoli, this spent some time in Egypt before being sent to Palestine early in 1917 where Milham joined them in time for the Second Battle of Gaza, 17-19 April 1917. He was killed seven months later in the capture of Beersheba during the Third Battle of Gaza 27 October-7 November.
Twenty-seven years later, George Edward Milham, son of the man who 'went to war for the sake of peace' and 'died without hate that love might live', was killed in Italy on 17 January 1944 in the British attempt to cross the Garigliano River and breach the German Gustav Line. It was his wife who chose his inscription too:
He died that we might have
A better world to live in
Fond remembrance
Jeanne and sons
SLEEP BEAUT DARL
UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN
SERJEANT ALBERT JAMES STARES
Serjeant Stares, "Beaut darl" to his mother who chose his inscription - beautiful darling perhaps? - served with the 25th Division Signal Company, Royal Engineers. Maintaining communications along the front and between Battalion and Divisional headquarters was a dangerous business whether you were a despatch rider or a signaller using flares, telegraphy or wireless. If contact was to be maintained, wires had to be re-connected, messages sent or carried regardless of the military situation.
Albert James Stares, an insurance clerk in civilian life - a job he had been doing since 1911 when he was 15 - enlisted on 12 October 1914 at the age of 18. By the time he was killed in action on 9 September 1917, the day the 25th Division was withdrawn from the Ypres front, he had become a serjeant.
Mr and Mrs Stares had two sons: Albert James and Frederick Clarence. Frederick survived the war but his son, Frederick Lewis Stares, was killed in action on D-Day, 6 June 1944. His parents chose a similarly affectionate tribute, making use of their diminutive for him as had been done for his uncle killed 27 years earlier:
Sleep on Freddy
The dawn will break.
"I PRAY YOU SHED NO TEAR"
CAPTAIN TALBERT STEVENSON, MC & BAR
"Your son was without exception the finest specimen of the young British officer I have ever met. His loss to the battalion is irreparable. Since our former Colonel (sic. should it be captain?) left he has been my Adjutant, and I relied implicitly on him. Brave to a fault, brimming over with energy and kindness, a prime favourite with officers and men, he also possessed a very old head on young shoulders. Personally, I loved your boy as if he had been a son of my own, and I have never been so cut up over any loss in this war."
Lt. Colonel Thomas David Murray
Quoted page 257 Volume 3 of the Marquis de Ruvigny's Roll of Honour
Stevenson was studying Chemistry at Manchester when the war broke out. He joined up immediately and was gazetted Second Lieutenant on 2 September 1914 arriving in France on 2 February 1915. Promoted lieutenant on 27 September 1915, and captain on 10 August 1917, he was wounded three times before being killed in action by a sniper at Polderhoek on the Menin Road. Stevenson, who had been awarded an MC in January 1917, received a posthumous bar to it in November 1917.
His father, Francis Stevenson, chose his inscription. It's a quote from a very obscure poem called 'To All Who Love, written by Lieutenant Colonel J. Berkley and published in The Spectator on 24 February 1917:
If Death should claim this mortal shell of me
Which you have seen and touched and thought to be
Needful to happiness,
I pray you shed no tear as though this life
Held all, or were but passing phase of strife
'Tween pleasure and distress.
I pray you clothe yourself in gala hue,
Purging your soul of that self-pitying view
That calls for mourning black.
For I would have you mingle with a throng,
Bright-hued, exulting, cheering me along
The road that leads not back,
That I may pass beyond the SOLDIERS' GATE,
Whose arch is SACRIFICE and threshold FATE,
Unburdened by regret;
To greet my battle comrades who have bled
For ENGLAND'S sake, and, risen from the dead,
Rest, clear of Honour's debt.
I pray you, urgently, to see your woe
As just that jarring note you would forgo
Could you but feel at heart,
How, grieving, I could have no other grief
Than helplessness to bring you dear relief,
Being near - yet far apart.
Four years after Talbert Stevenson's death his sister, Mrs Margaret Philip, had a son who she named Talbert Stevenson Philip after her brother. He was killed in action in Normandy on 19 August 1944. Lt Colonel Murray's sons were both killed in 1943.
There is more information about Talbert Stevenson on this Great War Forum site.
A portrait of Captain Talbert Stevenson MC & Bar by Anton Abraham van Anrooy hangs in the Black Watch Castle and Museum, Perth, Scotland
LIFE IS VERY SWEET BROTHER
WHO WOULD WISH TO DIE
RIFLEMAN GERALD OSCAR SMITH
'Life is sweet brother.'
'Do you think so?'
'Think so! - There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?'
LAVENGRO 1851
George Borrow (1803-1881)
This part autobiography, part novel received a very cool reception when it was first published. Sales picked up after Borrow's death, encouraged by the opinion of critics like Theodore Watts who wrote in the introduction to the 1893 edition: 'There are passages in Lavengro which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England'. Smith's inscription comes from one such passage. It's so beautiful I'm surprised I haven't come across it before.
Gerald Smith was a married man with at least two children, sons Roy and Phillip. I only know this from the fact that Phillip, a 22-year-old sergeant serving with 10 Squadron Bomber Command, was killed in action on 6 November 1940, and 29-year-old Roy, a constable serving with the Palestine Police Force, was killed in a bomb explosion on 20 October 1946.
NOW HEAVEN
IS BY THE YOUNG INVADED
SECOND LIEUTENANT JAMES EKIN
The idea that the dead are now happy, that they are better off where they are, and that in the case of the youthful dead, they will now be young forever, is a consistent theme in consolatory verse. This is exactly the idea behind 'Flower of Youth' a poem by Katherine Tynan (1861-1931) from which James Ekin's inscription is taken. However, Tynan takes it slightly further and like Mrs Schuyler van Rensselaer's poem, 'It Is Well With the Child?', she implies that God positively wants the companionship of these young men.
Lest Heaven be thronged with grey-beards hoary,
God, who made boys for His delight,
Stoops in a day of grief and glory
And calls them in, in from the night.
When they come trooping from the war
Our skies have many a new gold star.
The inscription comes from verse four:
Now Heaven is by the young invaded;
Their laughter's in the House of God.
Stainless and simple as He made it
God keeps the heart o' the boy unflawed.
The old wise Saints look on and smile,
They are so young and without guile.
But the real point of the poem is to reassure the bereaved:
Oh! if the sonless mothers, weeping,
And the widowed girls could look inside
The glory that hath them in keeping
Who went to the Great War, and died,
They would rise and put their mourning off,
And say: 'Thank God, he has enough!'
There was a huge crowd 'invading' heaven on the day James Ekin died: 19, 240 young British men alone. All killed on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme and among them James's elder brother Leslie who was twenty-two.
I looked up the Ekins in the 1911 census to see if there were any other children and was relieved to see that there were five of them. The youngest was only one, a boy Sidney, so he was totally safe from harm - except that he wasn't. He was killed in Tunisia on 21 January 1943 aged thirty-two whilst serving with the Second Battalion The London Irish Rifles.