Andover Advertiser 8th February 1918

ANOTHER MILITARY FAMILY – We have been asked to write a paragraph concerning the military history of Mr W.C. Moorse’s family, and have great pleasure in doing so. Harold the youngest son, joined the Hampshire Regiment when 18 years old. For five years he served abroad, two years as schoolmaster sergeant, until war broke out. He was sent to England, and having been given a commission in the York and Lancaster Regiment, proceeded to France in February 1915. We regret to have to say that he lost his life in action about a month later. – Sergeant Frank Moorse R.A.M.C. was at Netley Hospital for some time. Two years ago he was drafted to Salonika and has been there ever since. – Sergeant William Moorse was in the Wessex Division when war broke out, and for the first three years saw Service in the Dardanelles, Egypt and Palestine. – Driver Walter Moorse also of the Wessex Division has seen the same service as his brother William, and strange to say both had their Christmas dinner in Jerusalem.

Andover Advertiser 28th January 1918

MILITARY HONOUR – Some time ago we reported that Lieut. W.R. Tovani, of the Black Watch (Royal Highlanders), elder son of the Rev. W.T. Tovani vicar of Hurstbourne Priors, with St Mary Bourne, had been awarded the Military Cross. The following is the official account of what he did :- Lieutenant William Richard Tovani (Royal Highlanders). On 31^st  July 1917 during the attack, when his Company Commander had become a casualty, though wounded in the face carried on leading his men with the utmost gallantry, and capturing a machine gun concrete emplacement which was causing great hindrance to the advance to the first objective. He continued to lead his company to the second objective till he was twice again wounded and compelled to desist.

Andover Advertiser 25th January 1918

A MISTAKE SOMEWHERE – There has been a mistake committed by someone in the army, but fortunately, although serious on the face of it, it turned out amusing. On January 11^th  Private Richard Davis, of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, son of Mrs M. Brown, Lower Rank came home on a 14 day furlough from France. Last Saturday while he was at home, his mother received an important letter from the Dublin Records Office, stating that her son, Private Richard Davis 42463, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, was posted as wounded and missing on 28^th  November 1917. It is understood that about that time there was a very serious engagement in France, as a result of which some of the men of that battalion were thought to have been cut off, and no doubt the mistake had arisen through this. Had their son not been at home at the time that the letter was received, the mother would have had a most anxious time, but everybody had a good laugh at the mistake. In the earlier days of the war Private Davis belonged to the A.S.C, but was transferred with many others into infantrymen, and he has been in France for eighteen months. His chum was killed by his side on Christmas Day, but we are glad to know that although ill fate is trying to dog this young man’s footsteps, he has escaped injury so far, and we hope he will come through all right

Andover Advertiser 18th January 1918

A HOUSEHOLD ROLL OF HONOUR – It gives us much pleasure this week to refer to the patriotic family of Mr and Mrs G. Choules, of Riverside, who have (or had) four sons and two sons-in-law on the fighting roll in the present war. C.S.S.M Charles Choules A.S.C. 31, married living in Andover, served 18 months , and was discharged because of ill health.

Private George Edward Choules, A.S.C. transferred to the King’s Royal Rifles, 28, single, has been up three years, 16 months of which have been spent in France. He has had the misfortune to be wounded, for in the great push around the Cambrai area he had the sinews of his leg blown away by a bursting shell. With painful difficulty he dragged himself through water and mud to the dressing station. He was then sent to England, and for seven weeks he has been in hospital in Dundee. So serious was his wound that he has had to undergo two operations and tubes have been put in his leg in order to draw off poison engendered by the shrapnel. The latest news is that he is getting better and hopes that his leg will be saved. Before the war he was a policeman at Aldershot.

– Corporal Henry Choules Household Battalion, 25, married, was a policeman for five years in Bournemouth. In May 1917 he joined the Household Battalion, and in November he was drafted to France, On two occasions he has had to seek the kindly shelter of the hospital on account of a frost-bitten foot, but at the time of writing he is again out in the trenches.

– Private William Frank Choules, R.M.L.I., 20, single, joined in March 1917, having spent the last three months in France. In the great battle of Cambrai he lost his speech through shell shock, but we are profoundly thankful to hear he has recovered his speech and can talk in his accustomed manner. At present he is in hospital in Southampton.

– Private W. Mattingley, of the Anti-Aircraft Corps, has had two years experience of the present war. He is near Netley but suffers a great deal from chills.

– Private W. Allen, an old soldier, went out to France with the Scots Guards when the war began, and early on lost an eye through a bursting shell in his trench. Needless to say he has been  discharged. – This is a good record for one family, and our sincerest wish is that they may be spared to return safe and sound to their pre-war time occupations.

Andover Advertiser [December]1917

DIED FOR HIS COUNTRY – The sympathy of a wide circle of friends goes out this week to Mr and Mrs F.W. Thring, of the Post Office, on the news just received of the death in France of their eldest son Private William Henry Thring. Two years ago Private Thring joined up with the East Surreys, and for the last 19 months he has been in France and has seen much heavy fighting. Strangely enough he was home on leave three weeks ago, and he left home with a very cheerful spirit. During an attack on Beaudricourt on November 20^th  he was wounded in the chest and died at the clearing station two days later. The following beautiful letter was written by his company officer, which says much for the esteem in which the deceased was held :-

7th East Surreys

My dear Mr Thring, – It is with deepest regret that I write to inform you of the death of your boy, who for so long has been my devoted servant and personal friend. Since he went home on leave – I have not seen him at all. I expect he told you that I was going on leave shortly, and now I have returned to find that the Battalion has been in another attack and your boy went over the top with them and got wounded in the chest. He went over on Tuesday last, the 20^th , and your son was hit and taken back to the casualty clearing station. He died there on the 22^nd  at a place called Tincourt, and was buried there in the British military cemetery. It is not far from Peronne. We have spent hours together in the trenches, and had many and many a confidential chat. He was a faithful as well as a brave fellow, and I loved him, and never tired of sounding his praises. It will indeed be a long time before I feel the same after this loss, which is a mutual one to us both. I trust you may be comforted by the thought that he played his full share in this terrible struggle. He never missed a “show” and never failed with us when men of his stamp were most needed, and he never “went sick” in all the weary months he was over here. He was indeed a splendid chap. In this your great sorrow I am anxious to tender you my most sincere sympathy.

– yours sincerely

JOHN HALFORD

Besides the official notification from the War Office the Chaplain of the Clearing Station has written a cheerful letter saying that Private Thring died cheerfully and bravely. – Another son Sergeant Frederick George Thring who had won a commission is about to be discharged from the Australian Forces with a shattered foot, the result of wounds  received at Pozieres. This son was in Australia when war was declared, he joined up on 5^th  August 1914, and was fighting on 19^th . He has seen much service in German New Guinea, in Gallipoli and Egypt, and lastly on the Continent. We join in sympathy with the relatives in their loss.

By the end of the battle – the longest single battle in human history – more than 300,000 French and German soldiers had been obliterated in an area of 50 square miles. Most are still there, pounded into the sand and chalk of western Lorraine.

When fighting ended in December 1916, the two armies stood a few hundred yards from where they had been. For the French, the name “Verdun” still symbolises the murderous futility and the impossible heroism of the 1914-1918 war. And yet Verdun was less destructive than the Somme. It was less costly to the French, month by month, than the foolish and largely forgotten offensive battles of 1915.

It has become lodged in French popular memory partly because, despite 170,000 French deaths, it was a French defensive “victory” in a war in which victories were scarce.

“All the regiments in the French army were rotated in and out of Verdun,” said the French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour. “It seemed as though the blood of the entire nation was coursing through one battlefield.” The slogan of defiance attributed to Marshal Pétain, “Ils ne passeront pas”, fuelled the heroic legend.

There is another reason why the name “Verdun” has been seared on the memory of mankind. “The logic of Hiroshima began at Verdun,” said Mr Le Naour. “It was at Verdun that the notion of industrialised mass destruction was pushed to its limit for the first time.”

At Verdun – and from 1 July that year on the Somme – the firepower, and the ingenuity behind it, exceeded even that seen in the murderous campaigns of 1914 and 1915. In both battles, artillery was assembled by the Germans, and later the French and British, on an unimagined scale. Flamethrowers (Verdun), tanks (the Somme) and more efficient forms of poisonous gas (both) joined the world’s arsenal of mass butchery.

A French soldier is shot during a counter attack (Alamy)
Richard Holmes, the great British historian of the Western Front, also points out that there was “something particularly dreadful” about the distilled horror of the tiny battlefield of Verdun. “The front was so narrow (less than 15 miles)… Men might be killed instantly but without apparent damage by concussion; blown to tatters by direct hits; cut up as if by some malicious butcher; crippled by flying fragments of their comrades’ bodies or shocked into babbling incoherence by a capricious hit which left them unscathed among the remnants of their friends.”

An anonymous French officer left an account of the first days of the fighting: “Thousands of projectiles are flying in all directions, some whistling, others howling, others moaning low, and all uniting in one infernal roar. From time to time, an aerial torpedo passes, making a noise like a gigantic motor car…

“Beyond, in the valley, dark masses are moving over the snow-covered ground. It is German infantry advancing in packed formation… They look like a big grey carpet being unrolled over the country…

“There is a whistle over our heads. It is our first shell. It falls right in the middle of the enemy infantry… Through glass we can see men maddened, men covered with earth and blood, falling one upon the other.

“When the first wave is decimated, the ground is dotted with corpses, but the second wave is already pressing on. Once more our shells carve awful gaps in their ranks… Then our heavy artillery bursts forth in fury. The whole valley is turned into a volcano, and its exit is stopped by the barrier of the slain.”

Another French officer, Lieutenant Henri Desagneaux, wrote: “Numb and dazed, without saying a word and with our hearts pounding, we await the shell that will destroy us… There’s death everywhere. At our feet, the wounded groan in a pool of blood. Two of them, more seriously hit, are breathing their last. One, a machine-gunner, has been blinded, with one eye hanging out of its socket and the other torn out: in addition he has lost a leg.

“The second has no face, an arm blown off and a horrible wound in the stomach. Moaning and suffering atrociously, one begs me: ‘Lieutenant, don’t let me die.’”

Devastation near Fort Souville, Verdun (Alamy)
Erich von Falkenhayn, the German Chief of the General Staff, claimed after the war that his aim had been not to break through at Verdun but to kill French soldiers, and “bleed the French army white”. This is now thought by many historians to have been a lie by von Falkenhayn to explain his defeat. His intention had been to break through, and to destabilise the Allies before the new Pals regiments of Kitchener’s British volunteer army could enter the war further west. The initial German assault captured a handful of forts and advanced about four miles. From April, the Germans were stopped, only to advance again, be pushed back, and advance once more, before eventually being repulsed.

It is sometimes forgotten that the battles of Verdun and the Somme overlapped between July and November 1916. The Germans were also heavily engaged in defeating a Russian offensive on the Eastern Front. It was an extraordinary – but hugely costly – achievement by the German army to fight these three great battles in one year. Berlin’s casualties in 1916 on the Western Front alone – at least 700,000 dead, wounded or captured; some say 900,000 – are part of the ghastly arithmetic of eventual German defeat.

But even those terrible losses fell short of persuading the Germans that they had lost. That took another two exterminatory years and American intervention.

http://www.brucebairnsfather.org.uk/index_files/page0022.htm

Andover Advertiser September 1915

CASUALTY AT SEA – One would hardly believe that a brief Admiralty announcement like the following would carry any significance to little village like St Mary Bourne – “H.M.S. Lynx (destroyer) struck a mine in the North Sea and sank on August 9^th  (Monday). Four officers and 22 men were saved.” But this vague statement brought suspense to at least one home here, and the following letter which reached Mrs Turnell of 4 Neasden Cottages, on August 12^th, brought much sorrow, telling as it did of the death of a loving, kind and considerate husband, father and son :- “I regret to have to inform you that H.M.S. Lynx was sunk on the 9th inst, and that the name of George Turnell, rating A.B, official No. 206844, who is believed to have been on board, does not appear on the list of survivors received in this department. In these circumstances it is feared that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary he must be regarded as having lost his life.” Mr Turnell, who was 31 years of age, had put in 16 years service in the Navy and had never had a bad mark against him, so that it can be said in truth he bore an excellent character. Ever since the fateful August 4^th  1914, his thoughts were always for those he had to leave behind as evidenced by the regularity of his letters to his wife, who had never to wait more than 11 days for news, and even this short stretch was a forced one owing to the letters being kept back. The King and Queen have expressed their sympathy with the relatives. We understand that the deceased always prophesied his death at sea. On Sunday evening a memorial service was conducted at St Peter’s Church by the Rev. P. E. Binns, when there was a large congregation. A similar recognition service took place at the Wesleyan Chapel, where Mr Gilbert Culley made sympathetic reference to the sad loss. Mr Leonard Gibbons sang the solo “Not now, some day we’ll understand.”

Andover Advertiser 21st May 1915

WITH THE SERVICES – Mr and Mrs Sellwood, of this village, have five sons serving their country.

THE ROLL OF HONOUR – The local roll of honour now contains 100 signatures. The tragic toned echoes of the great European war were wafted to this village for the sixth time on Monday, bringing with them the sad news of the death in action of James Pike, whose widowed mother resides at Lower Rank. This makes the sixth brave son who has laid down his life for those at home, the five preceding names being as below : Frederick Day, Sidney Gunnell, Harold Moorse, Edwin Pike, Walter Sims, from which one is reminded of the saying “It never rains but it pours,” for this casualty is the second one in the same home. The little village had previous to the war seven men on the reserve of the 1st Hampshire Regiment, and up to the time of writing only one remains unbeaten in the game of war. Private James Pike was killed on April 26th. A letter received by his bereaved mother dated April 19th said he was quite well, but was afraid that he would not be able to write so often owing to being shifted. On the 25th ult., or one day before his death, the usual official postcard also stated he was quite well. Like his other village comrades who have passed beyond the veil, Jim had seen service in South Africa, where he spent six years. On returning home he went to a Darlington factory to work, and had been there over two years. Here a good job was being kept open for him if he could have returned. He leaves a widow and a baby boy.

Note – by Mike Willoughby? – James Pike born March 1884 Whitchurch H 2c 207 son of Albert and Ann Pike nee Gibbons. (they married December 1872 Whitchurch H.2c 426) Brother Herbert five years his senior and Edwin two years his senior. James married Hilda Harrison March 1913 Darlington 10a 24, they had a son Herbert born March 1914 Darlington 10a 65. According to his medal card James arrived in France on 23rd August 1914.

ANOTHER CASUALTY – The deepest sympathy will be felt with Mrs Holbrooke, of Stoke, whose youngest surviving son, Gerald, was killed in action in Flanders on May 19th. Gerald Howard Holbrooke had led a most adventurous life. He was born in 1879 and educated at the Rev. J. G. Gresson’s Preparatory School, Worthing, and at the Queen’s Service House, Portsmouth. Failing to pass into Sandhurst, he went to South Africa and was farming there when the war broke out. He at once enlisted in the Natal Mounted Police and was present at all the engagements leading up to the Relief of Ladysmith. At Colenso, where he was galloper to General Clery, he had his horse shot under him, and he was wounded at Pieter’s Hill. After the war he went to Madagascar, East Africa and India, wherever adventure was to be found. Later on he went to Canada and after serving in the North West Frontier Police, he bought land and settled down. On the outbreak of the present war he was one of the first to offer his services. He was offered a commission in the 2nd Canadian Contingent, but wanting to get to the front as soon as possible he enlisted as a private in the 18^th Canadian Scottish and was present at all the severe fighting around Ypres, when the Canadians so distinguished themselves. He came of a military family which has been connected with the British Army for more  than 150 years. His great grandfather Captain Bernard Holbrooke helped raise the old 97th Foot in 1759 (now the 2nd Battalion Royal West Kent Regiment) and with them served on the Continent in the Seven Years War, and was present at, and wrote an account of the Siege of Velle Isle in 1761. His grandfather Captain Frederick Holbrooke, served with the 13th Foot (now the Somerset Light Infantry) in Sir Ralph Abercrombie’s campaign in Egypt in 1801, and was present at the battles. He afterwards exchanged into the 14th Light Dragoons, now the 14th King’s Hussars. His father the late Rev. F.G. Holbrooke of Kimpton, served for some years in the old Gloucester Militia, and was just starting for the Crimea when peace was declared. Both Mrs Holbrooke’s other sons are now at the front, Major Bernard Holbrooke, 129^th  Baluchis, who was recently wounded at Ypres, and Major P. L. Holbrooke, D.S.C. R.G.A. who won his decoration a few weeks ago in France. Her youngest son Captain Cecil Holbrooke, R. A. M. C. died in India in 1900. Both Mrs Holbrooke’s grandsons are also at the front. Lieut. Austin Williams, 38^th  Lancers, Indian Army, and 2nd Lieutenant Leonard Williams, Army Service Corps.