IT took Michael Morpurgo’s tear- jerker of a book, and the subsequent Steven Spielberg film and stunning stage version of War Horse, to convey the carnage suffered by horses drafted into service in World War One. Eight million horses and countless mules and donkeys died overall. Britain alone lost over 484,000, one for every two men. One-quarter of all deaths …
ON September 7, 1914, Herbert John Ruler, an eager young reservist, from Barming, Kent, joined the British Forces in France. He died, aged 18, on October the 26th in a field hospital after a shell fractured his skull six days earlier. If it had not been for a strange coincidence, I would never of known he even existed. I do …
WELL I wondered, as I gazed at the grey, grim remnants of the Blockhaus, Eperlecques, was it from here that a life-threatening rocket was fired in my direction ? Apparently not, for this fearsome fortress, in Northern France, bombed by the British and Americans was rendered useless for rocket launching in August 27, 1943. And the only V2 that exploded …
HISTORIAN and hotelier Philippe Gorcynski is a man in love with a tank called Dorothy. Not any old tank but a rusting relic from World War One which I first saw one freezing February morning tucked away in an old barn in the village of Flesquières in Le Nord region of France close to Cambrai. And Philippe was desperate …
FUMBLING through a seemingly mixed bag of artefacts, Steve Arnold (pictured above and below) pulled out a fraying army boot – just one more clue to identifying yet another of the 217,000 Great War soldiers killed in France with no known grave. A gruesome task, yes. But for Steve, a gardener and exhumation officer with the Commonwealth War Graves …
Great War victims gain a voice at last THE 2014 to 2018 Great War commemorations did more than shed much-needed light on death on an industrial scale. It effectively gave the 18 million killed or wounded a powerful voice before ‘the war to end all wars’ inevitably fades into history. Fuzzy prints and film, letters home, weapons of war, including …
