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There are three names on the Thiepval Arch that also appear on a small granite memorial in the Devon village of Lydford and in War Memorial Clive Aslet has taken on the heroic task of restoring to them and their fellow villagers something more than their names. The Lydford monument was unveiled on the Sunday before Christmas 1921 when it had just 11 names on it, and over the next 83 years another 11 were added, with a further two eventually swelling the Great War’s casualties to 13, eight — including three Herbert brothers and a Bickle brother and sister — from the second world war, one from the Falklands and one, tragically, from Iraq in 2003, that of an 18-year-old private in the 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment, Andrew Kelly, killed by accident while cleaning his rifle.
It is a noble idea — and a fascinating way of looking at the sacrifice and the changing social, economic and demographic life of one single, unremarkable village — and it is not Aslet’s fault if it cannot quite deliver all that it promises. It is possible that another village and another memorial might have produced richer material — there are, after all, 54,000 of them in Britain from the Great War alone — but if War Memorial illustrates anything, it is that it is as hard to put the flesh on the bones of an 18-year-old Wilfie Fry or Archie Huggins as it would be those of their 14th-century village forbears.
Aslet has done everything that can possibly be done — parish and school records, traditions, memories, team photographs, regimental diaries, army papers — to construct the circumstances of these men’s lives and deaths, but at the heart of almost every one of these stories is a space which an individual once inhabited.
There is inevitably more to be recovered of the last days of a Private Kelly or Lt Nicholas Taylor who was shot down in his Sea Harrier over Goose Green, but without a single letter of their own to bring them to life until one gets to page 120 and Squire Radford’s nephew, the anonymity that clings to a thatcher’s son like Fry (died of pneumonia before he had so much as left England) or a stonemason like Huggins (died of dysentery contracted at Gallipoli) or even an old regular like Lance Corporal Charles Berry, lost forever in the mud of the Leipzig Salient near Thiepval, is too impenetrable to crack.
This is a lament not a complaint — Aslet is wonderfully well equipped to piece together the fabric of village life, to chart its changing topography, the demise of old trades, its shifting social dynamics and the patterns of emigration that saw two of its villagers fight and die with Canadian units — and for the earliest names on the memorial, at least, it probably simply tells a sobering truth about a war that wasted life with such an obscene and systematic indifference. ‘Do we intend to kill all our young men?’, one horrified minister was eventually forced to ask, as British and Empire casualties climbed inexorably towards the final figure of more than a million dead.Anyone wondering at the answer need only look among the 70,000-odd dead at Thiepval for the names of Charles Berry and his fellow Lydford villagers. Because that, despite Aslet’s efforts, is all that is left of them.
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