Free Kate by Claudia Joseph Page B

moved about at very short notice, which is great fun.’ ‘I am sitting in a little mud and wood shelter for all the world like playing Indians,’ he said the following day. ‘Now and then we hear an occasional rifle crack or a shell going over like a wild duck, but not aimed at us, at least I don’t think so.’
    Gradually, though, Maurice became more aware of the dangers. On 6 June, he wrote:
Into trenches for six days. I am going to try fitting the field glasses sent by Father onto a periscope so as to see more details of the German trench line because one cannot point a telescope directly at them. They are sometimes extraordinarily quick at picking off little things like periscopes.
    And on 15 June:
one afternoon the Germans suddenly started shelling our end of the trench with shrapnel. By sheer mischance, one of these shells did not burst in the air but hit a sand bag wall against which our billet policeman was standing and cut off his leg a little below the knee. He was a tremendously strong chap and chloroform did not seem to have any effect on him, at least not for ages, but sadly he died the next day. All the other deaths we have had in the company have been practically instantaneous, shot through the head while firing over the parapet.
    Four days later, he himself was killed.
    Lionel set off with his Royal Field Artillery unit around the same time as his brother and had made his way to the front, riding in cattle trucks and marching on foot, when he found out that his brother had died. He wrote to his sister Anne:
I like your letters about Maurice. They make me feel much happier. I thought at first that it was an absolute waste him being killed so soon, before he had done anything really good in life but it is lovely to think that he is really having a nice time now.
    He survived the Battle of Loos at the end of August and returned home for a week on leave, but he was wounded on 1 December and sent to a London hospital to recuperate. He then travelled to Rockland for Christmas, where he found his family in mixed spirits – mourning the death of Maurice but celebrating the birth of olive and Noel’s first child, a son Christopher, who was born on Christmas Eve that year.
    Lionel returned to the front in April and was killed on 16 July 1916 at the Battle of the Somme. He was just 24 years old and had been mentioned twice in dispatches. He is buried at Bouzincourt Communal Cemetery.
    Olive’s husband Noel was stationed at Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain when he heard about Lionel’s death. He had spent the early part of the war as chief administrator of the Leeds Special Constabulary’s Motor Transport Section – responsible for traffic control during air raids – and had had to seek the permission of the chief constable to enlist. He joined the Royal Army Service Corps in November 1915, when his wife olive was eight months pregnant with their first child, and became a private in the officer Training Corps. He was on a temporary commission as second lieutenant with the 152nd siege battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, when Lionel died. A month later, on 31 August 1916, he was sent to France, where he worked as a driver, supporting the front-line troops at the Somme. Olive must have been terrified that he would never return. Two of her three brothers had already died and she was all alone, coping with an eight-month-old baby.
    Noel was later attached to 406 Company’s transport depot, where drivers were assigned to deliver munitions to the front, move artillery or transport men and equipment, and to 611 Company. His personnel file records his conduct as ‘very good’ and his driving as ‘competent’. He may well have been one of the 1,400 lorry drivers with 406 Company’s siege park at Poperinghe, near ypres, who were delivering 1,000 tons of ammunition to the front each night under heavy shellfire. Their commanding officer, Major A. Cowan, remarked: ‘The new gas masks are very effective but it is not