Standing dignified, surrounded by a small wood just outside the village of Fouquereuil, west of Bethune, is Sandpits British Cemetery.
Every CWGC headstone represents a life, and the lives of his family left bewildered by his loss.
But sometimes you find a headstone with a whole crowd standing metaphorically around it. At Sandpits, Sjt William Chappell of the 2nd Suffolks has one such.
He’d been killed aged 32 during the desperate fighting to halt the massive German offensive in the spring of 1918; on 8th May, his Battalion had been taking over the line close to Chocques when the column was shelled, killing William and one other, and wounding 16.
When it came time to choose an epitaph after the Armistice, his twice-widowed Mum Elizabeth Mathilda picked these words:
“One of Four Brothers Who Shared the Same Fate.”
Born and raised in East Ham, Elizabeth had many sons and just one surviving daughter, Daisy, who’d married and emigrated to Canada before the War.
30-year-old Ernest was an old soldier, one of the very first to cross the Channel in August 1914 and, like so many of the little army which tried to stop the Germans that autumn, he would die n the attempt just weeks later, on 13th September, near a small French village named Venizel. His body was lost in the chaos.
In East Ham, Elizabeth helplessly watched her other sons go off to War and kept a firm grip on her youngest Arthur, mercifully too little to enlist.
1915 and 1916 somehow passed without further loss to the Chappell family, but the big offensive of April 1917 would claim 26-year-old Fred.
On 4th April, under a thick carpet of snow, Fred’s 11th Rifle Brigade took the village of Metz-en-Couture north of Peronne, but the enemy machine guns could not be silenced, and the Battalion suffered dreadfully. 38 killed including Fred, 83 wounded.
The loss of William, at Sandpits, came next.
So by late October 1918, with the end of the War surely in sight, Elizabeth must have been distraught when the news came that 20-year-old Alfred, had been badly wounded in the last days of fighting, about 70 miles north of where big brother Ernest had fallen four years earlier during the first days of fighting.
Alfred sustained gunshot wounds to both thighs and the groin; he made it back as far as Brighton General Hospital, where I’d imagine the staff had a difficult time persuading Elizabeth to depart when visiting hours were finished.
11th November came and went but Elizabeth’s focus was on getting Alfred through this; the War was over but Alfred’s fight was not quite done.
He held on until three days before Christmas 1918.
Once Elizabeth had carefully chosen her epitaph for William, representing all her lost boys in one devastating sentence, she followed her daughter across the Atlantic and settled in Hamilton, Ontario, leaving four pieces of her heart in France with her brave sons.
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