Two of the most poignant scraps of paper in the world.

Extract from Walter Smith's entry in the Register of Soldiers' Effects

Above is an extract from the Register of Soldiers' Effects for Sgt Walter Smith who had been serving with 2nd Bedfordshires since he was a lad.

Walter went right through the Boer War, crossed to France to fight again in 1914 and survived a wounding in 1915.

But on 14th March 1916, he and his Battalion were holding a trench in front of Maricourt on the Somme when their position was heavily shelled and Walter was killed.

He had stipulated, never having married, that all he had in the world should be divided equally between his mother, Emma, back home in at 4 Hope Cottages, Hitchin, and his siblings, Percy, Henry & George, Alice, Emma, Annie, Nora and Lillie.

He even remembered his sister-in-law, also Emma.

Extract from the papers of Herbert Smith.

And here is the form filled in by the Next of Kin of Herbert Smith (no relation to Walter), born in Notting Hill in unclear circumstances, who’d joined the Rifle Brigade as a teenager in 1908.

He crossing to France like Walter in November 1914 but lost his life near Armentieres on 13th July 1915.

As the form states, Herbert had no one, no parents, wife, brothers, sisters, children, grandparents, aunts or uncles, nephews or nieces, and so he’d left his all to his ‘cousins’ William & Alice Naylor, of Kilburn.

I can’t help wondering if maybe, given that Herbert seems to have known no family but the Army, William & Alice were simply Herbert’s friends and that he stipulated they were cousins so he could bequeath them all his worldly goods.

After the War, did any of Walter’s huge family ever make it over to his grave at Cerisy-Gailly?

Did Herbert’s ‘cousins’ ever go to see him at Y Farm Military Cemetery, Bois Grenier?

The odds favour Walter.

One of the many reasons we must remember them and (if possible) visit them all.

Lest we forget.