34th Coventry Scout Group (Walsgrave).
 
Remembrance Day Project

Remembrance Sunday 2005

Their Name Liveth for Evermore

The 34th Coventry Scout Group (Walsgrave) have been looking at the Walsgrave War Memorial and in particular the soldiers from Walsgrave who died in the First World War (1914 - 1918).

We have found out where the following men of Walsgrave who died in the first World War are buried or are remembered (their bodies never being identified).

Harry Beasley - remembered at Poziers Cemetery, Somme, France
Horace Harry Brown - remembered at Poziers Cemetery, Somme, France
Charles Edwaed Coggins - remembered at Tyne Cot Cemetery. Ypres, France
Eli Smith - buried at Guards Cemetery, Windy Corner, Somme, France
T E Smith - buried at Wyken (St Mary Magdalene) Churchyard, Coventry
Walter Tidman - buried at Tehran War Cementery, Iran
J Ball - buried at Amara War Cemetery, Iraq
George Blackwell - remembered at La Ferte-Sous-Jouarre Memorial, France


We pray for the lives of these soldiers, the other men of Walsgrave who died in the First and Second World Wars, and all the other people who have died or suffered in the conflicts throughout the world.

We have also found that:-

* Soldiers from the following countries fought in the First World War.
United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, America, Canada, Japan, Austalia, New Zealand, India,West Indies, South America, Morocco, Senegal, Serbia, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria.
* The Western Front in the First World War was where the Allied soldiers fought against German soldiers in Belgium and France.
* The Somme is in France and where the United Kingdom soldiers suffered huge loss of life on 1st July 1916 and in subsequent battles.
* Ypres is a city in Belgium where UK soldiers went out from to fight attacking forces. Ypres was virtually destroyed but has been rebuilt and is where the Menin Gate Memorial remembers over 56,000 soldiers who died but have no known grave.
* The First World War was fought between August 1914 and November 1918.
* The First World War ended at 11.00am on 11th November 1918(The Armistice).
* Colonel John McCrea, a Canadian Medical Officer who died near Ypres in Belgium (Flanders), wrote the famous poem "In Flanders Field".
* The poppy flower which grows freely in both the Flanders area of Belgium and the Somme area of France is used to remember soldiers who died in the First World War and subsequent conflicts.
* It is thought that between 10 & 11 million people, mainly soldiers, died in the First World War, but this may be an underestimate.

Rest In Peace
 
Remembrance Sunday 2006

KILLED IN ACTION

His chair at the table, empty,
His home clothes hanging in rows forlorn,
His cricket bat and cap, his riding cane,
The new flannel suit he had not worn.
His dogs, restless, with tortured ears
Listening for his swift, light tread upon the path.
And there - his violin! Oh his violin! Hush! Hold your tears.

Juliette de Bairacli-Levy

For N.J.De B.-L.
Crete, May, 1941

DEAD GERMAN YOUTH

He lay there, mutilated and forlorn
Save that his face was woundless, and his hair
Drooped forward and caressed his boyish brow.
He looked so tired, as if his life had been
Too full of pain and anguish to endure,
And like a weary child who tires to play
He lay there, waiting to decay.
I feel no anger towards you, German boy,
Whom war has driven down the path of pain.
Would God we could have met in peace
And laughed and talked with tankards full of beer,
For I would rather hear your youthful mirth
At stories which I often loved to tell
Than stand here looking down at you
So terrible, so quiet and so still.

C.P.S. Denholm-Young

RENDEZVOUS

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air-
I have a redezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath -
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Sping comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows'twere better to be deep
pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear. . . .
But I have a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Alan Seeger

WAR COMMEMORATION

To-day we must recall abysmal follies
That have bequeathed our friends to flies and sour clay,
That bent the air with groaning flights of steel
Or sweetened it with a shell's livid breath,
Turned wholesome plains and gentle lakes to filth,
Tore up our continent in unscavenged belts
Through cross-edged meadows and afforested heights
Where the guns crouched in pits and shouted
Lunatic judgement in dull obedience.
We must remember the weary stand-to
Of millons, pale in corpse-infected mist,
The mad, and those turned monsters, or castrated
In one red, hideous moment; and how, unseen
Dark Mania sat in offices, and designed
New schemes for shambles, learning year by year,
painfully, secretly, to degrade the world.

Sherard Vines 1925
THE SOLDIER
 
 

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace under an English heaven.

  
     
 
  Rupert Brooke  
     
 
God, bless their souls and give them peace and tranquility, wherever they lie at rest, in a foreign field or in England's green and pleasant land. We are in debt for their sacrifice.
 

 
 

A tribute to the men of Walsgrave who gave up their lives in the
First & Second World Wars

Prepared by the
34th Coventry (Walsgrave)
Scout Troop

Remembrance Service
12 November 2006
 
FIRST WORLD WAR
 
John Ball Harry Beasley George Blackwell
Raymond Bottrell Horace Brown Ernest Burrows
Arthur Galloway Charles Coggins Charles Lawson
John W Marshall Eli Smith Thomas E Smith
Walter Tidman Fred Vincent Sidney A Williams
 
SECOND WORLD WAR
 
Stanley Beaufoy Leonard Brown Roland Bush
Bernard Gardener Samual Goff David Harley
Joseph Marsh Edward Symcox Donald Ward