Above a shallow grave

One of the missing of the Somme, Lieutenant Cyril Winterbotham was killed on 27 August 1916 near Ovillers, France when his battalion was ordered to attack a German trench at a few minutes past 7:00 pm. Although the German position was taken, at least fifteen men from the unit were killed. Nine of them, including Winterbotham, were buried by their fellow soldiers two days later in the German trench.

Winterbotham’s widowed mother received news of her son’s death in a letter written by the battalion’s chaplain. Reverend George Helm wrote, “It may be some consolation to know that I buried him early this morning in the German trench he did so much to win, both by his example beforehand and of his actual leadership on the day … he was the British Officer at his best.”*

At the time of the burial, a wooden cross was erected that named the dead and the six men who remained missing. Shortly before his death, Cyril Winterbotham had written about these wooden crosses, often fashioned out of packing crates or salvaged wood, that marked the graves of thousands upon thousands of soldiers hastily buried by their comrades in arms. Winterbotham’s poem “The Cross of Wood” was published in his hometown paper the day before he died.**

The Cross of Wood

from Lives of the
First World War

God be with you and us who go our way
And leave you dead upon the ground you won.
For you at last the long fatigue is done,
The hard march ended; you have rest to-day.

You were our friends; with you we watched the dawn
Gleam through the rain of the long winter night,
With you we laboured till the morning light
Broke on the village, shell-destroyed and torn.

Not now for you the glorious return
To steep Stroud valleys, to the Severn leas
By Tewkesbury and Gloucester, or the trees
Of Cheltenham under high Cotswold stern.

For you no medals such as others wear—
A cross of bronze for those approved brave—
To you is given, above a shallow grave,
The Wooden Cross that marks you resting there.

Rest you content; more honourable far
Than all the Orders is the Cross of Wood,
The symbol of self-sacrifice that stood
Bearing the God whose brethren you are.
—Cyril Winterbotham

Over two years after her her son's death, in March of 1918 Winterbotham’s mother received a letter from a local man serving with the Army Service Corps who had visited her son’s grave. Corporal Thomas Woolhouse wrote, “Yesterday I went again to the spot where your son lies. His comrades and I shall have to try and get something to grow other than roses as the soil is very chalky.... but I believe that I shall be moving on in a day or so. The cross is firm and stands about 4ft 6in out of the ground, by itself, close to the trench.”*

Undated photo Cheltenham Cemetery

After the war, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission began the work of identifying and reburying the dead. The original wooden cross grave markers were offered to the families of the fallen soldiers, and in 1925 the Winterbotham wooden cross was returned to Cheltenham and erected in the cemetery.* It joined numerous others, as the people of Cheltenham had raised funds to have as many crosses of local men returned as possible. A “Soldiers’ Corner” was established in the Cheltenham, Gloucestershire cemetery, where the wooden crosses were mounted on specially constructed oak rails. A historian notes, “By 1927 there were 200 wooden crosses in place and a year later the number had risen to 230 crosses. The crosses were not reported on after 1928.”*** Today, only twenty-two crosses remain, but they have been researched, restored, and preserved. 

Despite the wooden cross marker, Cyril Winterbotham’s body, along with those of ten others from his unit, was never recovered due to continued heavy artillery shelling on the battlefield. Winterbotham’s name is listed on the Thiepval monument (Pier 5B), though a replica of his original wooden cross can be visited at Cheltenham cemetery. 

Those wishing more information on the original wooden crosses of the Great War can find a wealth of information at Returned from the Front, a project dedicated to establishing an online resource and database that provides information on the locations of currently existing returned crosses, as well as stories surrounding the people whose graves they marked.
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* This information and many other details on Cyril Winterbotham and Cheltenham in the First World War can be found in Neela Mann’s The story of Cheltenham’s Official WW1 Memorial Painting.
** The poem was first published untitled and unsigned in the July 1916 issue of the 5th Gloucester Gazette: A chronicle, serious and humorous, of the Battalion while serving with the British Expeditionary Force. The poem appeared in August 1916 in the Cheltenham Chronicle the day before Winterbotham was killed.
*** This and other information can be found in Cheltenham Cemetery Great War Crosses, which recounts the history of the crosses, as well as recent efforts to restore and preserve the crosses remaining and to research the stories of the men whose graves they marked. 

Oldest Surviving War Poet

Dearmer from article in Dutch Daily NRC (24 Mar. 1993), Michiel Hegener

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are two of the best-known poets of the First World War; John Oxenham was the best-selling poet during the war, and Edgell Rickword, born in October of 1898, is often identified as “youngest of the soldier-poets” (Kendall’s Poetry of the First World War). But the oldest surviving soldier-poet of the Great War is a name few will recognize: Geoffrey Dearmer. 

Dearmer was born March 21, 1893, just three days after Wilfred Owen. In 1914, Dearmer enlisted with the London Royal Fusiliers, serving in Malta, Egypt, Gallipoli, and at the Somme. He was demobilised in 1920. By the time of his death on August 18, 1996 at the age of 103, he was “the oldest member of the Fusiliers Association, the Gallipoli Association, the Society of Authors and the Poetry Society.”* As he approached his 100th birthday, Dearmer was asked by a radio interviewer “‘the secret’ of reaching the century so mentally agile and in such comparatively good shape physically. He replied: ‘Bad temper shortens life. Even temper never does.’”* 

Dearmer is perhaps best-known for his poem "The Turkish Trench Dog," but his lesser-known work deserves attention as well. His poem "Resurrection," first published in Poems (1918) as the second of two “Trench Poems,” grapples with the incomprehensible deaths of millions. 

Detail "Resurrection of the Soldiers,"
Stanley Spencer NT790185 Sandham

II. Resurrection

Five million men are dead. How can the worth 

Of all the world redeem such waste as this? 

And yet the spring is clamorous of birth,

And whispering in winter’s chrysalis

Glad tidings to each clod, each particle of earth.

So the year’s Easter triumphs. Shall we then

Mourn for the dead unduly, and forget 

The resurrection in the hearts of men? 

Even the poppy on the parapet 

Shall blossom as before when Summer blows again.

—Geoffrey Dearmer

Dearmer starkly assesses the cost of war—he was no stranger to loss and death. His younger brother, Christopher, died at Gallipoli in October 1915, just one week before Geoffrey arrived there, and his mother died the same year of typhoid while nursing the wounded in Serbia (she and his father were volunteers in Serbia with the Red Cross ambulance). What sets Dearmer’s work apart from that of the canonical war poets is that he finds solace in the restorative power of nature and faith. 

Geoffrey Dearmer

Although Dearmer’s war poems were well received during the war and in its immediate aftermath, they slipped into obscurity for close to 70 years until friends and admirers arranged to have a selection of his work, A Pilgrim’s Song, published to honour his 100th birthday in 1993. In the Foreword to that book, Jon Stallworthy writes of Dearmer, “his trust in God survived the horrors, and he was sustained...by the ministering beauty of a natural world that never ceases to bind the wounds that man unnaturally inflicts.” Stallworthy notes, “One does not have to share Geoffrey Dearmer’s beliefs to respect them and to recognize that he speaks for many less articulate victims of the Western Front. No doubt his seemingly unshaken vision of this world and the next helped to sustain him and bring him safely home to make a fresh start.”**

Dearmer’s legacy lives on in the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, annually awarded by the Poetry Society for the best poem published in The Poetry Review written by a poet who doesn’t yet have a full collection. All his life a modest man, Dearmer said after the publication of A Pilgrim’s Song, “I don’t know if I like any of the poems in it very much. Some are rather worse than others. Remember, all the great poets died.”*** 

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* Laurence Cottrell, “Obituary: Geoffrey Dearmer,” Independent, 19 Aug. 1996. 

** Jon Stallworthy, “Foreword,” A Pilgrim’s Song by Geoffrey Dearmer, John Murray, 1993, vii. 

*** Dearmer quoted in “‘The Dead Turk,’ Geoffrey Dearmer (1916): Echoes of Calvary in Gallipoli,” by Nigel Steel, Telegraph special supplement "Inside the First World War: Redrawing the Middle East," 2 Feb. 2014.