Out of the frying pan and into the fire

“For you, Tommy, ze war is over!,” was the sort of stereotypical comment that filled the cheap pulp fiction war comics that were popular in my youth. In 1918, for young Lance Corporal Joseph Steele, the opposite was true.

He was an agricultural labourer hailing from Corney, a rural community of scattered houses and farmsteads in West Cumbria. Desperately keen to join up, he’d lied about his age when enlisting in the 4th Battalion in late-November, 1914, claiming he was 18, when in fact he was only 16. Apparently, his mother was furious when she found out, although she must have relented, with nothing more being said, because after training at home with the second-line unit of the 4th Battalion he was posted to France on Christmas Eve, 1915, still only aged 17, and technically too young to serve in an active theatre of war.

The next couple of years were uneventful, with him managing to emerge unscathed from the various actions in which the 1st/4th Battalion participated. Then, on April 9th, 1918, at Givenchy, during the stand made by the 55th (West Lancashire) Division against the German offensive on the River Lys, he was taken prisoner.

He might have expected to be removed to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, or at least to a location well away from the battlefield, in accordance with the terms of the Geneva Convention, to which Imperial Germany was a signatory. If he did, then he was wrong. He, and many others of the West Lancashire men who were captured that day, were instead held just behind the German lines at Salomé, almost within sight of Givenchy, there to be put to battlefield clearance, burial, and carrying duties by their captors.

By means of a post-card delivered through the Red Cross he managed to get word home that he had been captured but, by the time it arrived in early-June, he was already dead, killed by a British shell. His family subsequently learned that he, along with several other prisoners of war, had been confined in the ruins of the church at Salomé, being employed as a stretcher-bearer by the Germans. On April 28th, the British artillery started shelling the area and apparently the German sentries ran out of the church to find cover, leaving Joseph and the other men unguarded; they promptly made a run for it. Joseph, however, had left his helmet behind and went back for it, only for a shell to make a direct hit on the church, killing him outright. Some of the other prisoners, who got back to the British lines safely, reported what had happened him.

Lance Corporal Joseph Steele (photograph courtesy of Mr. Ivor Holden).

He wasn't the only prisoner from the 1st/4th Battalion to be killed by the British shellfire that day. Private Robert Helm of Dalton-in-Furness also became a victim, as did Private Robert Ralston, of Caton, near Lancaster, both also having been captured on April 9th at Givenchy. These two men were possibly not with Joseph when he died, as their graves were located post-war and to-day they are both buried in Plot VIII, Row U, of Cabaret Rouge British Cemetery, Souchez. Joseph's grave, on the other hand, was never formally identified and he is now commemorated on the Loos Memorial, although I feel that in all likelihood he is buried somewhere in a quiet cemetery marked simply as an "Unknown Soldier."

I wonder how many more British soldiers were killed under such circumstances? Probably quite a few.