ARMY PAPERS/SERVICE RECORDS

ENLISTMENT:
Frank joined The King’s Royal Rifle Corps in Birmingham on 2 January 1914 (image).

SERVICE RECORD:
First entry, dated 2 December 1914, shows Frank being posted to the 38th Brigade. The final entry indicates his transfer to Section B Army Reserve on Demobilisation dated 23 May 1919 (2 images: “Casualty Form – Active Service”).

COURT MARTIAL:
Paper indicates that Frank was sentenced on 22 October 1914 to two years imprisonment HL (hard labour?) for “leaving his post before being regularly relieved, when a soldier acting as a sentinel on active service” at Pavillion Farm, Jury, France on 3 September 1914 (just two weeks after arriving at the Western Front)(image).

STATEMENT OF SERVICE:
First entry indicates Frank being attested to The King’s Royal Rifle Corps on 20 April 1914 and finally being discharged on 19 April 1926 (two images).

Discharge certificate (note: Alan has copy) states that he was discharged from the Royal Artillery on 19 April 1926 at Woolwich, having served 7years 46days with the colours and 4years 319days in the Army Reserve.

11 November 1918:
Germany signed an armistice with the Allies – the official date of the end of World War One.

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

Photo1: detail from the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner (by Charles Sargeant Jagger).
Photo2: Artillery in action.

• Infantry/Artillery Context: Worthwhile bearing in mind the following (from Geoff Dyer’s book ‘The Missing of the Somme’): “Sixty per cent of casualties on the Western Front were from shell-fire, against which shelter was the infantryman’s only defence. Artillery fire transformed the foot soldier from an active participant in conflict to an almost passive victim of a force unleashed randomly around him. ‘Being shelled’, Louis Simpson claimed later, ‘is actually the main work of an infantry soldier’”.



• Horses (another quote from Geoff Dyer’s book ‘The Missing of the Somme’): “In footage and photographs of the war there are horses everywhere. So many of them it is easy to think you are watching an early Western, set in an especially dismal period of the American Civil War. In St Jude’s Church, Hampstead, there is a memorial to the 375,000 horses killed in the war”.



• Ypres: In his novel ‘Fields of Glory’, Jean Rouaud gives a terrifying description of life in the kind of ‘sullen swamp’ that is the ‘enduring truth’ of the Ypres battlefield:
  “Little by little, abandoned corpses sank into the clay, slid to the bottom of a hollow and were soon buried under a wall of earth. During an attack you stumbled over a half-exposed arm or leg. Falling face to face on a corpse, you swore between your teeth – yours or the corpse’s. Nasty the way these sly corpses would trip you up. But you took the opportunity to tear their identification tags off their necks, so as to save those anonymous lumps of flesh from a future without memory, to restore them to official existence, as though the tragedy of the unknown soldier were to have lost not so much his life as his name”.



• "Old Contemptibles": was the title adopted by the men of the BEF who saw service before or on 22 November 1914. They were the originals, and most were regular soldiers or reservists. They derive their honourable title from the famous "Order of the Day" given by Kaiser Wilhelm II at his headquarters in Aix-la-Chapelle on 19 August 1914: "It is my Royal and Imperial Command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English; walk over General French's contemptible little Army."



• War Diaries: were produced by each unit, recording day-to-day activities in some detail (note: Steve checked these out at The National Archives, summer 2008). They represent an amazing documentation of the unit’s war involvement. The early (numbered) separate pages of the diary were fairly crude (very thin paper and glued into files for The National Archives’ records; after a few weeks, these were replaced by individual diary sheets (still on thin paper) with the following heading: “War Diary or Intelligence Summary (erase heading not required)”. Locations are carefully recorded in capital letters (although some spellings may be incorrect as Steve hasn't been able to trace all locations).

MEDALS

Victory Medal: RFA/214B page 22724
British Medal:
1914 Star Medal (with 14 Clasp): RFA/20 page 62.

Note: The Star Medal was instituted in 1917 for service ashore in France and Flanders between 5 August and 22 November 1914.
In 1919 a clasp bearing the above dates was authorised and given to those individuals who had actually been under fire between the prescribed dates.

Under “Action taken”:

1914Clasp 28981.CHR. iv.1719/c.d/25.11.20 (guessed?)
Theatre of War Qualifying Date: 19 August 1914.

Photo: Frank’s Medal Roll Index from The National Archives and the medals themselves - with the Clasp has been laid over the Star Medal(note: Alan has the medals in his possession).