A Gloucestershire lad at Home and Abroad

Most of these poems were written at the Front, and appeared in the Fifth Gloucester Gazette—the first paper ever published from the trenches. The author was then a Lance-Corporal in the 5th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment, and as such gained the Distinguished Conduct Medal in August, 1915. The award appears as follows in the London Gazette—F. W. Harvey.—“For conspicuous gallantry on the night of the 3rd-4th August, 1915, near Hebuterne, when, with a patrol, he and another Non-Commissioned Officer went out to reconnoitre in the direction of a suspected listening post. In advancing they encountered the hostile post evidently covering a working party in the rear. Corporal Knight at once shot one of the enemy, and, with Lance-Corporal Harvey, rushed the post, shooting two others, and assistance arriving the enemy fled. Lance-Corporal Harvey pursued, felling one of the retreating Germans with a bludgeon. He seized him, but finding his revolver empty and the enemy having opened fire, he was called back by Corporal Knight, and the prisoner escaped. Three Germans were killed and their rifles and a Mauser pistol were brought in. The patrol had no loss.” The poems are written by a soldier and reflect a soldier’s outlook. Mud, blood and khaki are rather conspicuously absent. They are, in fact, the last things a soldier wishes to think or talk about. What he does think of is his home. Bishop Frodsham, preaching in Gloucester Cathedral, after visiting the Troops in France, quoted the following poem in a passage which admirably expresses the feelings of most of our fighting men. “To suppose that these men enjoy the fighting would be sheer nonsense. The soldier does not want to go on killing and maiming Germans or Turks. He wants to get the dreadful war finished, so that he can get back to England again. But he wants the matter fought to a finish because he has seen in the villages and towns of France what German domination means. It has made him think furiously, as the French say. Many regiments and ships’ companies while away the impracticable hours by publishing little newspapers.