Lieutenant Lewis Thierry Seymour
2ND YORK & LANCASTER REGIMENT
NORTH OF THE ANCRE, MAINTENANCE work and the subsequent sporadic torment of each other continued to add to the casualty figures on both the British and German sides of the line. Near Beaumont Hamel troops rotated in and out of the trenches. There would be no major offensive in the sector for the rest of the summer, but infantry patrols and raids were regularly carried out and there was always labour-intensive work to be done.
Lieutenant Lewis Seymour. (St Edward’s School)
Lewis Seymour was born in 1893 in Hyderabad, where his father was forging a career towards being Superintendent of Lands, Records and Agriculture in Sind with the Indian Civil Service. The family’s home in England was Oxford and Lewis was first educated at the Christ Church Choir School before winning a scholarship to St Edward’s, where he was not only a bright academic but a talented sportsman too, representing the school at both cricket and rugby.
Before the war he had served with King Edward’s Horse, with whom he stayed in 1914. In the spring of 1915, though, Lewis made the move to the York & Lancaster Regiment, where he saw intense action in the Ypres Salient and became imprisoned in a section of trenches for three days and nights without food and water after helping to retake them from the enemy. After a spell at home as a machine-gun instructor at Strensall in Yorkshire, a specialist in Lewis guns, he returned to the front in April 1916 with his battalion.
Lewis’ battalion marched to Mailly-Maillet Wood on 9th August as it prepared to take over the holding and maintenance of a section of the line at the northern end of the Somme battlefield. Their spell in the trenches was plagued by a gusting wind when they relieved a battalion of The Buffs north of Hamel. A lack of offensive activity by no means meant a relaxing stint ahead of them. By both day and night Lewis and the other officers escorted working parties out into no-man’s-land for a spell of hard labour. The York & Lancasters struggled to dig a new communication trench and improve the British position as they were plagued by minenwerfer and gas alerts. The situation became bad enough that on 12th August the unit began to request artillery support to silence the enemy. On the 13th the battalion did so again, as Lewis took a party out to a particularly dangerous spot. As his men dug, a German mortar was fired that claimed the life of their 23-year-old officer. His commander told his family that Lewis ‘was a keen and capable officer and I miss him very much’. Another victim of attritional war on the Western Front, Lieutenant Seymour was laid to rest at Englebelmer Communal Cemetery, plot II.B.5.