#S/19841 Rifleman William Dexter
2ND RIFLE BRIGADE
WHEN HE WASN’T AT WAR, William Dexter lived almost on the doorstep of London Zoo where he worked, as had his father before him. Originally a painter and decorator until he followed his father into the job, he had since risen to the position of Junior Keeper of Ostriches. Enlisting at the end of 1915, William arrived in France on exactly the same day as William Lesurf, but was routed to the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade while the latter went to the 1st and subsequently to his death on 19th October. William had been with his battalion for precisely three weeks as the end of October approached.
Rifleman William Dexter. (Private collection)
On the 23rd, Rawlinson’s troops were going to make what was being termed as a preliminary attack on the Le Transloy Line to the north-east of them in conjunction with the French, the object of which was to establish a good starting point for a proper attack at a later date. A bombardment was already in place when William’s division came into the line. Their objectives for the day were to advance from in between Gueudecourt and Lesboeufs towards Le Transloy, first taking a strong point at the junction of two trenches. There would be a halt of half an hour and then the battalion would push on past the trenches in question and establish a new line out in front. The weather held as William and his companions began to make their preparations, trudging back and forth over boards sinking into their muddy trenches. But the lines were in a filthy state due to all the recent rain. Rations and stores needed to be dragged 5 miles to reach the 2nd Rifle Brigade on the back of pack animals and it was a similar scenario for their water supplies. It could take an officer nearly two hours to cover 1,000 yards in doing his rounds to check on his men.
As the weather improved on 20th October, the artillery on both sides picked up the pace of their gunnery. Nights now were frosty as a rule and the men struggled to keep warm. At 10pm on the 22nd William and the rest of his battalion began making their way to their new assembly trenches. Here the men would have to spend the night. There were no dugouts for shelter and no fires were allowed. At dawn the prospective battlefield was so misty that the attack was put back until later in the day in the hopes that visibility might improve. The fog duly cleared as the heavy artillery continued to bombard Le Transloy in the distance.
By now, numbers were so low in battalions that most attacks would be made on the Somme with them using two weak companies. After what seemed like endless hours sitting in cold, damp trenches, the 2nd Rifle Brigade launched itself forward at 2:30pm. The leading waves bunched up close behind the creeping barrage in good order, but seizing the strong point allocated to the battalion proved an insurmountable task. In the meantime, the battalion on the right was being systematically pushed back by machine-gun fire. The other waves of William’s battalion had more luck, seizing a line of shell holes further left that stretched for more than 100 yards. Behind it, the remaining men of the battalion had flooded into the now vacated assembly trenches ready to go forward in turn. At 2:55pm they advanced. Some of the men were beaten back from their objective, but eventually the remainder managed to reach the original attackers and help them join up the shell holes they had occupied to make a trench and form a strong point at one end.
It had been a confusing attack, with companies becoming intermingled. The battalion suffered not only heavy casualties in going forward, but more so in their consolidation work. The surviving riflemen were also busy in dealing with a number of German prisoners, some of whom deserted and simply turned themselves over to get out of the place and others that turned out to be a ration party who had become lost and wandered into the path of the riflemen. There was also the work of collecting the wounded, both friend and foe, so it was unsurprising that in such disarray, casualties were overlooked.
The 2nd Rifle Brigade initially calculated their losses at almost 240, a huge percentage of their available men. William was not reported missing until six days after the battle, but for his wife at home in Regent’s Park, there was then an agonising wait to find out if he was in German captivity. It was ten months before the War Office, having heard nothing of him, confirmed that the 31 year old must have died on 23rd October 1916.
William left behind four children: Ena, 6, Dora, 4, Edward, 2, and 1-year-old Joan. His widow, Sarah, was forced to go and live with his parents when her husband died after little more than three weeks with his battalion. Edward, like his father and grandfather before him, would become a keeper at London Zoo, in the reptile house. For seven years William lay on the battlefield, but in 1923 his remains were discovered to the west of Le Transloy and he was identified by his clothing and by a serial number on one of his boots. William Dexter was finally laid to rest at Bienvillers Military Cemetery, plot XVIII.J.5.