#21452 Private Walter Vurley
7TH LINCOLNSHIRE REGIMENT
MEANWHILE, SLIGHTLY TO THE NORTH-WEST, the saga of Delville Wood continued. After the attacks of the Footballer’s Battalion and the Royal Fusiliers that claimed the lives of William Jonas and Corsellis Lawton, the Germans were in a ragged state inside. Although infantry fighting had fallen into a lull, they couldn’t even get their wounded out as the furious British barrage continued to rain down.
Private Walter Vurley. (Authors’ collection)
Rather than volunteer to fight at the onset of war, 27-year-old Walter Vurley had, until conscription came into force, done his bit for the war effort by quitting his job as a baker’s journeyman near his home in Upwell, Norfolk, and going to work in a munitions factory in Scunthorpe. Enlisting in the Lincolnshire Regiment in 1916, he arrived on the Western Front in July and was posted to the 7th Battalion, which had helped to capture Fricourt early in July, suffering some 350 casualties. Like Walter, many of the men coming to replace them were fresh from home with no experience at all. There would be no chance to introduce them gradually to trench warfare or life at the front, as had been the case when the battalion first arrived. They were going straight into battle. At the end of the month Walter’s division was on orders to be ready to move at three hours’ notice to resume fighting.
When he arrived on 1st August, the Germans were still in possession of sections in the north and east of Delville Wood. The British occupied most of Longueval, but at the end of the July the enemy had still been lurking in the orchards at the northern end of the village. Walter’s battalion struggled to get into the line, ‘for it was not easy to locate the forward positions, and the Germans were very close’. The enemy had been moving up artillery on a front of some 4 miles around the salient formed by Longueval and Delville Wood, which enabled them to fire upon the position from three sides. But this salient had to be held at all costs until a renewed advance would straighten out the British line by pushing it forward to the right of the wood. Unfortunately for him, Walter Vurley’s fate was to be one of the men sent in to cling to this perilous position.
The whole scene was a mess, crammed with guns and ammunition ‘and impedimenta of all sorts [that] had necessarily to be crowded together’. Casualties immediately began to mount owing to the enemy’s shellfire, and on the 7th the Lincolns took a step closer to the action, moving into reserve trenches to support a battalion of Sherwood Foresters. Walter held steady in terrifying conditions, waiting to see what orders would come. One company of the 7th Lincolns accumulated almost 100 casualties just sitting in this position for twenty-four hours on 8th August, such was the rate of the German artillery fire.
That night Walter and his battalion were ordered to go up through Longueval to relieve the Sherwood Foresters. Conditions were indescribable, ‘almost to the breaking point of endurance’. Only the south and west parts of Delville Wood were clear of the enemy. There was next to no protection: ‘the line was at best a series of detached fragments of old German trenches, with between them strings of shell craters, improvised into posts.’ The area was ‘a mass of broken trees and fallen branches … with shell holes everywhere, and a tangle of undergrowth, bristling here and there with rusty barbed wire’. The air was foul with gas, which had been used during the relentless shelling: ‘[it] hung in the hollows, and drifted among the undergrowth.’ Then there were the bodies. In the stifling, tropical heat that had characterised much of the battle for the wood there were piles of corpses littered everywhere and maimed body parts, all clad in a mixture of field grey and khaki. ‘I never remember having seen so many dead in so small a stretch of ground,’ wrote one witness. Decay set in within hours in the summer weather and these unburied, blackened men had now lain discarded for weeks.
Delville Wood Cemetery, Longueval. (Andrew Holmes)
Walter and his battalion had completed their relief by 7:30am the following morning. On 9th August they were busy digging a new trench through the orchard on the outskirts of Longueval, to connect the British line with a post that their predecessors had managed to establish. Enemy artillery was very active and the Germans also showered them with indirect machine-gun fire. Snipers were also prevalent as Walter, a novice to the Western Front, attempted to work. By the end of the day, a deadly combination of shell and bullets had claimed his life, illustrating just how quickly valuable manpower was being exhausted on the Somme. Walter Vurley had been run from Britain, through France and into the line, where he was killed in action in just three weeks. He was with his battalion for precisely eight days. He had not survived long enough to go into battle, to help attempt to advance the line or press on with the offensive, but died simply digging a trench to try to stave off German attempts to claim back ground that had been lost. Walter’s body, if recovered, was never identified and he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier & Face 1c.