PRIVATE HEREWARD WILLIAM RAY
AUSTRALIAN INFANTRY
18TH SEPTEMBER 1917 AGE 24
BURIED: HOOGE CRATER CEMETERY, BELGIUM
Hereward Ray was his mother's eldest child - 'her first pride, her first joy'. He was also 'her brave soldier boy'. I can't help hearing the words of a popular, American anti-war song, written in 1915, in her description of her son. And if this echo is intentional then she's rebuking the song-writers, not agreeing with them. This is the chorus of the song:
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It's time to lay the sword and gun away.
There'd be no war today,
If mothers all would say,
"I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier."
To his mother, Hereward Ray was not only her pride and joy but a brave soldier too. The Ray family was committed to the war. There was no conscription in Australia but Hereward Ray's stepfather and brother both served in it, as did his mother's brother, Hector Archibald Maclean, who was killed in action aged 47, and two of his cousins. One cousin was killed and the other, invalided home, died of his wounds in Australia.
Hereward Ray enlisted in March 1915 and served with the 22nd Australian Infantry, which embarked from Australia in May. It went to Gallipoli where it remained until the evacuation that December. Then it moved to France and took part in the Battle of the Somme at Pozieres. Early in 1917 it went to Flanders. Ray was killed in the trenches on 18 September 1917. A witness related how he and Sergeant Kelly had both died of head injuries having been hit by a shell at Jabber Trench, Westhoek".