PRIVATE FRED LAYLAND
ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS
21ST SEPTEMBER 1917 AGE 23
BURIED: BUS HOUSE CEMETERY, YPRES, BELGIUM
Fred Layland served with the 96th Field Ambulance Unit and was killed in action during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge. In 1911, at the age of 16, Layland was working as a warehouse clerk but it has been difficult to find out anything else about him. Confusingly, the RAMC site has given his army number to Frederick Murrell, a fellow private in the RAMC who was killed on the same day as Layland and his buried beside him.
It was Mr WH Layland, Fred Layland's father, who chose his inscription. It comes from the thirty-second stanza of 'Burns', a poem in praise of Robert Burns by the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867):
Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined -
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind.
To Mr Layland, people of all races and creeds will honour the graves of those who died for their country in the First World War, just as they come from all over the world to honour the grave of Robert Burns.
But what to them the sculptor's art,
His funeral columns, wreaths and urns?
Wear they not graven on the heart
The name of Robert Burns?
Mr Layland was right, these graves are pilgrim shrines. Even before the war was over, some of the bereaved managed to visit them. And then immediately the war was over organizations sprang up to take, guide and accommodate visitors - both the bereaved and the tourists - round the battlefields and the cemeteries. The former group were known as pilgrims who ranged from the wealthy, who would arrange for a private car, usually driven by a former officer, to drive them around, to the poor for whom the Church Army and the St Barnabas Society began to arrange inexpensive group tours. From 1921, the St Barnabas Society organised an annual free pilgrimage for the close relatives of the bereaved who otherwise would never have been able to visit. Mark Connelly has written interestingly about the subject here.