PRIVATE CHARLES EDWIN HABGOOD
ROYAL FUSILIERS
17TH OCTOBER 1917 AGE 35
BURIED: DOZINGHEM MILITARY CEMETERY, POPERINGE, BELGIUM
You may wonder where Mrs Sarah Habgood, Private Habgood's wife, got the idea that her husband had given "his all for the sake of civilization". The answer is probably from the back of the Victory medal that he, as a member of the Allied armed services, would automatically have received having been in one of the theatres of war at some time between 5 August 1914 and 11 November 1918. On the front there's a robed, winged figure - a winged victory - and on the reverse a laurel wreath with the words, "The Great War for Civilisation". (Mrs Habgood spelt it with a 'z', the medal with an 's').
Throughout the war British propaganda had demonised the Germans as barbarians, depicting them as apes in pickelhaubes, their hands covered in the blood of women and babies. Posters mocked the Germans' much vaunted claims to 'kultur' with images of the burning of the medieval library at Louvain. Fears of German barbarism helped sustain the war effort to the end, and when the end came the Victory Medal maintained the theme.
Charles Habgood served with the 36th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, a labour battalion formed in May 1916. Originally used for unloading ships at Rouen, in April 1917 it became the 106th Company Labour Corps. These were often made up of men medically rated as below A1 fitness, but this didn't mean that they were safe from the guns. Five men of the old 36th Battalion died in an unspecified incident near Boezinge on 14 October 1917, with sixteen dying of wounds from the same incident in the following days. One of them could well have been Habgood.
Habgood's younger brother, Alfred, had been killed in action on 17 February 1915. His father chose his inscription:
Like his comrades
He died
That others might live
