PRIVATE ROBERT THOMPSON
LABOUR CORPS
9TH SEPTEMBER 1917 AGE 22
BURIED: DOZINGHEM MILITARY CEMETERY, POPERINGE, BELGIUM
If you think this sounds a rather begrudging epitaph then you wouldn't be the only one. But as it happens, it's a near quote from the poem that begins Ian Hay's best-selling novel, 'The First Hundred Thousand', which was published in 1915 and by early 1917 had sold 30,000 copies. It purports to tell the tale of a group of men who were among the first hundred thousand to answer the call to arms in August 1914 and how they became soldiers in Kitchener's New Army.
The book, like the poem, is written with typical British self-deprecation and understatement but a sense of pride in the task being undertaken is never far from the surface. In the poem, the men resist any heroic claims, yes they've given up their jobs but no they haven't done it for glory rather just "To have a slap at Kaiser Bill". And now they're off to war and they know that some of them will not come back:
But all we ask, if that befall,
Is this. Within your hearts be writ
This single-line memorial: -
He did his duty - and his bit!
Robert Thompson did his bit. Originally Private Thompson 25296 of the East Yorkshire Regiment, he was serving with the 22nd Company Labour Corps when he died from the effects of gas in a Casualty Clearing Station at Dozinghem on 9 September 1917. His transfer from the East Yorkshire Regiment to the Labour Corps suggests that he had been been wounded and was no longer deemed fit for front line service. Nevertheless, the work done by the Corps was still within the reach of the guns - and gas.