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World War 1 One ww1 wwII greatwar great 1914 1918 first battalion regiment
Pte. Alfred Sidney "Sonny" Mercer
British Army 11th Btn. Royal Sussex Regiment
from:Farnham, Surrey
(d.29th Apr 1918)
Alfred Mercer was not yet 16 when he enlisted in Aldershot or Guildford in September 1916. He was the eldest of seven children born to a working family in Farnham which had its roots in Dorset, Kent and the Surrey-Hampshire borders.
The 11th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment were quickly in the thick of things on the Western Front. Their involvement in the Battles of the Somme in 1916 included: fighting on the Ancre (Hamel); Battle of the Thiepval Ridge; Battle of the Ancre Heights; capture of the Schwaben Redoubt; capture of Stuff Trench; Battle of the Ancre, and in 1917: Battles of Ypres (3rd Ypres); Battle of the Pilckem Ridge; Battle of Langemarck; Battle of the Menin Road Ridge; Second Battle of Passchendaele.
In 1918 the 11th were at the Battle of St Quentin; part of action on the Somme crossings; at the Battle of Bapaume and the Battle of Rozieres; the Battles of the Lys including fighting on the Wytschaete Ridge; the First Battle of Kemmel Ridge; the Second Battle of Kemmel Ridge. On 29th April Sonny fought in the Battle of the Scherpenberg, where he was killed, aged just 19, along with many hundred other men in the battalion.
His name is on the memorial at Tyne Cot Cemetery, and on a more modest, but certainly heartfelt, memorial in Gostrey Meadows in the centre of Farnham, only 500 yards or so from where he was born and raised. We have no portrait of him; therefore our only photographic memories are of these two memorials.
It is almost beyond our modern comprehension to understand what this young man, like so many others, would have endured in his short but fiercely-lived life. His family remembers him with love and respect.
Mercy for Sonny Mercer
Barbed wire buried
deep in the fields I am grown in,
enmeshed roots, sods, earth,
bound tight,
scented loam
holding light and rain and warmth,
rusting the wire,
burnishing...
Sap rising
Sap quenched
BarbBitingFlesh
Devouring
Me.
by Julia Birch, 1916
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