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World War 1 One ww1 wwII greatwar great 1914 1918 first battalion regiment
Pte. Edmund Shirley
British Army A Coy. 1st.Btn. East Kent Regiment
from:Ramsgate
Ted Shirley signed up in 1914, falsifying his age: he was born in 1898 but registered it as 1896. He spent 1914 and 1915 in Kent, then was sent to France in 1916. He said he first was sent to Armentieres where they had to build up walls as the ground was too wet to dig trenches down into the soil.
He fought on the Somme from 1916 and received a bullet wound in his left arm in September, recovering at a convalescent centre in France I believe, from your records. He talked about seeing early tanks employed on the battlefield for the first time. On one occasion, when he was stuck in no-man's land he watched as a German sniper shot anyone raising their head to see where they were going as they crawled through barbed wire back across British lines: only those who kept their heads down survived, so that was what he did.
In March 1917 he was wounded with a revolver bullet in the right lung and awoke in a German Military Hospital in Lille. He was moved around to a number of camps in 1917, including camps near Limburg an der Lahn, Wittenburg and Dulmen (near Merseburg?). I found this information in Red cross records. He said that prisoners supplemented their diet with nettle soup.
When he was fit he was moved to a Lager further east into Germany and put to work on the railway running between Berlin and Leipzig. He did not remain in the Lager, instead he was imprisoned in an small rural railway station. There were about half a dozen British soldiers and the same numbers of French and Russian prisoners imprisoned there. The Russians were treated very badly. At one time, some of them would get out at night to steal potatoes from a local farm to supplement their poor diet. That was until the farmer started shooting at them one night. It was here that he heard the war was over and refused to work anymore. He was finally repatriated to England in 1919.
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