Corporal Maurice George Messer (9153)

1st Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment

Had he survived the terrible years of the Great War, Corporal Maurice George Messer of A Company, 1st Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment would have been entitled to have referred to himself as an ‘Old Contemptible’, a title bestowed on the soldiers of the regular army that arrived in France in mid-August 1914 and whom were referred to by the German Kaiser as General French’s contemptible little army. Born in 1892, Maurice George Messer became a regular soldier, enlisting with the Wiltshire at Tidworth and, as his record of service shows, he had risen to the rank of corporal before Britain’s formal declaration of war against Germany on August 4th. On the 22nd day of that same month, Corporal Messer disembarked from a troop transport vessel at Le Havre, joining his battalion, resting at Chartres, on September 5th. His arrival, in the company of Captain Reynolds of the 3rd Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment, marked the occasion of the first reinforcement to the 1st Battalion and of the 89 rank and file that came with Captain Reynolds, 82, including Messer, were immediately assigned to A Company. It will be recalled from my first profile (see the August 2004 edition of The Downsman) that the 1st Battalion had sustained very heavy casualties in the Battle of Le Cateau on August 26th, a day in which the British Expeditionary Force sustained 7,812* soldiers either killed, wounded or missing.

Over the next few exhausting weeks, George Messer participated in the pursuit of the now retreating enemy before accompanying the 1st Battalion to their new area of operations west-south-west of Lille and took part in the desperate fighting to deny the Germans access to the channel ports. A flavour of what was taking place can be gained from reading my profile in the October 2004 issue of The Downsman concerning Private Phillips and in particular to my remarks concerning an engagement on October 21st with German infantry trying to exploit a break through the British lines in the vicinity of Haplegarde. For Corporal Messer the day ended in agony for at the height of the fighting he fell wounded with a bullet through his left thigh, though the diary entry for the 21st makes no reference to casualties sustained:

‘Wednesday. Enemy broke through the right of the Bde, but the Battn held on to its line. The line was still broken at dark, ordered to entrench a new position before Haplegarde. B Coy moved off to commence digging. Battn attacked about 6 p.m. and successfully beat off the enemy.’

‘Thursday. Enemy re-attacked fiercely about 2.30 a.m. and, surrounded our right (D Coy), the latter still held on. Attack beaten off about 3.30 a.m. At 4.10 a.m. the Battn withdrew and took up a new position SE from Haplegarde. Got into position just after daylight. Trenches very heavily shelled all day. The Germans lit ricks in rear of our lines and prevented our putting up wire entanglements.’

Evacuated immediately to Ambers in the care of 9th Field Ambulance, George Messer was transferred to the 11th General Hospital at Boulogne where between the 5th of November and the 18th of December, 1914, he continued his recovery before being discharged to an Infantry Base Depot at Rouen. It is not known if he was able to take any leave at home but on the 16th of January, 1915, a Saturday, he rejoined his unit at Kemmel in the Ypres salient, the diarist noting:

‘Saturday. A quiet day, a farm just in rear of Battn HQ took fire, and the enemy put some shrapnel over, presumably at the smoke. Relieved about 7 p.m. by 5th Fusiliers. 2 men killed, 1 man wounded. Returned to billets at Locre. Draft of 99 joined Battn.’

For the next eighteen months, Corporal Messer would have endured the full misery of the Western Front battlefield, much of his time being spent in the shell torn landscape of the Ypres salient where he would have taken part in the Second Battle of Ypres. For the 1st Battalion this action, which commenced on Thursday the 22nd of April, 1915, was spent in trenches in the vicinity of Elzenwalle, interspersed with brief periods out of line at Dickebusche. A perusal of unit diaries indicates that very heavy fighting took place around them though casualties to the battalion were light and it was not until the 5th of May that the diarist reports the death from sniper fire of Lance Corporal James Angell. The next day 2nd Lieutenant Walter Elvin Scott fell; mortally wounded (his second Christian name is incorrectly reported in the diary as Alfred). Along with Lance Corporal Angell he is buried in Voormezeele Enclosure No. 3 cemetery.

And so for George Messer the months passed by until the summer of 1916, when he found himself on the Somme. The 1st Battalion did not participate in that awful first day of battle (1st July, 1916) and it was not until the 4th of July, that serious action commenced and with it the first casualties. Fighting in an area known as the Leipzig Salient one soldier was killed and eleven were wounded, this light total being eclipsed the following day when 20 men died, 22 were reported missing (a further two were listed as missing believed killed) and 158 wounded, some very severely. So far, it seems, all deaths had been confined to the non-commissioned officers and soldiers, but on the 6th, the Battalion’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Sidney Brown was killed in action, as was Captain Arthur Hoare Hales. Several other officers were wounded and 24 hours later during a day of close quarter fighting no less than 219 men of the 1st Battalion became casualties. Amongst the officers who perished that day was Captain Robert Leavitt Knubley who was critically wounded after going forward at the height of a sustained enemy bombardment to supervise operations that were in the hands of two junior officers. That night, totally exhausted, the survivors withdrew from the forward trenches to the rear area where, on the 22nd, a draft of 111 other ranks arrived to help fill the depleted ranks. Even the rest areas were no safe haven; on the 12th, ten days prior to replacements arriving, a shell fell in D Company lines killing one man and injuring three others.

By the 24th of July, reasonably refreshed, the 1st Battalion was back in the trenches, this time near Hamel and it was here, two days later, that Corporal George Messer collapsed along with nineteen others as a result of a sustained gas attack. Evacuated to a casualty clearing station near Louvencourt his life slipped away that same day. He now lies in the nearby military cemetery where many of the 230 identified graves are the visible tributes to those who fell in this terrible conflict.

Bill Chorley