THE SUMMER BUILD-UP TO THE STORM Trench warfare, live and let live? MAY – SEPTEMBER 1915
Wallace Morgan was one of the U.S. War Department’s eight war artists – his 1918 drawing could have come from any year in the war.
Campaigns frequently took place later than planned because they were so infernally complicated and unpredictable to organise. So the spring and summer passed on the British
Sector of the Western Front whilst the forces were still being marshalled for the next earnestly hoped-for war-winning offensive.
The Price Paid by the Chapman Family – three bright young men who died in three consecutive years Brothers John Theophilus (May 1915) and Hubert Frank (1917) and their cousin Arthur Donald (July 1916) Both families also had sons who fought in and survived the war, which must have further added to their parents’ anxieties.
John and Hubert’s surviving brother Harold had a distinguished military and academic career. Arthur Donald’s brother Albert also survived the war and gained a commission in the Machine Gun Corps becoming a captain then a major. Arthur Donald’s wife, Lizzie, never remarried and died in Leicester aged 63. 46
Waiting for the next big offensive, which turned out to be the Battle of Loos, were the 5th Leicesters at Mount Kemmel, a bend just below the Ypres salient, from where Capt. Hills wrote home: “We had a new bit of line… only about 25 yds from the Germans at one corner & got fired at from almost every possible point all round. Our 2nd in command of D Company got shot through the brain but is still alive & doing well.” He didn’t do well. It was almost certainly Capt. John Chapman out with a sniping party, shot through his binoculars whilst reconnoitring the enemy’s position.