Walter Mepham 1898-2017

WalterMepham Born March 14, 1898 Killed November 30, 1917, Cambrai, France. An auto-biographical Novel by M. Stow Dedication To the enduring memory of 7,048 officers and men of the forces of the British Empire who fell at the Battle of Cambrai, November 20¬¬–December 3, 1917, but have no known graves. Chapters Part One: Family Chapter 1: Why We Went to War Chapter 2: Father’s Family Chapter 3: Mother’s Family Chapter 4: Our Parents Meet Part Two: For or Against Chapter 5: Arthur Conan Doyle Chapter 6: Lord Bertrand (Bertie) Russell Chapter 7: Arthur Wells Chapter 8: Alfred Byfield Part Three: Sarajevo Chapter 9: The Assassination in Sarajevo Chapter 10: The Decision Is Made Chapter 11: France Chapter 12: Reports of War Chapter 13: The Cambrai Operation Chapter 14: At Flesquieres Chapter 15: The Boulon Woods Part Four: Louverval memorial, France, 14th March 1998 and November 30th 2017. Author’s Note This is the story of Walter and his elder brother, Harry Arthur Mepham, of London, England, researched and compiled from the records of the time by his maternal distant cousin, the author, Malcolm Stow. The idea for the story was prompted by a postcard found among the papers of the author’s late grandmother, Henrietta Wells, with the starkly precise dates of birth and death of Walter, killed at the First World War Battle of Cambrai. The story is embellished by selections from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s field reports, The British Campaign in France and Flanders (unpublished); and Bertrand Russell’s The Ethics of War (published 1915). These two literary combatants were contemporaneously implicated in the life of Walter, and Harry Arthur. From the Mepham family history in Sussex, England, where Conan Doyle lived and supported encampment for soldiers travelling to the Western Front in 1915; and to Holborn, London, where the Mephams lived and worked in 1914, and where Russell also lived at the time. Russell argued against conscription, and for a personal rational existential choice, in war, or pacifism. Both authors would have influenced Walter and Harry Arthur’s decisions to go to war; and, in Harry’s case, his refusal to return to the Somme battlefront, after 1917. The family stories are fictionalized around such known facts; and the Mepham brother’s likely discussions, and their own owned decisions, as to the outcome of those shared deliberations. What did it mean to fight a “good” war? For love of king and country, for purely personal pride? For bread on the table? For their parents Caroline Wells, of East London, and Mark Henry Mepham from Kent and Suffolk, England; and for their own family cousins, and their children, and grandchildren yet to be born. November 30th 1917. Cambrai, France Dear Harry Arthur, I know how much it grieved you to hear of my being lost. How Mother was. How she told you not to go back, and how all the emotion came down on you, and nearly killed you both. How, if Mother had lost us both, as well as Father, then her heart would have…Well, you know it wasn’t you who killed her; it was me. She knew. It was the dreaded question: Why did we all have to go, leaving her alone to tend wounded and dying soldiers—strangers—in our places? When Father went to war, in 1915, well, that was one thing. Perhaps to persuade us, and her, that he would die for us, and in our stead. He might not see his grandchildren himself, but Mother would. And that we—one of us, at least—would have a better chance of bringing children, our parent’s grandchildren, into the world and their being remembered in both Father’s, and Mother’s image. I don’t think they wanted both of us to go to the Great War. War. As I am the younger brother, Father went in my stead. But then we brothers did both go, and there was no stopping us. After you and Father went off full of gusto, not wishing but prepared to die. I was the insistent younger son wanting to follow in your footsteps. Prepared to die, to lie, too, about my age as Father did, younger not older lying, to join up. And then father, you, and then myself, to be sent abroad. Overseas for the first time in our lives. When I did eventually go, Mother must have felt deserted by all of us. But by me in particular. She knew there was no stopping me, and she kept her hurt to herself even when we were all together. Do you remember, Harry? When you were on leave during the zeppelin air raids on Croydon in 1916? It was then that I persuaded her to let me go, so that I could get back at those trying to kill us in our beds. By the time I was trained and set off later in 1916, the year you returned for leave, only for you to return again, to the second Battle of The Somme. That was the last time we saw each other, you know? Then, when news reached mother about my being lost at Cambrai, in 1917, you were home again. At the hospital, where mother was nursing the sick and injured and dying, perhaps, and she must have known I would not be coming back. She persuaded you not to return. To abscond from leave, to desert, didn’t she? Did you try medical grounds, or simply refuse to return? How could any of us be blamed? How could we feel disgust anymore, or hatred, or indifference now, or even some sympathy, perhaps. For those dressed up in self-serving political and religious conscientious objection, instead of the bloody uniform of war? They, the Refusers, they refused for the same reasons, in the end, that we did go in the first place: each of us to save ourselves, and our family’s future. The same reason you absconded, Harry, and Mother persuaded you to so do; that you and yours, would be the next of our line, if mine were not. For our family, Harry Arthur, you not only fought, but you found something in common with the no-conscription, white feather lot, the Peace Pledgers, didn’t you? As well as with the fighting brigades, saving our country from invasion, you, and now me, Harry, saving our own…wretched-souls…that is what they call the foot- soldiers out here ‘the poor bloody infantry’ you know? But most of all, for all of you. You, Harry Arthur, and mother found that my being missing, my uncertain death, although not glorious, would not be in vain. Father, believed his going in my stead, would not for any of us, to be in vain, To my brother, from your loving brother, Walter Mepham. Aldershot Army Training Camp, Hampshire, England, 1916. Part One: Family

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EarthCentre: The End of the Universe: New edition with photo-illustration plot summary references and text notes critically updated. EarthCentre: The End of the Universe. An Epic Drama. An Existential-Anthropic Odyssey A teleological eschatological mystery re-solved. An epic funfairgroundride through the EarthCentre Theme Park of the Past Present and Future...World-Mythology and Religion, Philosophy, Cosmology and The Earth and Human Sciences and the part of theology concerned with death, judgement, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind; meaning end and purpose, imposed by existential action. An Anthropic Odyssey: Being a topological themed mystery ride through: The Cosmos with dialogue and commentary to be spoken or read in parts at a smooth and rapid-pace and then again slower as an echo in memory and in voices and verses selected by the reader/speaker M.Stow M.Stow12 Copyright 2015 M. Stow12 All rights reserved. ISBN-13: 978-1491017357 ISBN-10: 149101735X Love and the gentle heart are one thing as the wise man puts it in his verse and each without the other would be dust as a rational soul would be without its reason. Dante: La Vita Nuova verse 20 My stuttering verse with its uncertain notes A shudder takes me: tear on tear entire The firm heart feels weakened and remote: What I possess seems far away from me And what is gone becomes reality. Goethe: Dedication from Faust. EarthCentre: The End of the Universe: 1.1. Departure (the LifeShip leaves Earth) 1.2. The-Past Excised. 1.3. Starship: Life-ship. 1.4. The Solar-system and the Inner and Outer Planets. 1.5. The Players of Games. 1.6. The Death of the-Sun. 1.7. Orions’ Arrow and the Afterlife. 1.8. Universal Galactic-Gallant. Summary/endnotes Part One: EarthCentre. 1.1. Departure (the LifeShip leaves Earth) -EarthCentres! -Welcome to: The End of the Universe… Irreversible temporal-turning terse determining-mentors’ Tilting wobbling toppling tipped-averse purposeful contemplator Glacial misty-gladed gazed glazed-over annual-seasonal circumpolar Sloped terr-aqueous medium-sized planet. Volcanic-vapourous pouting spouting coiling broiling boiling-eruption Crenellate causeway sweeping steeped peaked and troughed. Surging crashing salt-rock seas coughed and spluttered A-muttering material-vitality now kilometres-high. Stage-plates loosed no sooner risen Super-heated the stewing spewing skies. As loco-moting steeples’ stalking walking upright talking Swooshing swooping whooping trooping cloud-plateau Terraced-topped raised Terrible-Trees. Up-rooted as up-sprung as Autumnal-leaving Each of Us: now as over a blind-wall looming Zooming in-between emptiness Filling the un-living gloomy necessarily violate. In-violate as if held-in All Other’s hallowed halo’d-hands held onto Quake-shaking quailing-quagmire slovenly sludging Curmudgeonly bludgeoning exorably cravenly-waiting… Waving saving drowning dodging Inter-tidally rounding-out pitched switching Patched stringing stinging a striding-out. Way-sailing singular photo-tropic Solar-burst! Now! Each of Us!?? Toward the unfixed-facing lunar leering Leaning-over as coming in to land. The illuminating scribe as sidereal as quarter-sized. As quarter distanced from The Sun Dazzling-irresistibly within a hidden heat-force blistering listing En-flaming magnifying couched-louche slouched-unveiling… Shadowy-grey cygnet-supplicant occultation Transiting swanning grown-lovely. As lovingly verifyingly seductively-inclined… Masked-mouthed mounted haunted-nightly Starlight-dusting alarmingly charmingly Meant-blent metring. Mentoring dis-armingly Into so-many outward-bound Now opposital polar-outpourings. As of some sadness as regretful whim. Only now consequential wisdoms’ warnings As at the equatorial edges In the swim.