The Sorrow of the Moons

Henry Moon I think there's a Chinese saying that goes something like "May you never have sons in times of war". 
 
Walter and Anne Moon, of Western Road, Southborough, had four sons away fighting in the Great War. 
  
Henry, a Gunner in the 4th Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery, died, aged 22, on 2 June 1916. 
  
After he left St Peter's School at the top of Southborough Common, he had first worked locally as a telegraph messenger at Southborough Post Office, and the local press reported he was "the first member of the Hand and Sceptre Lodge of Oddfellows to give his life for his country".

He had been in Canada when war broke out, one of many young men who had left Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century, hoping to make a life for themselves in the Dominions, as they were known at the time. When he signed up in Toronto at the end of 1914, he gave his trade as Fixture Builder. In a letter to Mr and Mrs Moon, written on the day Henry (referred to as Harry) was injured, a Canadian chaplain wrote: "I know you will be very much disturbed and anxious to hear that Harry has been wounded.  He asked me to write and tell you about it, as he will not be able to write himself for some time. The Battery where Harry was, was heavily shelled today at noon, and Harry, unfortunately, was hit by a small splinter on the lower part of the chest on the right side.  Our Medical Officer was away when the word came to our Brigade Headquarters only a few hundred yards away. I got the Medical Sergeant, and we went over with a stretcher. We put a dressing on his wound and carried him on the stretcher down the road, where an ambulance and doctor met us. The doctor redressed his wound and sent him off to the Hospital, where I think they will operate to remove the splinter. He was very brave and bright, though he was suffering a good deal. He will probably be laid up for quite a while, but the doctors do not anticipate any danger."  But Henry died the following day in hospital, and was buried in the adjacent cemetery at Lijssenthoek, near Poperinge in Belgium. Walter Moon Henry's older brother Walter had signed up in September 1914 and was serving as a Lance Sergeant with the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in February 1916, when the local paper reported on Walter's close shave: "...home from the Front on leave ... his first experience under fire was at the Battle of Loos ... while walking through a wood he paused a moment to  speak to a Sergeant of the Canadians, and a German sniper fired at them. The bullet struck sideways on a pocket-book in Sergt Moon’s breast pocket, was deflected by the frame of a miniature in his pocket book, and wounded the Canadian in the lung.  Our representative was shown the pocket book and the miniature with the mark of the bullet. Sergt Moon is full of praise of the arrangements for the comfort and health of the men in the way of food, clothes and baths. He had only once been short of food, which was during the Battle of Loos, when it was impossible for the convoy  to come up owing to the heavy fire. They had then to depend on the emergency rations carried with them, and Sergt Moon says that that meal of “bully beef” and biscuits was the best and most welcome he had ever had." 
  
But Walter's luck didn't last - he died aged 23 on 4 July, a month after his brother Henry, several days after being wounded, and is buried in Heilly Station Cemetery, Mericourt-L'Abbe, in the Somme.   Charles Moon Mr & Mrs Moon's third son, Charles, worked before the War as a footman for the Nicholsons, of Bidborough Court, a local 'big house'. He joined up in August 1914, and in a letter to his mother in June 1915, while serving with the 6th Battalion of the Queen's Own (Royal West Kent Regiment), enclosed a card he had received from the Major-General commanding the 12th Division, on which he stated his pleasure at hearing how Corporal Moon (then Private) had distinguished himself by his conduct in the field. Charles had been given special leave earlier, in April because of his Military Medal.
John Moon Henry and Walter's younger brother John was employed after leaving school by Mr H Hemsley, bootmaker, of Crescent Road, Tunbridge Wells. He joined the Royal Naval Division in October 1915, a week after his 18th birthday, and was initially attached to the 5th Nelson Battalion in the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, “somewhere at sea”. He joined the Anson Battalion at Mudros, Turkey, and then served on the Western Front.

It is awful to imagine how desolate their parents must already have been feeling after the deaths of two sons in June and July, when the following month, on a Tuesday morning in August, Mrs Moon received a letter informing her that Charles had died on 14 August, aged 21. She had already had news of his wounding from Corporal Jenner, from High Brooms, who had been serving as a stretcher-bearer out in the Somme, and had picked up Charles, who had lost a leg, and carried him to the dressing-station.

What Mrs Moon was not to know until four days later was that her youngest son John had been killed in action on the same day that Charles had died. She heard the news in a letter from Lieut J Gilliland, OC “C” Company, Anson Battalion, BEF: “Dear Mrs Moon, I am awfully
sorry to have to write and tell you your son John was killed during a bombardment this afternoon. I know how terrible this news must be to you, but in your great grief it must be a consolation to you to know what a splendid soldier your son has proved. He joined us on the 22nd March, and we all very soon got to know his cheerful and manly disposition. It will console you, too, to know his death was instantaneous, and that he had no suffering. He will be remembered by his friends in “C” Company, who are very numerous."

Like so many of these endless letters home which weary officers were duty bound to write,  it may have tried to paint a kinder picture than the reality. One account  stated that John was killed by a rifle-grenade, and another that it was a German shell in the front trenches that brought about his death.
 
The local newspaper reported that "Mr Moon has been ill himself for some months, and is now in Bath Hospital, where Mrs Moon will have to travel to break this terrible news".
 
John's grave is in Tranchee de Mecknes  Cemetery, Aix-Noulette, Pas de Calais, and Charles was buried at Warloy-Baillon Communal Cemetery Extension, Somme, some 40 miles south 
west.
 
I walk past their former home in Western Road often, and wonder at how much sorrow there must have been within those walls in the following years, and sadly, how much grief is still felt in soldier's homes today, when bad news arrives from Afghanistan.
 
The Moons lost two nephews, Christopher Moon and William Moon, in the following years, and, in September 1944, another member of the extended family, Ronald , then serving with the Parachute Regiment, was to die in action, aged 23, in Holland. These, and the Moons of Western Road, are all commemorated on  Southborough War Memorial .
 
Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of World War One, who died in 2009, memorably said: "Why did we fight? The peace was settled round a table, so why the hell couldn't they do that at the start, without losing millions of men?"