The individual stories of their passing are an indictment of war because many who answered the call to fight at the behest of politicians knew little of the circumstances that had taken them to the front and this tale of a Bourne lad who died exactly 100 years ago is typical of the 17 million men who never came back, not only from Britain, but also from Germany and thirty other countries.

The Barsby family were well-known in Bourne, fifteen of them being buried in the town cemetery between 1861 and 1961, among them John Edward Barsby, a baker, and his wife Ada. When war broke out in1914, the couple had been married for twenty years and had three children, a daughter Ethel (1896), and two sons, Percy Victor (1898) and Thomas (1900), and were living at number 69 West Street.

Percy was among several local lads swept up in the jingoism of the time and who answered the patriotic call to join up, enlisting with the 5th Battalion, the Lincolnshire Regiment, and by Christmas 1916 had been sent to the front where he was injured, subsequently spending several weeks in hospital. But he was soon sent back into action and facing more danger in the fierce fighting and on April 25th, he was mortally wounded by a bursting shell during a spring offensive known as the Battle of Arras, a campaign which lasted for 39 days and had a particularly high daily casualty rate. He was nineteen years old.

Back home, his parents knew little of the fighting or the conditions in which their son was serving, their information confined to sanitised newspaper reports and censored letters home, but during November and December 1916, they had been able to find out for themselves what was actually happening at the front when dramatic film taken during the Battle of the Somme was given several public showings by the Bourne Electric Theatre Company.

So many people from the town and surrounding villages flocked to see the film at the Corn Exchange, especially those with relatives and friends serving at the front, that the hall was packed for each showing and additional seating was installed to cope with the crowds. The flickering silent images on the screen were the first actual pictures of the war to be seen in Bourne, certainly of the mud and blood of the trenches, and as a result, the audience was stunned into total silence and many were moved to tears.

This then would be uppermost in the minds of Percy’s parents when an official letter arrived, an ominous indication of bad news and so it proved because it contained a military notification of their son’s death, a traumatic moment which was subsequently reported by a local newspaper on 8th May 1917: “On Thursday last, Mr and Mrs J Barsby, West St, Bourne, received a letter from an officer of the Lincolnshire Regiment to which their son was attached containing the sad tidings that he had been killed in action, having been killed by an explosion from a shell and died whilst being taken to the dressing station. The officer adds that they all sympathise with the parents in their loss, but hoped that the fact that he did not suffer, for he did not regain consciousness, would help to lighten their trouble.”

Private Barsby was subsequently buried in the Maroc British Cemetery at Grenay, Pas de Calais, France, and his death is recorded on the War Memorial in South Street. He is also remembered by his family, those descendants who came after and have tried to find out more about how he died.

This is the story of one soldier from Bourne who lost his life during the conflict but we should remember that of the estimated 250 men who left this town to go to war, 134 are known to have died at a time when the population was only 4,300 [1911 census] and so most people would have had a connection with at least one of them.

The war and its aftermath produced a wealth of literature, particularly poems but there was also a rich outpouring of plays and novels and ironically one of the most famous of these to chronicle the terror of the trenches was written here in Bourne during the years that followed by the Australian author Frederick Manning (1882-1935).

He had served in France and survived the Somme to write Her Privates We while staying as a paying guest at the Burghley Arms [then known as the Bull Hotel] although only a few people ever knew he was here yet his book with its hero named Private Bourne is now acclaimed as a masterpiece in evoking the day to day life in the trenches experienced by soldiers such as Percy Barsby.

The greatest of the poets was undoubtedly Wilfred Owen whose work has become one of the most damming indictments of war ever written and after describing his agonising experiences of seeing death in the front line, summed up his feelings with these evocative lines:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The Old Lie; Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria mori.
(It is sweet and right to die for your country.)

When the Armistice came at 11 am on Monday 11th November 1918, people throughout the world rejoiced as they were told by the politicians that this had been the war to end all wars but they were wrong.