They say dead men can't talk, and except for the very few who have recently slipped into history, the veterans voices have long been silent. It's all very well re-constructing someone's story from papers records but personal testimony adds a whole new dimension. Some of us may have letters and diaries from the period to bring things to life, and for a few their relatives wrote books.

In my case, I just have the scraps of hand me down tales of the family menfolk who served in the Great War. My grandfather died when I was just 5, and of his several cousins who served, well I didn't even know of their existence until it was too late. Take Reuben Jesse Burge, for example. He had volunteered with his older brother Samuel on 6th September 1914 at Kingston. Reuben survived the war, born in 1897, he lived until 1984, and as it turned out spent much of his later years at an address quite near to what was my own family home at the time. Even if we had met, would he have spoken of the war to me?

It's a strange coincidence that in the exact year that Reuben died, a young Paul Nixon conducted an interview with Harold Shephard who was then 88 years old, just one year older than Reuben would have been. Harold Shephard had served with the 5th Leicesters, joining “B” company in 1911, a fact born out by his original army number of 1457. Who knows which of the Ibstock men could have rubbed shoulders with Harold?

Paul Nixon has published his the transcript of his interview with Harold, along with many others, at http://worldwar1veterans.blogspot.com/2009/11/2630111-pte-harold-shephard-5th.html I would urge anyone to read it.

Harold recalls events that the Ibstock men who served in the same battalion must have lived through. He was wounded in 1915, and gassed and wounded again in 1917. Something he attributes to his ill-health in his later years. He talks of meagre rations, crown and anchor, blasted Ypres and the desert like Somme, and much else. Of the end of the war he has this to say:

Harold had effectively cheated himself out of any pension.