FRAMLINGHAM, England — This little market town 14 miles from the North Sea is an unlikely place to discover the meaning of World War I, whose end at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is the reason Congress originally set Veterans Day — originally known as Armistice Day — for Nov. 11.
With a population a wee bit more than 400 and a soaring 12th-century castle built by an early earl of Norfolk, this is really a place to contemplate the Norman Conquest (the castle was owned by a series of some of the most powerful nobles of the Middle Ages), consider the life of Mary Tudor (a daughter of Henry VIII who became England’s first ruling queen), and examine an 18th-century workhouse (where the poor toiled and lived, neither happily nor healthily).
This town — tiny, remote, peaceful — did not escape the wars and worries of modern times. During World War II, German bombs fell in 1940 and 1942, a Home Guard regiment was formed, and American GIs preparing for D-Day strolled its streets. But the greatest impact of the 20th century came here, as it did for so many small towns like it in England, in the conflict of 1914 to 1918.
Here the townspeople reckoned that the war, which began in August, would be over by Christmas. Here Capt. E.P. Clarke, part of a prominent family of corn merchants, stood at the command of 93 Territorials from the Framlingham Company of the Fourth Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment.
Here the town rallied to provide financial assistance to families of the men who departed for battle in the trenches of France.
Here the town mourned the death of Arthur Smith, who perished when his submarine struck a mine.
Here a man named William (Sonny) Moore was dispatched to Russia as part of a division known as the Czar’s British Squadron. Here five families lost two sons; one of the double losses came within a terrible 48 hours.
Here Ernest Meadows is remembered for finding shelter in a shell hole after being wounded in both thighs and his stomach, and remaining there for 10 hours for fear of being shot in daylight. He died in 1918, two years after his brother, Reuben, was killed.
All this is commemorated in a corner of Framlingham Castle, a memorial that is the source of the accounts in this column, a commemoration to 20th-century warriors in a place that was the setting of long-forgotten battles nearly a century ago.
“From our perspective 100 years later,” according to a legend in the commemoration, “it is difficult to comprehend how our small town could come to terms with such devastating changes to its social fabric.”
Those changes came in large measure with the wartime service of about 1,000 residents of this community who went off to war, 142 of whom did not come back, and of the thousands who stayed behind, worried and weary and, for months on end, without word of how their sons and brothers were faring in a faraway battlefield, where the term “trench” modified words such as “warfare,” “foot,” and “fever,” and where dysentery and cholera were as deadly as enemy bullets.
Ernest Dring, who fought in Mesopotamia and whose death is commemorated in a memorial in Tehran, was one of those victims of dysentery. “There is no need to worry about me at all. I shall come back alright,” he wrote his mother in 1917. “All you have to do is to take care of yourself and keep my bed made ready.”
A year before he died, Herbert Bonney described to his mother how the German forces surged against the British. “They came over in great hordes, about 750,000 of them against about 6,000 only of ours,” he said. “It was a terrible time I can assure you, but thank God he delivered us; it was a baptism of fire and an awful time it was.”
Charles Bridges wrote home describing standing in mud up to his behind in a trench. “It is impossible for those who haven’t experienced it to realize what it’s like.” He died of complications from tuberculosis just after the armistice. Lance Cpl. Arthur Wilson was at the Somme in 1916 and was killed in September of that year. He was one of the few Somme veterans with a known grave.
Three members of the Carley family fought in the war; only two survived. One of the Carleys who came back was Tom, who fought in the British Flying Services, which was filled by men who were drawn by posters urging them to join the Royal Air Force “and share their honor and glory.” Part of the appeal: “If you join the Royal Air Force voluntarily, you cannot be transferred to the Army or Navy without your own consent.” One of those who joined was Harry Carr, 17 at the time of his enlistment. He served as an aero-engine fitter.
David George Kerridge also enlisted at 17 and two years later was catapulted into a crater that also held a German soldier, whom Kerridge credited for saving his life. He later was known around town as the one-armed postman.
The one word missing from this commemoration is “American,” an omission of mention of the doughboys who joined the fight in 1917. “We wouldn’t have done it — won both world wars — without you Americans,” Terry Gilder, a steward on duty when I visited, told me. “Both wars would have lasted longer. You can’t imagine the culture shock of someone from Missouri finding himself fighting in France.”
One of those someones was Harry Truman, who commanded Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery in France. It was a transformative experience for the one-time farmer from Independence, Mo. “I’ve been very badly frightened several times in my life,” he recalled later, “and the morning of July 11, 1918, when I took over that battery, was one of those times.”
In France he learned when to follow orders and, consequently, when to ignore them. He discovered the courage and strength that had been hidden within him. He matured, emerging from the war a different man. “My whole political career,” he said, “is based on my war service and war associates.”
War is humankind’s greatest change agent. It changes borders, politics, people — and communities. The war that changed Truman also changed Framlingham.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
