William Charles Apps

William Charles Apps was born on 9th December 1897 in Southwick, Hampshire, and baptised the following January. He grew up the son of William Charles Apps and Anne A. Apps in a rural landscape of farms and small communities, later living at Park Farm Cottages in Hambledon. Like many village boys of the late Victorian and Edwardian countryside, his early life would have been practical and local – work, family and parish life marking the passing of the years rather than travel or adventure. When war came in 1914 he was still too young to serve, and nothing in those early years suggested he would spend his adulthood on the battlefields of France.

By the time he reached military age Britain had suffered enormous losses and conscription was drawing in his generation. He joined the Royal Field Artillery as Gunner 109858 in “A” Battery, 295th Brigade. The work of an artillery gunner was exhausting and dangerous but rarely dramatic: hauling shells weighing as much as a man could carry, preparing fuses, maintaining guns and firing repeatedly in mud, cold and darkness. Gun positions were fixed and carefully plotted by the enemy, so the men lived under constant threat from counter-battery fire. Their war was one of endurance -long hours at the guns, interrupted by sudden bombardments.

In the winter of 1917-1918 his battery served in the Somme-Arras sector near Hébuterne and Fonquevillers, ground already devastated by earlier battles. Here the fighting was not defined by advances but by continual artillery duels. Night bombardments frequently mixed high explosive and gas shells, aimed deliberately at gun crews who had to keep firing even while wearing respirators. War diaries from the sector describe shells falling among battery positions in darkness and mist, men continuing to fire defensive barrages while fumes drifted across the gun pits, and soldiers appearing unharmed at first but reporting sick hours or days later. On 24th January 1918, William returned to England to be hospitalised at Catterick Military Hospital after gas exposure, remaining under treatment until 5th February.

Such cases were common: a soldier might survive the initial attack yet suffer lasting damage to lungs and strength. He returned to duty during the most dangerous period of the war’s final year. After the German Spring Offensive the line stabilised but fighting remained constant – daily shelling, harassing fire and sudden destruction of gun positions. There was no single famous battle attached to his death. In the early hours of June 17th 1918, aged twenty, he was killed in this continuing artillery warfare.

His body was never recovered or could not be identified, a frequent fate for artillery crews struck directly at their guns. Instead his name is carved on the Pozières Memorial on the Somme among thousands lost during the battles of 1918. Closer to home, his loss was also marked in the community where he had lived: his name appears on the Hambledon Village War Memorial, returning him in memory to the village from which he had gone to war. His story reflects the experience of many soldiers whose war left little dramatic record: not a charge across open ground, but months of labour, noise and exposure, followed by a sudden absence. The memorial bearing his name stands in place of a burial, marking a life that passed from an English village into the vast, impersonal destruction of the Western Front, and never returned.