Other Information:Pte Reginald Brookes Butt volunteered for the army on the 4th September 1914, aged 16. In August 1915, he went to Gallipoli with the Isle of Wight Rifles (1/8th Hampshire Regiment) as part of the 54th Division. He was invalided off Gallipoli with frost bite and typhoid at the end of 1915 and was re-mustered into the 8th Division sometime in 1916. One night in August 1917, he was in the Ypres Salient acting as a stretcher-bearer when he was hit by a German shell which shattered his left thigh. Reginald told his son that he and other bearers (there may have been as many as four or six because of the mud) were detailed to go out and pick-up wounded around about 24.0hrs. Due to the nature of the battlefield, they followed a disused railway embankment. They had just put a wounded man onto the stretcher and hoisted it up on to their shoulders when a German barrage opened-up. He said that the first shell landed with a screaming noise close behind him and exploded with much force making him flinch and nearly let go of the stretcher and then another one quickly followed and exploded further away, but he seemed to miss his footing and slid down into a shell-hole full of water. He then realised that he had been hit. A shell fragment had taken a piece out of the back of his right thigh and gone straight through his left, smashing the femur and severing the femoral artery. The shelling was intense and the other bearers said they would come back for him, which they did. He always said that the embankment saved his life, for they would never have found him otherwise. He was taken back to the trenches and dealt with immediately by a doctor and then taken to Poperinghe to a Casualty Clearing Station. [Information and photo kindly provided by Reginald’s son]
|