The Double Sacrifice

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JOHN WILLIAM SANDALL is, in many ways, representative of countless young men from rural Lincolnshire whose lives followed the steady rhythm of the seasons until the First World War shattered the familiar order of things.

He was a cousin of mine, and this is his story.

JOHN WAS BORN at Rippingale in 1883, the son of Edward John Sandall, an agricultural labourer from nearby Kirkby Underwood, and his wife Mary, who came from neighbouring Dowsby.

Like so many families across South Kesteven, the Sandalls earned their living from the land. Fields, meadows and farmyards formed the backdrop to John’s childhood, and his home village and its surrounds were the centre of a world that had changed little for generations.

John was eighteen years old when the Census of 31 March, 1901 was taken. It offers a brief glimpse of the young man beginning to make his own way in life.

The document shows him living at Brudenhall’s Lodge, Little Bytham in the household of farmer William Brudenhall. There John was employed as a horsekeeper.

As we have seen in previous posts in this series, it was demanding work that required long hours, skill and responsibility. Before tractors transformed British farming, horses were the engine of agriculture, and their care lay at the heart of every successful farm.

A decade later, the 1911 Census finds John, still a single man, back at Rippingale, living once more with his parents.

His occupation was recorded simply as ‘farm labourer,’ a description that scarcely conveys the variety of work such a life entailed. From dawn until dusk, the seasons dictated the day’s labour, and John’s future probably seemed as predictable as the fields he worked.

That future appeared brighter still when, on 5th November, 1912, John married Betsy Smith Dodsworth at Morton by Bourne.

Instead, less than two years later, Europe descended into war.

SOMETIME IN THE spring of 1917 John travelled to nearby Bourne, where he enlisted in the Lincolnshire Regiment. He was allocated service number 203642, serving initially with the 2/4th Battalion.

John’s surviving records contain one intriguing inconsistency. His Medal Roll records his service with the 2/4th Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment, while his Soldiers’ Effects Register lists him with the 8th Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment.

Yet his Lincolnshire service number belongs to the 4th Battalion allocation, and the battalion war diary confirms that the Lincolnshires and Leicesters were fighting side by side throughout the opening days of the German Spring Offensive.

Whether the Leicestershire entry resulted from an administrative error amid the chaos of March 1918 cannot now be known, but the available evidence strongly suggests that John remained a Lincolnshire soldier until his death.

BY THE SPRING of 1918, after years of costly fighting, Germany made one final attempt to break the deadlock on the Western Front.

Throughout February and into March 1918, John and the 4th Lincolnshires occupied the trenches east of Bullecourt. Although the sector remained comparatively quiet, the battalion diary reveals growing signs that something far larger was unfolding.

German movement behind the lines steadily increased, enemy sentries replaced soft caps with steel helmets, patrol activity intensified, and on 10 March a German deserter crossed into the British lines claiming that an attack was imminent.

Few could know precisely when it would come, but by mid-March the battalion understood that a major offensive was only a matter of time.

At 5.05 on the morning of 21 March the men at Mory Camp were awakened by the unmistakable sound of an immense artillery bombardment.

Breakfasts were abandoned, equipment hastily gathered and the battalion moved forward into reserve positions as the scale of the German assault gradually became apparent.

Under the cover of a dense morning fog, specially trained German Sturmtruppen (assault troops) had struck along a wide front. Using revolutionary infiltration tactics, they bypassed isolated strongpoints, penetrating deep into the British Fifth Army’s defences

At first the battle remained hidden by haze and distance, but by midday reports confirmed that the enemy had already broken through parts of the British line.

John was killed during the second day of the offensive, at a time when the 4th Lincolnshires found themselves fighting a desperate series of delaying actions around Vraucourt and Mory.

Forced to withdraw under intense artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire, the battalion repeatedly dug fresh defensive positions before being compelled to fall back once more as overwhelming numbers threatened both flanks.

The battalion diary notes:

‘Though the men were becoming very tired they fought every inch of the way and obeyed
all the orders of their Officers and N.C.Os in a most exemplary and cheerful manner.’

This simple sentence captures the desperate nature of those chaotic hours.

At was somewhere amid that confused withdrawal that John William Sandall was lost. His body was never recovered.

John has no known grave. Instead, his name is carved on the Arras Memorial, alongside almost 35,000 officers and men who fell in the Arras sector and whose final resting places were never identified.

Somewhere beneath the fields of northern France lies the place where his life ended, but the precise location has long since been lost beneath the landscape that the war itself transformed beyond recognition.

THE OFFICIAL RECORDS tell us that Betsy received John’s outstanding Army pay and War Gratuity, the routine administrative conclusion to a life cut short. Yet no ledger could measure what had been taken from her.

Their marriage had lasted barely five years, almost half of it overshadowed by war.

By the time of the 1921 Census, Betsy had returned to live with her father, John Dodsworth, at Carrdyke Farm, Morton, joining her brother Joseph, the farm foreman, and her sister Jane.

Both women were recorded simply as undertaking ‘Home Duties’, a quiet entry that hints at a future very different from the one she and John must once have imagined.

John’s death, however, was not the end of the Sandall family’s sacrifice.

WHILE JOHN’S NAME was being added to the growing list of Rippingale’s war dead, his younger brother Walter was still serving with the Machine Gun Corps in the Middle East, thousands of miles from the battlefields where John had fallen.

Today, John’s sacrifice is remembered on Rippingale’s war memorial. His name, etched in stone, appears on one side of the cross’s plinth along with the names of four others.

Among the names on the plinth’s opposing side is that of Walter, his brother.

Walter’s story follows this one.

Lest we forget — these names cut into a cold sandstone cross serve as a reminder that the Great War was measured not only in battles won and lost, but in families forever altered.

It was a time when ordinary men expected little more than honest work, home and family — until history demanded a price that proved immeasurably greater than any of them could have imagined.

Footnote

My thanks to Howard Sandall of Bourne, Lincolnshire, for kindly supplying the photograph of John in uniform. It became the definitive reference from which the canon images illustrating this post were created.