World War I Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  Lloyd would have liked to get home as soon as possible, but by December he had been told that he was going to be staying in France “until things are definitely settled.” On Christmas Day 1918, he opened a box Mary had sent him and was delighted to find pictures of her and his mother, some talcum powder, toothpaste, and Hershey’s candies, as well as gifts from the rest of the family. For Christmas dinner in the mess they had, “roast pork, mashed potatoes, gravy, turnips, olives, pie, coffee, and bread”—a veritable feast.

  In May 1919, Lloyd was sent back to the US and he wrote to Mary, “Home at last and now what is needed to make me the happiest man ever in Sam’s army is to meet you and Mother.”

  On January 10, Lloyd wrote that they had spent seven days’ leave in the town of Commercy, in the Meuse, and noted that there were “numerous pretty, well-dressed girls” there. He told Mary that some of the boys had “strayed” but that he had not because he knew he had a girl back home who was “true and faithful.” He sent her gifts of French perfume and a pretty vase, which delighted her, and wrote that he had been collecting souvenirs of war, including a German Iron Cross.

  The final weeks and months dragged by and it was April 1919 when Lloyd’s unit finally sailed home and made their way to Camp Funston in Kansas. On May 2, he found out over breakfast that he was getting his discharge and was able to send a telegram to tell Mary, adding the news that he had just been promoted to sergeant.

  A Long Engagement

  Right after his discharge, Lloyd traveled to Kansas City to be reunited with his sweetheart, who had written to him faithfully and loyally right through the war. Having stuck by him, though, Mary was expecting a proposal of marriage on his return and when it was not forthcoming, she burst into tears one evening, then wrote him a very hurt letter. “I am just a big blundering idiot,” he replied. He explained to her that he had not given her a ring before heading off to war in case he did not return, and promised that he would give her one the very next time he saw her. However, there was a condition: he couldn’t actually marry her “until I can at least have a possibility of the home that you deserve.”

  Lloyd went back to work on his parents’ farm that summer, then in September 1919 he enrolled at Gem City Business College in Quincy, Illinois. The school was forced to close during a coal strike, so he came back to work for Mary’s father in a company that manufactured furniture for banks, then in a business that did some house building. Finally he married Mary on September 15, 1920, at her parents’ home in Kansas City after what amounted to a seven-year courtship. As was the custom of the day, she gave up her job at the Kansas City News Service to be a homemaker, and he took over his parents’ farm for a time before going to work for the US post office.

  There were financial lean periods over the years, but Lloyd and Mary were blessed with eight children—five boys and three girls. Tragedy struck in February 1944 when their eldest son Warren was killed while piloting a B-25 bomber over Greece during the Second World War. The other children grew up and settled in California or Arizona, so Mary and Lloyd headed out to California after Lloyd’s retirement to be near enough to spoil their grandchildren.

  It took Lloyd a long time to get around to marrying the girl he had met back in high school, and he was very lucky that she waited for him. Mary was an attractive, strong-minded girl who could easily have found someone else. But in Lloyd’s opinion, through all the corresponding they were forced to do in their courtship they “found a deeper love” than they might otherwise have enjoyed, and maybe that was the secret to their long and happy marriage.

  Lloyd and Mary, c. 1924, with two of their sons, John and Warren. Warren, their eldest boy, would be killed in February 1944 while serving as a pilot in the Second World War.

  Jack & Adrienne

  FOX

  Married: November 24, 1919

  The border patrol between France and Belgium in Le Bizet. Leon Dumortier, Adrienne’s father, is the man in a cap standing to the right of the doorway.

  A brochure for a Thomas Cook battlefield tour in 1926. By then the war cemeteries had been cleaned up, but those who rushed out in 1919 saw some appalling sights.

  John “Jack” Thomas Frederick Fox

  BELGIAN

  May 7, 1891

  Rank & regiment: Private, Royal Artillery Regiment

  Adrienne Marie Dumortier

  BELGIAN

  October 23, 1898

  War work: Munitions factory worker

  Adrienne (seated front) and Rachel (standing behind her) with their sisters Yvonne, Alida, and Irma, and brothers Gaston and Maurice. This image was taken in Hazebrouck in 1919/20, after the family’s return from the South of France.

  Jack with the Royal Artillery at Dover Barracks in 1915 after having been shipped back from Hong Kong. He is in the second row down, third from the left.

  Close to the war’s end, Jack Fox fell in love with a pretty young Flemish girl called Rachel Dumortier. He wanted to marry her, but when her family found out about their affair they insisted he marry her elder sister Adrienne instead.

  Jack was a shy, quiet lad who grew up in the village of Saxilby six miles west of Lincoln, England. His father died when he was ten and his mother got married again, to a local man who, like Jack’s dad, worked as a farm laborer. There wasn’t any other work to be had in the area so just before his eighteenth birthday, in 1909, Jack volunteered for the Royal Artillery in order to learn some skills and earn a living. He did his basic training at Dover Castle, where he learned from the start about the rigors of military life after he was reprimanded because his cap wasn’t straight. In 1912 he was sent out to Hong Kong as part of a garrison defending the British colonial territory. He enjoyed the exotic culture there, buying himself some enameled vases with Chinese engravings and an imitation dagger. In 1914 and early 1915, the men listened with alarm to news reports as war was declared in Europe and the British Expeditionary Force suffered early setbacks. They knew they would inevitably become part of the fighting and, sure enough, in June 1915 they were shipped back, arriving in Northern France in December 1915.

  A dutiful son, Jack had this picture taken at a photographer’s studio in France to send back to his mother in Lincoln.

  Jack was first attached to the 41st Siege Battery, composed half of regulars from Hong Kong and Singapore and half of territorials from Durham. His job was loading and firing howitzers, a heavy kind of supergun that fired high-explosive shells, based on the northern edge of the Western Front, around Ypres, Arras, and the Somme. By 1917 he had been moved to the 63rd Siege Battery and was firing huge 12-inch howitzers mounted on carriages and moved around on railway tracks, which took a long time to dismantle and reposition. It was noisy, dangerous work because the Germans frequently tried to target the teams behind these heavy field guns. Jack, however, was lucky enough to survive the war unscathed.

  ARTILLERY IN TRENCH WARFARE

  When it became clear in 1915 that the war was going to be relatively static, mainly taking place in trenches, the weaponry changed from light field guns, which couldn’t fire heavy-enough shells to be effective against well-fortified trenches, to heavier guns like the howitzer. The German Army’s “Big Bertha” was a particularly heavy howitzer, firing high-caliber shells at a steep trajectory that caused maximum destruction on the ground. At first howitzers were pulled into position by teams of horses, but by the final months of the war these had been replaced by tractors. The railway howitzers Jack Fox operated first came into use in March 1916. Tanks were also developed in which men could travel across no-man’s-land; first used in the Battle of the Somme in September 1916, they achieved more success at Cambrai in November 1917 and Amiens in 1918. Poor communications at the Front meant there were frequent instances of casualties from so-called friendly fire from these new heavy weapons.

  A 12-inch howitzer (see here) and an 8-inch one (see here) being fired on the Western Front. They had to be anchored in the ground with tons of earth to counteract the kick they g
ave when fired.

  In late 1918 Jack was in the vicinity of Ypres, a town that had once been home to 20,000 people. As the northernmost point of the Western Front, bulging out into German-held territory, it had been fiercely fought over. The Allies only hung on to it at a cost of 25,000 soldiers and untold numbers of civilians. The Gothic cathedral and 13th-century Cloth Hall were in ruins, and barely a building was left standing. Rats scurried among jagged piles of rubble and fractured trees stood out in relief against the sky. It was against this background that Jack met Rachel Dumortier and their doomed attachment began.

  La Poudrière

  The Dumortier family lived in Dikkebusch, a small village near Ypres, and worked in the transportation business, taking farmers’ produce to market by horse and cart. They stayed in the area during the First Battle of Ypres in October and November 1914, during which British forces retook the town that they referred to as “Wipers,” which was easier to pronounce than the French name. After that they dug trenches around the 17th-century ramparts by the Menin Gate, from which they could venture forth to attack the German lines surrounding them on three sides. Food soon became scarce, but the Dumortiers stayed on during the Second Battle of Ypres in April to May 1915, when the German forces released chlorine gas. It must have been terrifying as the huge cloud drifted across the area, causing those caught up in it to cough and choke, with streaming eyes and burning throats. There was constant bombardment from the heavy weapons, day and night, and many citizens fled to stay with family elsewhere, but the Dumortiers had nowhere else to go at that time.

  This iconic image of the devastated town of Ypres, taken in January 1917, shows St Martin’s Church and the Cloth Hall in ruins.

  The Belgian royal family were instrumental in creating a scheme whereby Belgian citizens were evacuated to Bergerac in the South of France in late 1915 and early 1916. A large gunpowder plant called La Poudrière had been established on the River Dordogne, complete with temporary wooden housing, a school, and a 700-bed hospital. There were communal dining rooms for the 8,000 staff, markets where they could buy food, and daycare centers for preschool children. Unable to face another winter of freezing cold, food shortages, and constant shelling, not to mention the threat of more poison-gas attacks, the Dumortiers traveled south by train in December 1915 and were allocated a house in Bergerac, within the factory complex. The two eldest girls, seventeen-year-old Adrienne and sixteen-year-old Rachel, started work at the factory, where their job was to stuff gunpowder into shell casings. From time to time there were loud explosions as shells were tested on a nearby firing range. It can’t have been pleasant work for the teenage girls, but it was certainly a valuable contribution to the war effort as La Poudrière was soon producing 10 tons of gunpowder a day.

  Adrienne (left) along with some friends at La Poudrière, the munitions factory where she worked in Bergerac. None of them wore face masks despite the fact that they were handling gunpowder..

  Adrienne’s parents had a large family, with five girls and three boys. They all made new friends in Bergerac, but were fiercely homesick for Dikkebusch and hoped against hope that their house and possessions would have survived the fighting. It was not to be. When they returned in the fall of 1918 they found the area flattened and anything they had left behind gone. In the fields there were rotting corpses. Few amenities survived. At a clearing station in Hazebrouck, the Dumortiers were allocated a house in which they could live during the rebuilding of Ypres and its infrastructure.

  Jack working in Bandaghem Cemetery, on the road between Poperinghe and Ypres, 1919. He took great pride in his work.

  Meanwhile Jack Fox, still with a year of his ten-year military service to complete, volunteered to help give proper burials to all the soldiers who lay in the ground where they had fallen, often without so much as a cross to mark the spot. A Chinese labor force had been hired to perform the grisly task of “battlefield clearance.” This meant they had to pick up body parts and put them in sacks, while looking for any marks or possessions by which the soldier might be identified. They also searched for the telltale signs of a grave just below the surface: grass that was unnaturally green, greenish-black puddles in shell holes that indicated the liquefaction of underlying tissues, or small bones brought to the surface by rats.

  Jack’s first job was at Bandeghem, a cemetery attached to a field hospital. There had been no time, materials, or manpower to make coffins, so bodies were buried in the bloodstained sheets the men had died in, and it was Jack’s job to tidy up, mark, and catalog their graves. It was grim work, but he felt a huge debt of gratitude to these men who had given their lives and he wanted to honor them. Only by a fluke was he still alive while they had perished. He lived in a mobile van with a friend, working as long as there was daylight and cycling to nearby towns to find food and company in the evenings. One evening, at a social club in Hazebrouck, he met Rachel Dumortier, who had found work as a spinner in a textile factory, and her company was a welcome respite from the horror of his day job. Rachel was very pretty and although she only spoke Flemish and French while he spoke only English, they soon fell for each other. Communicating through sign language and the odd words they picked up, the two grew very attached to each other and, according to some family members, began a passionate romance.

  The two grew very attached to each other and began a passionate romance.

  Laying Down the Law

  In early 1919 Jack went home on leave to visit his mother, who now lived in Newark-on-Trent, and he sent a card back to Rachel in Hazebrouck, written in painstaking French, probably with the help of a friend: “It is my desire to come back quickly,” he wrote. She had asked him to bring her a dress and he said he didn’t know which style she meant, but wrote, “You remain very pretty forever . . . hope you are very content.” When he came back, Rachel took Jack home to introduce him to her family, who immediately objected to the relationship. He was twenty-seven and, in the family’s opinion, too old for the nineteen-year-old Rachel. Besides, according to tradition the eldest daughter of the family must be married first. The Dumortiers informed Jack in no uncertain terms that he had to marry Adrienne, who was two years older. Plump, with strong features and a domineering nature, she was not nearly as appealing as her younger sister.

  Jack was inexperienced with women—Rachel was probably his first girlfriend—so he didn’t know what to do when faced with the pressure from this huge extended family. He loved Rachel, but everyone was insisting that he do the right thing, to the extent that he was told he would bring shame on the family if he did not concur. At last he caved in and on November 24, 1919, he married Adrienne in a ceremony at Hazebrouck’s town hall. Rachel attended, putting a brave face on her heartache and disappointment. So poor was Jack’s grasp of Flemish that a translator had to be brought in to translate the wedding vows for him. None of his English family was able to travel over for the ceremony; if they had, perhaps they might have talked him out of it.

  The wedding of Adrienne and Jack on November 24, 1919. Rachel is standing behind Adrienne, looking glum but resigned, and their three younger sisters sit in front. None of Jack’s family were present.

  At last he caved in and on November 24, 1919 he married Adrienne …

  Jack and Adrienne moved into a white wooden hut in Dikkebusch, constructed from prefabricated kits brought over from England; they used packing cases for furniture. His army service came to an end, but he still had a period of four years as a reservist and applied for a post with the Imperial War Graves Commission formed in 1919 so that he could continue tending the graveyards in the area. In November 1920, Jack and Adrienne’s first child was born—a girl they called Mariejeanne—followed a year later by a stillborn boy. Adrienne always believed the boy’s death was caused by the toxic effects of the gunpowder she had inhaled while working in La Poudrière. They had worn overalls and headscarves, but were never given facemasks to protect them from the dangerous chemicals they handled.

  On January 4, 192
1, there was a further tragedy in the Dumortier family when Rachel suddenly passed away. She’d been hit on the side of the head by a snowball containing a concealed stone and had died of a brain injury. Jack and Adrienne were devastated by the sudden and shocking loss, with Jack mourning the vivacious girl he had loved so dearly. Later that year, he and Adrienne moved to a house on the Chausée de Bruges in Ypres, where they had three more daughters, followed in 1935 by twin boys, one of whom was deprived of oxygen during birth and died the following year. For the rest of her life, Adrienne would carry a picture of his little white coffin wherever she went. A pall of sadness hung over their married life.

  There was a thriving British community in the Ypres area, associated with the War Graves Commission, and a British church and school were established, as well as a cricket team. Jack was a kindly father who never raised a hand to his little ones, and he taught at the Anglican Sunday school, bringing up his children in the Anglican faith although their mother was Catholic. The Fox family spoke English at home but Adrienne’s accent was described as sounding “like broken Welsh,” and when she was cross with her children she would tell them off in Flemish. The Dumortier children received a good education and lived comfortably because Jack’s salary was paid in sterling at a time when the exchange rate was favorable, but the marriage was strained. Adrienne was an argumentative woman and Jack, who did not like quarreling, would often retort during arguments, “You are a nail in my coffin.” It was a strange kind of life, in a patriotic British enclave right in the heart of Belgian territory surrounded by cemeteries and memorials to the dead.