Smith, Harold

Hull Pals Memorial Post. PRIVATE HAROLD SMITH 10/1251. Born 1894, the eighth of eleven children, to William and Rose Smith of 20 Cherry Tree Lane, Beverley. Harold was a Labourer before the war. He enlisted at Hull City Hall on 10th April 1915 and joined the battalion during their training throughout 1915. He sailed for Egypt that December and helped protect the Suez Canal from the Turks until the following March when the Pals were posted to the trenches of France. Harold was a veteran of those awful days in the autumn of 1916 on the Somme, and the attack on Oppy Wood the following May during the Battle of Arras and will have seen so many of those he had trained alongside fall prey to shelling and machine guns. Being surrounded by death may have hardened him, or it may have crushed his spirit, it is hard to say from this distance and who knows really what passes through the mind of another? What I can tell you is that Harold was fatally injured during the German Spring Offensive and left behind as the British withdrew falling prisoner to the advancing enemy in whose hands he died on 13th April 1918. He received a proper burial on the battlefield, possibly by one of his own comrades he himself taken prisoner and put to work in the burial parties. After the Armistice the body of Harold Smith was exhumed and relocated in Outtersteene Communal Cemetery Extension, Bailleul. He was 24 years old.