Summers, Herbert

BORN COTTINGHAM 1896. LIVED IN HULL. SON OF SAMUEL & SARAH, OF 78, KINGS STREET, COTTINGHAM. LISTED ON THE COTTINGHAM WW1 MEMORIAL.
Hull Pals Memorial Post. PRIVATE HERBERT SUMMERS 10/677. Born 1897, the youngest of two children and only son of Samuel and Sarah Summers of 78 King Street, Cottingham. Herbert was a Butcher’s Assistant before the war, but rushed to enlist in the heady days of September 1914 when the war was still a great adventure. A member of “B” Company and one of the original Pals, he served in Egypt and on the Somme before being killed in action on 3rd May 1917 during the fighting for Oppy Wood. He is buried at Orchard Dump Cemetery, Arleux-en-Gohelle. He was 21 years old. Barrie Barnes writes movingly of the individual soldier’s experience of war: “What we see in retrospect as one event, like The Battle of Arras, the soldier was only aware of as his own personal experience and a fast-moving show of highlights interspersed with high tension and the fear of death, mutilation and hand-to-hand fighting. The journey through battle for the individual was a series of local actions and Pal’s faces appearing and disappearing in the fog of war, thick smoke, isolation, terrific noise that few human voices could be heard through and the burst of star shells adding an unreal lighting effect to the whole scene. All of this was burnt into the soldier’s memory for the rest of his life.”