The final tale of Pelsall and the Guards concerns Edward Edgerton who was Pelsall-born but lived in Harden Road, Bloxwich and worked for Proffitt & Sons of Queen Street, Walsall. Edgerton had volunteered in Darlaston for the Royal Army Medical Corps in February 1915 though little is known of his part in the war during his days as a medic apart from the fact that he attained the rank of corporal. However, he long harboured the idea of serving with his brother who had joined the Coldstream Guards, the second most senior regiment of infantry, and in October 1918 Edward was given just that opportunity.
He transferred to 1st Battalion, the Coldstream Guards and was immediately plunged into the Battle of Cambrai (8th–9th October), the pursuit of the Germans to the River Selle (9th–12th October) and the subsequent Battle of the Selle (17th–22nd October). As the enemy retreated, deserted by all their allies, they decided to make a stand at the River Sambre, where the fighting was harder than ever. Close by the village of Villers-Pol, Guardsman Edward Edgerton and his brother prepared to move forward with the 2nd Guards Brigade. The Coldstreamers had been given one or two days’ grace to prepare for the coming battle, as the battalion war diary explains. ‘…From 2nd November at Ruesnes (two miles to the west of Le Quesnoy). 3rd November, the day was spent preparing for the attack.
The enemy was shelling the western edge of Villers Pol. The attack objective was the high ground to the east of Villers Pol…. we crossed the River Rhonelle and there was sharp hand-to-hand fighting…in intense darkness. At 1 p.m., we dug in on west side of river…there was intermittent shelling. 4th November, 1 a.m., under a heavy enemy barrage our attack was held up on the eastern edge of Villers Pol where there was heavy fighting and shelling. Rations came up in the evening but a very cold and wet night was spent in slit trenches.’ The intensity of the fighting evidently cost Edward Edgerton his life as he was posted ‘missing in action’ on 4th November, although his body was later found and identified. The 29 year-old was buried in Picardy, in Frasnoy Communal Cemetery between Bavay and Le Quesnoy.
There is a fascinating footnote to the death of Edward Edgerton. The war poet Wilfred Owen, a lieutenant in the 1/5th Manchesters, was killed in the same assault on the German defences at the River Sambre and is buried a few miles to the south of Edgerton’s final resting place. No doubt Edward’s family would have sympathised with Owen’s condemnation in verse of the ‘old lie’ –
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’.
(‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’).
After the Armistice on 11th November, the Guards Division was sent to Cologne in Germany until finally it returned home to England in the spring of 1919. By a cruel twist of irony Edward Edgerton’s brother, who survived the Battle of the Sambre, was later demobbed to return home.
Of the eleven Pelsall men known to have enlisted in the elite Guards regiments, six never returned to the village and now lie in tended graves or undiscovered in fields on the old Western Front in France and Flanders. Guardsmen Clayton, Thompson, Owen, Dennant and Morgan survived the war but were far from unscarred by their experiences. Every one of the lads, from their relatively humble origins, had upheld the highest traditions of the two oldest infantry regiments in the British Army – the Grenadier Guards and the Coldstream Guards.
