Soldiers tend to conceal their experiences on the front line from their loved ones when they return home. The novel way that a 10-year-old Sylvia Collins got her grandfather to talk about what he’d been through in the Mesopotamian campaign of the First World War was to catch him when he was enjoying his favourite pastime: gardening.
“I had to use the most devious ways of getting him to talk, like pretending to enjoy gardening when I wasn’t keen on crawly things. I’d ask little questions. After a while he’d open up.”
So engrossed was Sylvia with the life of her grandfather, John Thompson Wright, that she wrote their conversations down in old exercise books, as well as the ones she had with her grandmother, Alice.
As the years passed, Sylvia also went door-to-door in John’s hometown to track down family information, visited graveyards, and used the advice of experienced authors and this very magazine to find descendants of others who served in John’s unit.
She has turned all this research into a new book, A Flash of Steel.
The title features John and Alice’s early lives; John’s career in the Army, from the Boer War to India; their marriage and Alice’s time as a military wife; and Sylvia and her brother Arthur’s childhood in their grandparents’ care. However, the highlight is undoubtedly its revealing coverage of the forgotten Mesopotamian theatre of war, including the reason why so many people would say to Sylvia, “You must be very proud having a war hero as a grandfather.”
Fought in modern-day Iraq, the campaign against the Ottoman Empire has failed to get the recognition of the Western Front, and is largely remembered for the disastrous Siege of Kut and the huge number of deaths attributed to disease. But the open desert enabled the use of cavalry, including John’s regiment the 14th King’s Hussars.
It was while on horseback that John performed his most heroic feat. On 8 January 1916 during the Battle of Shaikh Sa’ad, John became aware that a platoon of men was due to arrive where the Ottoman troops were well concealed in trenches. Without orders and armed only with his revolver, he rode out into no-man’s land to flush out the enemy, saving the platoon from being included in the high death toll during the three-day battle.
“My grandad said that the Turks knew all the hiding places. But he knew that he could flush them out,” Sylvia remembers. “What he did was really quite remarkable. If it hadn’t been for him breaking rank without the orders to do so, a platoon of men would have died.”
Such was John’s gallantry that he was awarded the Victoria Cross, yet even more remarkably turned it down because the payout for the lesser Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) was greater. “For him, family always came first,” Sylvia explains.
Sylvia has also ensured that the heroism of two of John’s comrades who won DCMs but have been lost to history is recognised in the book.
As well as being glad that she’s recorded her grandfather’s wartime experiences for future generations, Sylvia is donating the proceeds from the book to the Royal British Legion, which was set up after the war to aid servicemen and women – John described the charity as a “godsend for soldiers”. His record ensured that he had no trouble finding civilian work again, but others were not so lucky.
All in all, A Flash of Steel is a fitting tribute to a soldier whose courage was dwarfed only by his concern for his family and his brothers in arms.