A GLUSBURN man has revealed details about his great uncle who, he believes, died during a last-ditch German offensive at the end of the First World War.

Patrick Hargreaves, who lives at Bungalow Road, said both of his grandfathers, Fred Hargreaves, a Sutton stonemason, and Heber Brown, a Glusburn warehouseman at Hayfields Mill, were wounded in the Great War, but returned home.

But it is the story of Heber’s brother, Oscar Brown, that has captured the interest of Patrick, his great nephew.

While Patrick, a member of Glusburn and Cross Parish Council, was doing research for the village’s new war memorial, he discovered that Oscar had been killed on April 10, 1918, at Erquinghem-Lys, France.

Oscar, along with Patrick’s grandfathers, was in the Yorkshire Duke of Wellington regiment.

But unlike the other two, Oscar, who was a joiner at Hayfields Mill, went off to war early and did two or three years of soldiering prior to a major battle at the end of the war.

Erquinghem-Lys was an industrialised town that was in the path of a late German advance in the First World War.

“The war had been static and this was Germany’s last desperate push,” said Patrick. “The British were thrown in to stop Germany’s spring offensive in 1918. From the photos I’ve seen, it looked like hell on earth.

“The evidence I’ve seen about Oscar is that he was with a platoon of around 30 or 40 men to support the Suffolk regiment, who were under extreme pressure.

“Oscar’s regiment, who probably had no idea what they were going into, were never seen or heard from again. It looks they held their position for five hours at considerable loss to the enemy.

“I suspect Oscar’s fate was that he was killed there, and wasn’t identified.”

Patrick said the family originally got the telegram to say Oscar had gone missing in April 1918 and then in August they were told he had been killed.

“Word came from the Geneva Prisoner of War Agency in Berlin that he’d, in fact, been killed on April 10 by Germans and then buried in an unknown grave,” said Patrick.

Patrick, who recently visited Erquinghem-Lys with his 30-year-old son, Charles, said he believes that Oscar was initially buried by a road north of Rollanderie Farm on the outskirts of the French town, and then presumably reburied in a Commonwealth war grave.

“He is one of hundreds of thousands not identified and never found,” said Patrick. “He is commemorated on a wall at Tyne Cot Cemetery in Ypres, France, the biggest Allied Commonwealth war grave cemetery.”

Patrick and Charles visited the cemetery along with other key First World War sites during a trip to France in June.

“It makes it more graphic and real,” said Patrick. “You can imagine a joiner in the mill who could have been quite an enthusiastic young lad, but then you cannot imagine how dreadful of a situation that he and these other lads found themselves in.”