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Brothers in the Great War : siblings, masculinity and emotions
When war broke out in August 1914, William ‘Percy’ Campbell
volunteered immediately. Commissioned in the Wiltshire Regiment,
he joined the 7th Division, fighting in the First Battle of Ypres.
Killed in action on 24 October 1914, aged just twenty years, he had
been on active service a mere seventeen days. His body was never
recovered. Almost sixty years later, his younger brother Pat wrote a
short fraternal memorial to his dead sibling. At the outset, he summarised the loss experienced by the war generation:
Everyone in Britain was in mourning. I myself lost many friends
whom I loved and admired, but Percy stands for them all. For me
the war means Percy. His was the courage and gaiety that was extinguished, his is the face I see whenever the war is mentioned
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