Ann's Great Uncle Remembered on Armistice Day

Percy Miller Spice. Died on 11 November 1918, Etaples, France

On this day, Ann's Great Uncle Percy Miller Spice died, a victim of the Great War. 

Sapper 68178 Percy Miller SPICE. 119th Heavy Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA). Died 11th November 1918 aged 24 years. Born Herne Bay, Kent. Enlisted Herne Bay.

After three years of fighting, he died in 4 General Hospital, Camiers, France
from mustard gas poisoning during the last Flanders Offensive at Ypres
in the Western European Theatre, on the last day of the war.

He is buried in the Étaples Military Cemetery, France.
In homage, we visited the cemetery in 2009 to leave a coin of remembrance at the grave.

Étaples by Iso Rae, 1917

One hundred years later, we have no concept of conditions on those fronts. We may only turn to witnesses who where there, and their descriptions. Étaples and the field hospital at Camiers are described in the work of Iso Rae, a remarkable Australian woman artist who stayed in  Étaples throughout the First World War, and who gave a unique insight into the life of the vast British army camp there:

Étaples is a very old fishing town and port, which lies at the mouth of the River Canche in the region of Pas de Calais in Picardy. The Étaples Army Base Camp, the largest of its kind ever established overseas by the British, was built along the railway adjacent to the town. It was served by a network of railways, canals, and roads connecting the camp to the southern and eastern fields of battle in France and to ships carrying troops, supplies, guns, equipment, and thousands of men and women across the English Channel. It was a base for British, Canadian, Scottish and Australian forces.

The camp was a training base, a depot for supplies, a detention centre for prisoners, and a centre for the treatment of the sick and wounded, with almost twenty general hospitals. At its peak, the camp housed over 100,000 people; altogether, its hospitals could treat 22,000 patients. With its vast conglomeration of the wounded, of prisoners, of soldiers training for battle, and of those simply waiting to return to the front, Étaples could appear a dark place. 

Source: Iso Rae in Etaples: another perspective of war, Betty Snowden

Wilfred Owen [Collected Letters. Oxford University Press] described it as,

A vast, dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a few days before the shambles … Chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all the faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England; nor can it be seen in any battle, but only in Étaples. It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s.