PRIVATE CHARLES DOYLE
ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS
24TH SEPTEMBER 1916 AGE 22
BURIED: GUARDS' CEMETERY LESBOEUFS, FRANCE
Mrs Elizabeth Doyle, Charles Doyle's mother, makes no attempt to wrap her son's death in religious, patriotic or chivalric language. To her, life is for living, not killing. Given the chance to express herself publicly, even if only on his headstone, her response to her son's death is uncompromising - 'the purposes of life misunderstood'. But Mrs Doyle had another reason to be unimpressed by the war, her husband Charles Edward Doyle had volunteered to fight, despite being beyond the age of military service, and had been killed in Mesopotamia/Iraq just five months before her son.
Charles Doyle served with the Royal Army Medical Corps and in September 1916 was a member of the 18th Field Ambulance unit attached to the 6th Division. On the 21 September they went into the trenches at Morval on the Somme and on the 24th the unit's war diary recorded, "one of our stretcher bearers killed by a shell & one wounded by shrapnel". The dead stretcher bearer was Charles Doyle.
Charles Edward Doyle, a serjeant in the 6th Battalion the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, part of the 13th Division, went with it to Gallipoli in August 1915. Following the evacuation, in January 1916 the Division was sent to Mesopotamia to reinforce the Tigris Corps in their attempt to relieve the Anglo-Indian garrison under siege at Kut-el-Amara. On 6 April it met the Turks and after three days savage fighting, when four Victoria Crosses were won and the effective strength of the Division was reduced to 5,328 men, it was stopped at Sanna-i-Yat on the 9th, the day Serjeant Doyle was killed. Whether he orginally had a grave or not he doesn't now and is commemorated on the Basra Memorial, he was 42.
It's interesting to note that Mrs Doyle hadn't always expressed herself in this manner over her son's death. On 18 October 1916 the following announcement appeared in the Manchester Evening News:
DOYLE C - In loving memory of my dear son Private C Doyle 20001 RAMC who fell in action September 24 1916
Mother, sisters, brothers
A good life is often too short
But a good name endureth for ever