Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A Great War M.M. awarded to Private A. B. Eschle, West Yorkshire Regiment, who was killed in action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, when his unit - the 15th Battalion (1st Leeds Pals) - suffered 528 casualties

Military Medal, G.V.R. (15-312 Pte. A. B. Eschle, 15/W. York. R.), and further privately engraved after the regiment ‘May 23rd 1916’, good very fine £320-360

M.M. London Gazette 28 July 1917.

Arthur Bertrand Eschle was born in Aberdare, Glamorgan, Wales in September 1881, the ninth of eleven children to Felix and Hannah Eschle. His father was of German extraction and ran a jewellery and clock making business in Aberdare.

Eschle appears to have served in the Boer War, prior to re-enlisting at Leeds Town Hall on the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. Assigned to the 15th Battalion (1st Leeds Pals), he was one of 528 men from his unit who were either killed or wounded in the attack on Serre on 1 July 1916, the majority being cut down by machine-gun fire in No Man’s Land. As Private R. N. Bell, also of the 1st Leeds Pals, recalled:
‘The trench was almost blocked with dead and wounded. One of the latter with both legs shattered was screaming in agony but, scrambling my way a little farther along in the blown-in remains of the trench, I realised that I was now entirely alone. For some time I remained in the ruins of one of the bays, accompanied only by the corpse of a man in No. 6 Platoon and a mole, disturbed from its burrow by a shell.’ (The First Day of the Somme, by Martin Middlebrook refers.).

Eschle is buried in Serre Road Cemetery No. 1, France.