He left Eton College early to sign up
during the fir wave of patriotic enthusiasm at the outbreak of the First
World War. After a few weeks’ training, he was gazetted as a Second Lieutenant
in the Coldstream Guards. He was killed at Ypres in October 1914 only three
days after he had joined his regiment at the front, aged 18. He also has a
memorial inside the church. The striking symbolic relief above its inscription
incorporates two figures looking up at a cross. Attached to the wall next to it
is a rare survival, a wooden battlefield cross with his name stamped on a small
metal tab on it. Although over a century old now, these crosses seem to bring
back the horrors of the battlefield with startling immediacy. During battles
such as Ypres, men were killed by the thousand each day and were buried nearby
in hastily created cemeteries with the graves often marked by these wooden
crosses. Later, when the Red Cross’s Ambulance Unit (later to become the
Imperial and then Commonwealth War Graves Commission) set about the huge task
of identifying as many of the bodies as possible and re-interring them in the
formal cemeteries we recognise so well today, the wooden crosses were offered
to the families of the deceased. Some were buried in local churchyards, others
– like that of Charles Williams Wynn – placed on display inside the church.
In her autobiographical work ‘Testament of Youth’, Vera Brittain described the emotions the arrival of the cross could generate: “It’s such a queer feeling to have it here, when it’s been above him all that time … I am sorry in a way that they have removed it … It’s a strange world – where the symbols of people count so much because they’re all one has left”.
