‘There is no Headstone on your grave, except my heart’

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A FAMILY’S archive collection remembering a soldier who gave his life trying to help schoolchildren escape war-torn Burma 77 years ago is being presented to a regimental museum.

Correspondence, articles, photos and medals connected to Captain Thomas Young of Cinderford include the original type-written copy of a heart-rending poem written by his fiancee on learning of his death, entitled My Heart’s Your Tombstone.

And in the week when thousands across Wyedean remembered the fallen in two World Wars and other conflicts, a letter from his comrade informing the 24-year-old’s parents of his death and burial in an unmarked jungle grave stands out as a solemn remembrance of the sacrifice he and millions of others made.

Nephew Alan Elliott MBE said: “We’ve been thinking of collating all the items together for a long time and presenting them to the Gloucestershire Regiment’s Museum.

“Otherwise, it will be lost to memory – and his story and other stories like my uncle Tom’s shouldn’t be. They should be told.

“The film, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman, was based on the refugee treks out of Burma, and when they were filming in Wales, the producers wrote to my mum Emily, and asked her if she wanted to come and see the set.

“My uncle was very young. There was terrible suffering in Burma, and all that potential life is gone.

“It was very hard for the family, something they never got over – and although it’s thousands of miles away, there’s no grave to put a wreath or flowers on, it’s all lost to the jungle.

“So many men from the Forest died in Burma, but it was the forgotten war. Well we can’t forget them. While we shouldn’t live in the past, we shouldn’t forget the past and what they did.”

The poem by Captain Young’s fiancee Gladys Davis begins: “There is no headstone on your grave except my heart my Dear/And there is all my love, washed with my every tear.”

Alan says: “Her very wonderful sentiments and words are as meaningful today as when they were written by Gladys in 1942.

“This poem also speaks for the love and loss that many families feel when their loved ones are killed but have no identified graves where they can lay flowers or go to mourn.”

In the face of the Japanese onslaught and harassed by bandits, Captain Young was charged with helping a party of 38 schoolchildren and teachers trek nearly 300 miles through mountainous jungle to safety in India.

The letter sent by his comrade Staff Sergeant HJ Shaw brings home the horror of their situation as hundreds of thousands of refugees fled in the midst of the monsoon.

It begins: “It is with the greatest regret that I have to inform you of the passing of your son, Capt T.H.E Young.

“We took on the job of escorting schoolgirls and their teacher on the 300-mile trek through jungle, swamps and over rivers and mountains.”

After 160 miles, and with the children near collapse, the two soldiers walked another 23 miles through torrential rain to try and reach an RAF airdrop of food.

With refugees dying all around, the duo fell ill with malaria and with no medicine “during the morning of Saturday, 29th August 1942, he passed away quietly,” wrote his comrade.

“I buried him during the afternoon on the edge of the jungle… at Shinbwiyang village.”

He tells them of their son’s possessions which he is sending home – “1 gummed letter addressed to his parents; 1 leather wallet containing a few odd coins; 1 Bible; 1 New Testament; 1 silver cigarette case with monogram THEY; 1 Silver Vesta match case initialled WTKD; and Mrs Young’s wedding ring.”

He also had Captain Young’s diary which he would “send to you as soon as possible”.

And he ends: “So sorry that I have to write this letter to you. Captain Young was a very noble man – we could have escaped from Burma by an easier way, but your son gave his life that others may live – and greater faith had no man than this.”

Captain Young is remembered with other British servicemen and women who gave their lives on the roll of honour at the national war memorial in Rangoon.

The son of Baptist preacher Henry Young and his wife Mary, he worked as head clerk for the Land Association in Newent before the war and was a Sunday school teacher at the Baptist chapel in Cinderford.

Called up to the Glos-ters, who will be receiving the family archive, he was on secondment to the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry at the time of his death.

The family also have copies of heartbreaking letters calling for help written by the headmistress of the school he was charged with helping.

St Matthew’s Girls headteacher Miss Bald described how riddled with illness and exhaus- ted, they survived on Captain Young’s rice rations, trekking up to 17 miles a day through dense jungle filled with wild animals and decaying bodies, and wading waist deep through raging rivers and floods.

Of Captain Young, whose gallantry is recalled in Ian Hendy’s book about Forest servicemen and women in Burma, Tell Them of Us, she wrote: “He has shown indomitable courage, and very often he foregoes sleep and rest in search of food for us when we have come to the end of our supply and nothing but starvation looms.”

“We are all on the verge of collapse… Believe me, we cannot do any more,” she pleads.

Tragically no more than five children survived, with even that number’s survival unconfirmed, while Miss Bald and the six other members of her family all perished.