M.G.C.

Sergeant Bernard Vincent Webb

Bernard Vincent Webb was the son of George Webb, a dentist of Westbourne Road, Luton, and his wife Elizabeth.

Bernard was just 17 when he enlisted with the Bedfordshire Regiment in September 1914. He told the recruiting officer he was 19!

Whilst serving with the 3rd Battalion Munster Fusiliers he was wounded at Gallipoli, on the Ottoman Peninsula, just over a year later with a gun shot wound to the hand.

Private Ernest Charles Mills

Ernest Charles Mills joined the Bedfordshire Regiment, in 1915 and transferred to the Machine Gun Corps (M.G.C.) in 1916. The M.G.C. was known as the suicide corps, but Ernest survived and was discharged in 1919.

He never spoke of his time in France except when he was dying and then said that only two members of his platoon who fought throughout the Somme, himself and another soldier he couldn't name, survived; and they were stood up to their waist in mud and barbed wire. The drawing in the linked photograph album is by Ernest, and shows cooking in a trench dugout.

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