PRIVATE THOMAS ROSSER DAVIES
1ST CANADIAN MOUNTED RIFLES
19TH OCTOBER 1916 AGE 25
BURIED: CONTAY BRITISH CEMETERY, FRANCE
A Welsh wife chose this Welsh inscription for her Welsh husband who was killed on 19 October 1916 whilst serving with the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles. The family came from Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, Wales, Davies was born in Ammanford and his wife's address after his death was in Ammanford. There is nothing to suggest that Davies was ever in Canada, he could just have been drafted into the Canadian Mounted Rifles to replace their casualties rather than having been a Canadian.
Davies' inscription is a quote from the First Epistle of John Chapter 4 verse 19, "We love him because he first loved us". Did his wife, Mrs Annie Davies, notice the next verse: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" Or was she purposely making a veiled criticism about war?
There is no information about how Davies met his death but as the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles were not in the trenches on the day he died, and as he's buried at Contay British Cemetery where two Canadian Casualty Clearing Stations were based, he is most likely to have died of wounds received between the 9th and the 13th October when the battalion were last in the front line. For these four days the battalion war diary records that 13, 2, 37 and 17 other ranks were wounded on each of the successive days, days when it usually described things as "situation normal with intermittent shelling" and occasionally, "hostile enemy activity".