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Western Mail, Thursday, 9 January 1930, p. 2
44th Battalion Coincidences
Some peculiar coincidences happened in the 44th Battalion. The first three men killed in action, all by the same minenwerfa shell, had names commencing with the first three letters of the alphabet, Anderson, Barker and Cameron. That happened in the unit's first tour in the line line at Armentieres, on December 20, 1916. The last casualty, in the 44th final fight in the Hindenburg Line, was Alec Wann, and the officer who attempted to drag the bodies of the three first-mentioned from the trench wreckage which half-buried them was only a few yards behind Wann when he was killed. The battalion was initiated to the front line through thc Armentieres Lunatic Asylum and along a communication trench called Lunatic Lane. When its few exhausted survivors assembled after seventeen days in front of Paschendaele, the rendezvous was the ruined Lunatic Asylum near Ypres. Three sets of brothers were killed in its ranks, the Ronans, the Moyles and another whose name I forget. Six sergeants-major of the Instructional Staff were killed with the 44th. "Sammy" Taylor, "Dick" Walsh, "Jock" Young, "Ted" Porter, "Big" Foley and Faulkner. When the battalion arrived on Salisbury Plain its camp at Lark Hill was Number 13. Its only unsuccessful engagement in nearly two years in France was its big raid on March 13. Less than 12 months after arrival in France not a solitary individual of the 40 and odd original members of Number 13 Platoon was on his feet. "A" Company in four successive engagements lost all its officers except one, and on three occasions it was the same officers who survived.