Fitz breaks young hero's silence after 100 years
On a pilgrimage to the battlefield where his great uncle died 100 years ago, John Fitzpatrick got into a long chat with the 17-year-old boy soldier who had unhesitatingly answered the nation's call to arms.
It was a story Private Ben Leeman had not been able to tell for a century.
"Does anyone remember us?" he asked John. John - known as Fitz - was able to reassure him on that point.
Fitz's pilgrimage earlier this year was real, and now that imagined chat, used as a literary device, has been turned into a historical novel telling the story of the young soldier's life and experiences, called A Century of Silence, and available through Amazon.
"It is written in an original way, which sets it apart from any other book of its kind," he said.
Fitz has retraced Ben's footsteps, and as a former serviceman who faced danger in the hotspots of Northern Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan, he was able to draw on a special insight into the feelings the teenager would have experienced in battle.
Ben, from Grimsby, lied about his age to join up at the age of 15, serving in the 15th (Bantam) Battalion, Notts and Derby Regiment, The Sherwood Foresters.
He was killed in action during the opening days of the great German spring offensive of 1918.
But in 2013 Ben Leeman was just a name to Fitz, who runs Cosford Dog Training and lives at County Lane, Codsall Wood.
"I knew my Mam had an Uncle Ben, who her dad - my granddad - spoke about very rarely as he was invariably overcome with grief whenever he talked about his younger brother and his bitterness about how his own mother never fully recovered from Ben's death," he said.
Nor did he know much about the Great War, but everything was to change in 2014 when he and his father went on a 70th anniversary trip to Normandy
At the end of their visit his mother asked if he "fancied taking a trip up to the north of France" to find her Uncle Ben's name on a memorial wall of a cemetery.
A leisurely detour to Pozieres on the Somme took them around 10 hours, but was to have a profound effect on Fitz, and was to be the first of many visits to the area.
Their "chat," as described in the book, was during a visit to the memorial to mark the centenary of Ben's death, which was on March 24, 1918, at a place called Curlu Wood.
Ben was both a young veteran and a war hero, having fought on the Somme and in Flanders, and being awarded the Military Medal during the fighting at Houthulst Forest in October 1917.
Fitz is a former RAF Police Warrant Officer, who was head of the RAF Special Investigations Branch major crime team and then the senior instructor at the Joint Service Dog School before retiring in 2013. Since retiring he has been a full time dog trainer and behaviourist.
"The book was compiled using family records, public and military records, particularly the battalion diary of the 15th Battalion and the war diary of the 35th Division, and information supplied by amateur historians, who are real experts on just about everything to do with the Great War. The Regimental Museum of the Mercian Regiment was also very helpful," said Fitz.
"Being a former SIB investigator I never rely on documentary evidence alone. I have visited all the locations where Ben served and whenever possible walked exactly the same route taken as described in the war diary.
"I have a fairly accurate idea of how long it takes to tab from Maricourt to Curlu Wood, at 8.30am on March 24, because I did it myself 100 years after the event. I don't do things by halves.
"Some of the feelings experienced in battle, attributed to Ben, are personal. Service in Northern Ireland, a long time before any thought was given to a peace process, a tour in Iraq, and three tours in Afghanistan, gave me a bit of insight."
