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Cpl. Percy John Keen
British Army 216th (Nuneaton) Army Troops Coy. Royal Engineers
from:Chesham, Buckinghamshire
(d.4th June 1917)
A brief description of the manner of Percy Keen's death and an idea of the part that he might have played in the Great War, is described in the text of "With the Rank and Pay of a Sapper" by James Sambrook as described to him by his father Arthur, along with the memories of a handful of members of 216th (Nuneaton) Army Troops Company, Royal Engineers, according to their various diaries and written reminiscenses. "At the end of May the Company went to Neuve Eglise, where the eglise was only a rag of a tower. There they occupied a few huts in a large camp established near the remains of the village, on a hill overlooking the quaint old fashioned town of Bailleul to the west. Their eastward view was dominated by the not so quaint Wytschaete-Messines ridge, described by John Buchan at this time as, a low hillside seamed with white trenches, and dotted with the debris of old woods, a bald, desolated height, arid as a brickfield, rising from the rank grass and yellow mustard of no-man's land. The landmarks on it were the ruins of the White Chateau at Holbeke, the dust heap which once was Wytschaete village, and the tooth of the ruined church of Messines.
During the Great War the duties of the Royal Engineers were many and various not least in the course of preparations for the Battle of Messines. Among these was the construction of canvas reservoirs and the pipelines connecting them to the troops and services to the front line. The 216th had been sent to Neuve Eglise as part of the plan for the coming battle at Messines Ridge. They were placed at the disposal of the Chief Engineer of II Anzac Corps, whose headquarters was at Bailleul. They shared their present camp with a battalion of the 3rd Australian Division, commanded by Major-General Sir John Monash, a distinguished engineer in civilian life and one of the ablest new soldiers thrown up by the Great War. Monash was a careful planner and considerate commander, as too was the cautious, methodical, imperturbable General Sir Herbert Plumer, Commander in Chief of the Second Army of which II Anzac Corps now formed a part.
The 216th Company was kept busy on several projects. For about a fortnight before the attack, which started on 7th June, they laid corduroy tracks in places where the ground was soft. These were made of slabs, chiefly of elm or beech, ten to twelve feet long, one foot across, and three inches thick, cut by forestry companies of Royal Engineers in the rear areas. The ground was prepared by digging side drains and filling shell holes with the spoil and any available rubble and wreckage; four or five slabs were laid lengthwise as runners and the others, laid crosswise and spiked to the runners, made the surface; half-round pine logs along each edge made a kerb, intended to keep wheels on the track. The work was done at night, all materials cleared away and the track camouflaged before daybreak. In the unending struggle against mud and shellfire, which constituted warfare in Flanders, these rapidly laid timber roads were essential for the movement of ammunition, guns, rations and material.
Closer to zero day the 216th strung white tapes on stakes to guide the walking wounded back from the front-line trenches to the casualty clearing system, a couple of miles of reasonable track. The Company's main work, the work that Percy was involved in, as the author's father recalls, was to put in water pipes in readiness for the transport supply wagons of the division which would capture what was left of Messines after the mine beneath it had been exploded. The water supply for this was drawn from the reservoir the company had excavated on the reverse slope of Kemmel Hill and we put in stand pipes and wooden water troughs in places near the entrances to the communication trenches, which were not seen from the German lines. Water troughs were required for artillery and supply column horses and mules and for the cavalry.
The company laid two pipelines from the Kemmel Hill reservoir towards the ridge, one in the direction of Wytschaete, the other, further south towards Messines. The southern line went over very low ground, through Souvenir Dump, St. Quentin Cabaret, and Stinking Farm, where the land was so wet that trenches were, perforce, sandbagged breastworks built up above ground level and known as the Chinese Wall.
During May an artillery barrage was hurled against the German wire entanglements, roads, camps, and supply dumps, so that the ridge was steadilly stripped of any traces of summer greenery. From the end of the month the barrage became even more intense; then in the days before the infantry assault on 7th June, gas shells were sent over in order to compel the Germans to wear masks and lose sleep. Needless to say, the Germans responded in kind. Their guns were outnumbered by the great weight of artillery deployed by General Plumer but they still had excellent observation; they knew the roads and duckboard tracks along which men, ammunition, and supplies travelled at night; they duly dropped their shells along them, working backwards and forwards. Three days before the attack (Monday 4th June 1917) a section of the company, with a working party from the 4th New Zealand Infantry Brigade were carrying water pipes forward to Stinking Farm, on the front just below Messines village, when they were machine gunned from the German positions on the ridge as well as being shelled as usual: Corporal Percy Keen was killed and Sapper Gilmour was wounded. The party carried Percy's body with them when when they took cover behind the ruins of the farm buildings near to a communications trench, and then brought him back to camp on a stretcher. He was buried in a cemetery near Neuve Eglise next morning, sewn in his blanket. Percy had been invalided home after an accident the previous November and had returned to the Company at the end of January, thanks to a routine order which enabled men to return to their own unit.
At about 3.10 am on the morning of the 7th June the mine under Messines Ridge was blown (at that time the biggest bang in history) immediately followed by a massed artillery barrage all along the front line north of their position towards Ypres. The Battle of Messines was a complete victory, with its tremendous artillery bombardment and record explosion of land mines containing almost a million pounds of high explosive it was a triumph of organisation and of co-operation of the artillery and the engineers with the infantry and although Percy did not live to witness it the pre-arranged water supply was of great importance. In the months before the attack over 180 miles of pipeline were laid in the area of the Second Army, with reservoirs and pumping stations capable of supplying a million gallons of treated drinking water a day, together with half a million untreated gallons for animals."
