SELF-SACRIFICE

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 11930, 23 January 1936, Page 1

SELF-SACRIFICE

A SOLDIER’S HEROIC ACT Alfred Henry Desmond, who survived the South African war, was crippled by a bullet in the Great War. His last act of heroism was to end his life to save his wife from further drudgery. And a tragic widow’s story of self-sacrifice was revealed at a Coroner’s inquest at Southend. Desmond was found on the railway line at Leigh, near Southend. He had left a letter.

“My dear, brave little wife,” he had written, “I cannot bear to see you going out in the morning, and coming back to the same old thing at night. I cannot make a drudge of you any longer,” the pathetic letter ended.

Alfred Desmond ended his soldiering in March, 1918, when a bullet hit him in the back, travelled through his body, and lodged in the watch in his breast pocket. The bullet perforated a photograph in the back of the watch. Could Not Go to Bed.

The picture was that of the wife, who told of the life of her war-crip-pled husband, at her cottage home in Bastwood-road, Leigh-on-S«*.

When Alfred Desmond came out of hospital in 1919 he found that a younger man had been given his job. For four years he sought another job, but could find no employment. All that was coming into their home was a 15s weekly disability pension. Mrs Desmond, a slightly-built mid-dle-aged woman, had to find work. This year her husband developed spinal trouble, and so terrible was the pain that he could not lie down. For the last six weeks of his life he never went to bed.

"He just sat upright In a chair, watching me go about the house,” said Mrs Desmond. “I had to remain up with him at night and go to work in the morning. All day I worried about him sitting there helpless—alone.

“In the last few weeks he was very worried. He had got the Idea in his head that he was a burden.” Left alone for a short time on Thursday, Desmond struggled down to the railway tracx and flung himself in front of a train.

“I loved my husband dearly,” said Mrs Desmond. “He was a brick. I know that he did this terrible thing because he imagined I would be better off without him.” The Coroner, Mr H. J. Jefferies, recording a “suicide” verdict, said the case was the most tragic he had ever heard. Mrs Desmond was described as “the type of heroine of whom the world knows little.”