OH, the anguish of my sorrow and the bitter tears I shed

When I read the awful message that my darling son was dead

"Presum'd killed," said the letter, but I could not read it through

For my heart was nearly broken when I realised it was true.

Oh son, little did I think when first I cradled thee

That on the battlefield you would fall so far away from me.

No loving hand clasped yours that day; no home voice said "good-bye"

You fell in battle's dread affray, but God himself was nigh.

BY 1921, the wounds of war were still raw, and the country was barely beginning to come to terms with its loss. November 1921 saw the first artificial poppies raise £103,000 for disabled soldiers, and that autumn the earliest war memorials were unveiled.

Indeed, on Monday, September 26, 1921, The Northern Echo reported that six memorials had been unveiled that weekend, usually by military men whose names suggest they had big bushy moustaches.

Major Joicey unveiled a stained glass window in Penshaw Church; Lt-Gen Sir F Ivor Maxse unveiled a large plaque in St Clement's Church in York. In Haughton Road Methodist Church, Darlington, a vicar unveiled a memorial pulpit. At Eldon, in the Gaunless Valley, Lord Gainford, assisted by the Lord Bishop of Durham Dr Hensley Henson, unveiled a memorial cross "on which appears the names of 132 fallen heroes".

Then he opened a pair of cottages the colliery owners, Pease and Partners, had built for disabled soldiers. Inscribed on them were the names of the 74 from Eldon Colliery who had been killed. These were dark days of economic depression, Lord Gainford noted. He said: "These memorials should stimulate us to pull together to secure that for which those who died sacrificed their lives and restore the country to a prosperous condition once again."

At the same time, just over the top of the valley, Col F Walton - "in the unavoidable absence of Col Vaux DSO" - conducted "a greatly impressive unveiling ceremony at Coundon".

It was a "striking memorial", said the Echo, topped by "a striking figure of a soldier in service kit mounted on a pedestal of Yorkshire freestone".

Over the decades, the soldier lost his right arm and both his lower legs, and then he lost his position when he was removed in the 1960s. But on Wednesday, a replica soldier was winched into position, ready for next Sunday's ceremonies.

The Echo of September 26, 1921, as well as covering the unveilings, carried a roll of honour of local soldiers who had died on that day during the war. There are 22 names, with obliterated life stories attached.

Six of them died in 1915 in the same action at Loos where the term "the Big Push" was first heard. They rushed out of their trenches and were cut down by enemy machine guns. The operation was aborted after four days as a failure. The six included men from Wingate, New Shildon and Darlington.

The mother of one of them, Private Teddy Shaw, placed the above heart-rending poem in the paper in memory of her 18-year-old boy. None of the six's bodies were ever recovered.

On the same day, 30 miles north near Ypres, Sergeant Joseph Reavley Musgrave, 25, perished, presumably in support of that Big Push. He came from 20, Osborne Terrace, Leeholme, and his name is on the newly-restored monument in Coundon.

"His loving father, mother, brothers and sisters"

would all surely have been present as the Coundon memorial was unveiled. With tears in their eyes and sobs in their hearts they would have remembered the moment, six years ago to the day, that they had received that awful message.