The War Grave of Private Samuel Brew, 6th Field Ambulance, Australian Army Medical Corps, who was killed in action on 16 August 1918, aged 42, while recovering a wounded enemy soldier, is located in Daours Communal Cemetery Extension, Daours, Somme, France. Grave IV, C5.
He was the son of the late Richard and Elizabeth Brew, of Lyons Street, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, and a native of Great Crosby, Liverpool, England, who came to Australia when he was 23 years old. His brother, Captain Henry Brew, survived the war, but another brother, Private John Brew, and his cousin, 2nd Lieutenant Thomas Brew, DCM, were also both killed in action. Further information is held by the Australian War Memorial.
Daours Communal Cemetery Extension is located on the D115, a secondary road linking Daours to Pont-Noyelles (on the Amiens to Albert road). Daours is ca.10km due east of Amiens and ca.4km south of Pont-Noyelles.
The preparations for the Somme offensive of July 1916 brought a group of casualty clearing stations (the 1st/1st South Midland, 21st, 34th, 45th and Lucknow, section "B") to Daours. The extension to the communal cemetery was opened and the first burials made in Plots I , II, Row A of Plot III and the Indian plot, between June and November 1916. The Allied advance in the spring of 1917 took the hospitals with it, and no further burials were made in the cemetery until April 1918, when the Germans recovered the ground they had lost. From April to the middle of August 1918, the extension was almost a front line cemetery. In August and September 1918, the casualty clearing stations came forward again (the 5th, 37th, 41st, 53rd, 55th and 61st) but in September, the cemetery was closed. There are now 1,231 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in Daours Communal Cemetery Extension.
Click on the image to see an enlarged version. Note the inscription at the bottom of the headstone, "DIED TO SAVE AN ENEMY".
© This photograph was taken by Steve Brew on the rainy Saturday afternoon of 26 September 1998.