1917 star Dean-Charles Chapman read about war hero’s agony and found out it was his great, great grandfather
WHILE filming his new movie 1917, British director Sam Mendes wanted his cast to read up on the hell endured by World War One soldiers.
So actor Dean-Charles Chapman began poring over diaries from the Western Front, and became fascinated by the account of machine gunner David Peers, who had been shot through the hip and survived in agony for days behind enemy lines.
Most of his battalion had been killed or wounded or were missing, with 20-year-old Private Peers paralysed in both legs.
He survived by dragging himself through the mud and drinking from the water bottles of his fallen comrades.
After four days of bone-crunching pain, he thought salvation had come when a German soldier found him. But as he begged for help, the German simply spat — then left him for dead.
Remarkably, as Dean-Charles read the memoir it gradually dawned on him that the account was about his own great, great grandfather. And today The Sun brings his full story for the first time.
The actor plays L/Cpl Tom Blake in the movie, which this week won two of the biggest awards at the Golden Globes — for best picture and best director for Sir Sam.
Also starring Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Madden and Colin Firth, the film is also nominated for NINE Baftas including best picture and best director.
Critics are now tipping it as a surefire contender for Oscar nominations when these are revealed on Monday.
Dean-Charles, 22, recalled his family discovery: “I read that book pretty much every day before I walked out on set.
“It was only after I spoke to my mum and dad, who then spoke to their parents, that it became clear that my great, great grandad had an entry in it.”
Because of filming commitments, Dean-Charles, who shot to fame in 2014 as young king Tommen Baratheon in Game Of Thrones, has not had time to investigate properly his ancestor’s remarkable wartime ordeal in the Battle of Loos.
So, with the help of World War One historian Jon Cooksey, whose expertise has been used by TV’s Who Do You Think You Are?, The Sun has exclusively pieced together the incredible story of the hero whose great, great grandson became one of the stars of the best war movie since Saving Private Ryan.
In the film — out this Friday — Dean-Charles and George MacKay play two lance corporals who must race across rat-infested, corpse-strewn no man’s land, braving bombs and water-filled craters to deliver a message that will save the lives of 1,600 British soldiers.
During filming on Salisbury Plain, Wilts, Dean-Charles read The Western Front Diaries, by Australian author Jonathan King.
It includes the story of Pte Peers. The apprentice fitter joined his home regiment, the Territorials, in Grimsby in early summer 1914, two months before the war broke out.
With the 5th Battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment, he landed in France in March 1915 and saw action at Ypres before being sent south to the French coalfields near Bethune, where the British had suffered thousands of casualties.
The North Midlands “Terriers” of the 46th Division — including the 5th Lincs — were chosen to go over the top and retake a German stronghold known as the Hohenzollern Redoubt.
At 2pm on October 13, as a two-hour bombardment ended, Pte Peers and more than 600 of his comrades showed the greatest bravery as they rushed to attack the Germans in hand-to-hand combat.
Jon Cooksey says: “The 5th Lincs were caught in a deadly crossfire from machine guns to their north and to their south from German positions.
“Their casualties were extremely heavy. All but two of the officers who went over the top were killed or went missing, leaving the battalion effectively leaderless.
“Out of 659 men from the 5th Lincs who went into action, 483 were killed, wounded or missing. That’s a 73 per cent casualty rate.
“Among the 217 men counted as missing was Pte Peers, although thankfully he was still alive.
“He had gone over the top as one of about 18 men in the battalion’s machine gun section but was severely wounded during the attack by a bullet that went into his right side and exited on the left.
“As it travelled through his body it caught his spinal cord, which left him paralysed from the waist down.”
A report of the battle in his local Grimsby paper at the time reveals how Pte Peers survived by drinking from water bottles on the bodies of his fallen pals.
Later he told the Red Cross how he had been found alive by an enemy soldier, days after the fighting had ended.
Pte Peers said: “I was lying out for four days until I was found by a young German officer who said to me, ‘Englander?’ And when I said, ‘Yes’, he spat on the ground and said, ‘Swine’. Then his superior officer came up and treated me well.”
The local paper’s report reveals how Pte Peers had begged the German soldier who found him to, ‘get someone to finish him off’.
Instead, the officer sent him to a field hospital about a mile behind enemy lines.
Pte Peers’s entry in the Western Front Diaries reveals how there were no nurses at the hospital in Phalempin, near Lille.
Military orderlies took his clothes away and refused to attend to his paralysis.
Pte Peers was surrounded by dying comrades but he survived, though still in agony and desperate for food.
On November 5 he was laid on the bare floor of a third-class railway carriage and taken on a bumpy overnight train journey to hospital in Aachen, Germany.
Mendes' legacy
LIKE Dean-Charles, director Sir Sam Mendes had his own family inspiration for his war film 1917 – his grandad Alfred.
He had told his young grandson horrific tales of his time as a messenger in the trenches in World War One.
Now Sam has shared his memories of his grandad, who died in 1991, such as how for the rest of his life he constantly washed his hands, a habit that young Sam laughed at.
Then one day his dad told him: “It’s because he remembers the mud in the trenches and never being able to get clean.”
Sam then began to pester his grandad to tell his war stories.
And after 50 years of silence, Alfred suddenly began to talk. His tales included how a soldier carried on running after his head had been blown clean off.
Another time he carried an injured soldier back to the trenches, where he was found to be dead. He had been shot while being carried, but Alfred was the target.
Sam’s grandad won the Military Medal for helping to rescue comrades from no man’s land.
Because he was small and a hard target for snipers, he also volunteered to carry messages.
When Sam was 12 Alfred gave him a hand-written “contract” in which the boy promised to write his first novel by the age of 18.
His grandad told him: “You’re going to tell stories. This is what you have to do.”
Sam says: “The image of that little man, cut adrift in that vast, misty landscape, stayed with me.”
Against all the odds, he survived this new ordeal and was transferred to a prisoner of war camp hospital in Cologne.
There, a sergeant who spoke a little English asked if Pte Peers wanted to stay in Germany after the war and to sign papers to make him a naturalised German.
The outraged Tommy said: “I refused and the sergeant told me I was a fool as I would have got my liberty if I had signed.”
But six months after the attack, and still paralysed, he was put on a prisoner-exchange train to Brussels and finally arrived at the Queen Alexandra Military Hospital in Millbank, central London, in May 1916.
Pte Peers was transferred to Ralston Hospital in Glasgow, where he was discharged, given a weekly disability pension of 40 shillings (£2) and a silver war badge which wounded servicemen wore to show they had done their bit at the Front.
Now out of the Army, David, permanently paralysed from the waist down and classed as “100 per cent disabled”, got married to Kathleen in 1917.
Ten years after the battle that nearly killed him, he landed a job making Remembrance wreaths at the poppy factory in Richmond, South West London.
He and wife had six children and the ex-Tommy died in 1935, aged just 40. Four years later their 18-year-old daughter, Evelyn Ruby, married Sidney Chapman, 22.
Three generations later, Sir Sam Mendes gave their great grandson the role of a lifetime in his epic war movie.
Dean-Charles said: “Just reading snippets of the story of my great, great grandfather and knowing I had an ancestor who was there made me feel so much more connected to Blake.”
And thanks to The Sun’s research, Dean-Charles now knows the full account of his ancestor’s extraordinary story of survival and heroism.
- 1917 is in cinemas from Friday.
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