Herbert  Cushion

Herbert Ernest Cushion, or Bertie as he was known, is the only regular Army casualty recorded on Tasburgh's Memorial. He was born in Tasburgh in 1890 where his father Charles was a farmworker in charge of a team of horses who lived with his wife Ann and their three other children in a cottage next to The Cherry Tree on Church Road. At the age of 16 Bertie joined the 1st Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment at a recruitment held in Starston which suggests he may already have left home. County Regiments such as the Norfolks usually had three battalions, the 1st and 2nd were active whilst the 3rd was a training unit providing replacement soldiers to the other two. In 1911 the 1st Battalion were posted to Beguan in India, returning to barracks in Belfast in 1913 and then being shipped to France in early August 1914 on the outbreak of war.

Bertie's first engagement with the Germans was at Mons on 24th August when the 1st Norfolks were ordered forward as part of the division reserve to reinforce one of the flanks. They then marched and fought back through Le Cateau to the Marne, up the Aine and then across to Ypres. He would have been in the line at Christmas that year, and although the division records do not mention football between the front lines, it does record that gifts were exchanged with some of the enemy troops. Hostilities soon resumed with a series of battles continuing until 25th May 1915. It was probably in ne of those that Bertie was injured, dying of his wounds in the military hospital at Ypres in June.

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