The War Memorial & Memorial Hall

Sgt William Charles Fuller VC — a hundred yards under fire

A small stone at the foot of the memorial marks the only Victoria Cross in Laugharne's story.

The day is fixed. 14 September 1914, on the Aisne, in the first weeks of the war. William Fuller — then a Lance-Corporal of the 2nd Battalion, The Welsh Regiment — saw his captain fall, mortally wounded, a hundred yards off across open ground swept by rifle and machine-gun fire. He went for him. A hundred yards out, and a hundred yards back, carrying a dying man, under fire the whole way. The citation says it as plainly as that, and adds nothing to it. George V pinned the Cross to his chest in January 1915.

And here is the thing that makes this stone his, and not only the fallen's: he came home. He survived the war and lived to be an old man, into the 1970s. That is why his plaque stands apart from the two Rolls of Honour beside it — those name the town's dead; this one honours a man who walked back.

Let the honouring stay honest, though, because that is the deepest respect. Fuller is very widely said to have been born in Laugharne, and to have been the first Welsh-born VC of the war — and both may well be true. But the primary record has not yet settled either, so the app holds them as things said, not things proven. It does not need to reach. A hundred yards, under fire, for a dying man: that is enough, and that is certain.

(Two small things the record fixes, kept for the careful visitor: the regiment in 1914 was styled the "Welsh" Regiment — the "Welch" spelling came later, in 1920. And the officer he carried, Captain Mark Haggard, is said to have been a nephew of the novelist H. Rider Haggard — a kinship the stories carry, but not one the record confirms.)

Stand a moment longer than you meant to. That is what the stone is for.