Another Local Hero

If you are not a Sapper you will need to extend your vocabulary this morning to understand my post. Just three rather technical words and you may know them already. I didn’t. Here they are quoted from Wiki. 

Redan (a French word for “projection”, “salient”) is a term related to fortifications. It is a work in a V-shaped salient angle toward an expected attack. It can be made from earthworks or other material.

A caponier is a type of fortification structure. The word originates from the French word caponnière (house).

A gabion (from Italian gabbione meaning “big cage”; from Italian gabbia and Latin cavea meaning “cage”) is a cage, cylinder, or box filled with rocks, concrete, or sometimes sand and soil for use in civil engineering, road building, military applications and landscaping.

Now you can appreciate what happened on 18th June 1855 at Sebastopol in the Crimea. Colour-Sergeant Peter Leitch, who was serving in the Royal Engineers aged thirty-five, after approaching the Redan with the leading ladders, formed a caponniere across the ditch as well as a ramp by fearlessly tearing down gabions from the parapet and placing and filling them until he was disabled from wounds. He survived and was awarded the Victoria Cross.

He died in 1892 and is buried in Margravine Cemetery, the second holder of the Victoria Cross in my local graveyard. That there should be two holders of the VC who lived locally I cannot explain. However, that they both hitherto had unmarked graves is because parts of the cemetery were cleared of headstones after it closed for new burials in the 1950s. Again the Victoria Cross Trust put up a new headstone this year, as they did for Sergeant-Major James Champion, see Local Hero.