SOLDIERS in the Great War who were awarded medals for gallantry were rightly hailed as heroes.

But a handful of the men who won them didn’t see it that way.

Sgt Jack Firth, of Darwen, was one of them. He won the Military Medal for bravery in the opening exchanges of the Battle of the Somme.

But the first his family back home knew about it was when his medals were sent to his mother, at her home in St John Street, after his death from a shell-burst at Nieppe Forest on September 12, 1918, just two months before the war’s end. He was 28.

Looking back now, almost 100 years since the start of the ‘big push’ across the Somme valley on July 1, 1916, his nephew John Firth, of Darwen, said: “Uncle Jack was with the 11th East Lancs, the Accrington Pals, and they were almost wiped out on that first day.

“He was very popular with his men and he must have wondered why he had survived to fight on while so many of his young lads died.

“A gallantry medal would have meant a lot to his poor mother.”

In a couple of hours, most of the battalion were either killed, wounded or missing.

Out of 720 men who took part in the attack on the village of Serre there were almost 600 casualties.

The battle of the Somme lasted until the first flurries of winter snow arrived, with the armistice on November 11 ending the war, but few members of the 11th Service Battalion (Accrington) East Lancashire Regiment saw any more of it. Mrs Firth received confirmation of her son’s death in a letter from one of his pals.

“I miss him very much, and so do all the company,” he wrote. “He was a gentleman and well respected by everyone. He had suffered very much in the past by wounds.”

In four long years he had been wounded six times, gassed and suffered frostbite.

After the war, several of Sgt Firth’s pals called on his mother to pay their respects. The circumstances in which the Military Medal was won were still a mystery to her, but she learnt that it had been awarded after Jack went back into no-man’s land to rescue a comrade.

And they revealed that Sgt Firth, a regular who had joined up in 1909, wore the medal pinned on the inside waistband of his trousers.

They reckoned he wore it for the bravery of all the Accrington Pals – especially the pals he had lost.