He was just another Tommy rushing off to war on the tidal wave of patriotism that swept England in 1914.
Leslie Gardner Shaw was what Kipling called a gentleman ranker. He was the youngest son of a wealthy Wolverhampton family. Yet he went to war as Private 9390 Shaw, a humble squaddie among the Black Country Territorials of the South Staffordshire Regiment.
He was soon promoted to corporal and after six months in France his potential could no longer be denied. On August 30, 1915 he was commissioned as an officer in the South Staffords' Fifth Battalion.
Six weeks later he was dead, leading his men in a doomed attack.
Second Lieutenant Shaw is remembered on his old school's roll of honour and in the heart of a Canadian woman whose grandmother was his sweetheart.
The young officer was one of hundreds of North and South Staffords men killed in the attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt, a German strongpoint, during the bloody Battle of Loos in northern France.
October 13, 1915 was the Black Country's bloodiest day in the Great War and is still remembered with pride in the families whose lads never came home.
Today, as the Staffordshire Regiment awaits it fate, it is determined to keep alive the memory of such endeavours. The Hohenzollern attack was a blunder to be repeated dozens of times in the First World War.
A massive British artillery barrage impressed the watching Tommies but hardly damaged the German trenches.
As soon as the barrage stopped, German machine-guns began sweeping the British parapets. The men knew they had to climb out of the trenches into this murderous hail. According to reports, not one flinched.
Second Lieutenant Shaw, aged 25, was in "A" Company. Just after 2pm they went over the top, to death and glory. Sergeant H Smith of Walsall recalled: "No sooner did we show ourselves than we were subjected to heavy machine-gun fire.
"Men dropped left and right, but the others never faltered. Comrades who witnessed the attack said they had never seen lads go into it better."
The Express & Star proudly headlined the October 13 attack as the "most orderly charge since war started" and claimed: "Braver lads never put foot on a battlefield."
The cost was appalling. The Fifth Battalion lost five officers and 92 men. Over the next few days, Wolverhampton alone recorded the deaths of 54 men. Leslie Shaw's body and thousands of others were never found on the shell-churned Loos battlefield.
A few days later death notices and tributes began to appear in the Express & Star.
John Perks Shaw and his wife Eliza of West Bank in Richmond Road, Wolverhampton which is now two nursing homes, put an announcement remembering their "youngest and dearly-loved son." Leslie Shaw was educated at Wolverhampton Grammar School but moved to Sedbergh School in Yorkshire before entering Birmingham University.
While in Yorkshire he met Frances Hannah Gibson, daughter of a Huddersfield family. They became engaged and corresponded until his death. Frances's grand-daughter Barbara Bondar of Toronto, Canada, has some of her grandmother's letters.
On Valentine's Day, 1915, all too aware of the odds facing him, Leslie wrote to Frances, urging her to remember his love for her on every Valentine's Day to come. Barbara believes he knew he would not survive.
"It sounds like a 25-year-old gentleman's guidance for his fiancee in her possible future without him," she says.
Barbara recently contacted the Director of Birmingham University's Centre for First Word War Studies, John Bourne, in an attempt to find out more about this long-lost hero.
"There is tremendous interest if the First World War," says Dr Bourne. "One of our most popular websites is the university war memorial online."
The site contains a brief record of 2nd Lt Shaw who is commemorated on the Loos Memorial near Calais.
Three thousand miles away, Barbara Bondar admits to mixed emotions. She feels great pride in the young man who died and respect for the devotion her grandmother showed to his memory for the rest of her 90-plus years.
Barbara says: "Everything I have ever heard or read about this war and how troops were slaughtered by the thousand has done nothing but fan my anger.
"My reading of the battle at the Hohenzollern Redoubt, the slaughter of officers in those first few minutes and the wreckage of the 5th South Staffs within the afternoon, only fuels my disgust with wars and with those politicians who wage them."
But at the time, the Black Country lads viewed the slaughter with a bulldog stoicism that, nearly 90 years on, cannot fail to move us.
