An Officer on the Western Front
Anthony Fletcher reads his grandfather’s correspondence from the Western Front to see how he maintained morale and developed his leadership.
The Memorial at Faubourg-d’Amiens Cemetery in Arras records the names of 35,942 Allied soldiers who fell in that area of the Western Front and whose graves are not known. Seven hundred men of the Nottingham and Derbyshire Regiment, the Sherwood Foresters are listed there. 109 from its 2/5th battalion died on March 21st, 1918, the day that the final German offensive on the Western Front began. Overall, that day, around 78,000 men from both sides were killed, wounded or taken prisoner, the highest figure for a single day’s fighting in the whole of the Great War. The 2/5th Sherwood Foresters was one of seven British battalions each of which suffered losses of more than a hundred men. One of those killed from this battalion was Major Reggie Chenevix Trench (1888-1918), my grandfather. This article is based upon many of the 300 or so letters he wrote home to his wife and mother, between February 1917 and the day he was killed.
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