Not seen this thread before, which is weird because I was round my mom's last night for tea, with my grandad too.
So mom passes me this little plastic folder and explains that my grandads uncle was killed on November 5th 1916 at roughly 11am.
It had his death certificate, along with a really detailed version of events, including all of his companies officers field diary notes. He was in the Worcestershire 2nd and the document starts from the company's beginnings to the end of them all. It was incredibly interesting and I even shed a few tears towards the end. The conditions described in the officers notes were just unimaginable to me, 21 year old blokes crawling over thigh high mud to a small ridge, knowing as soon as they went over the top, they'd be sprayed with machine gun fire... just to get to a ridge.
It was in the somme region and he was attacking a trench called bontazki or something similar. They were on the west side of this long line of german trenches, who were dug in deeply, whilst the french soilders were along the east side and much further pushed up. So the commanding officer was forced to literally run into no mans land to keep up with the french.
It wascbasically suicide and the Worcestershire 2nd lost over 300 men, including my great grand uncle.
I'm very proud to say that eventually, they did take the trench.