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Key dates over October 1914

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Lives lost on this day: 2

5th October 1914 - Pitchcroft turned into drilling ground

2nd Batt: Still entrenched north of Soupir under enemy fire, Lt Smythe Osborne arrived with the 4th reinforcements (100 men);

3rd Batt: Arrived Coyolles at 4:30 am, spent day in billets before marching with 42nd Batt RFA to billets at Saintimes.

The Worcester Relief Fund: over £3400: A letter has been received from Mr H J Pill, President of the National Midland Counties' Cross-Country Association, who enclosed a 3d bit, and hoped that every other athlete in the UK would do the same;

Pte H Little of Upper Wick, who was called out as a Reservist, and joined the 2nd Worcs on 5 August, has just arrived home suffering from a compound fracture of the right collar bone. He is the most severely wounded of any of the men who have returned to Worcester, but such is the indomitable courage of our troops that in an interview today he expressed the hope that the wound would have healed properly in about 6 weeks, so that he might once again find himself in the firing line. He, like the other Worcs, took part in all the engagements in the celebrated retirement from Mons, and was for 8 days engaged in the fighting on the Aisne before he was unlucky enough to stop a bullet;

If anyone wants to see what patriotism can do, let him go to Pitchcroft. That large area is now a drilling ground for all the local military forces. Yeomanry, Artillery, and Rifles send men there every day, for 2 or 3 hours in the morning, 2 hours in the afternoon, to be instructed in the business of soldiery. The drilling makes an interesting and, at times, a stirring spectacle. The demonstration is not without its humour, once one saw a sergeant running by the side of a recruit and holding his head up;

Police-constable W Holmes, a member of the Worcs Regt, who was at Mons, and greatly suffered with acute rheumatism after being 8 days and nights in the trenches, has written a letter, in which he says he was one of those who had to cross the River Aisne on the single girder of a destroyed bridge under severe artillery fire. Writing of his experiences in the trenches, Holmes stated that they had to bale the water out with bully beef tins.

Information researched by Sue Redding