SECOND LIEUTENANT GEOFFREY ARTHUR WARD
ROYAL WEST KENT REGIMENT
30TH SEPTEMBER 1916 AGE 36
BURIED: MILL ROAD CEMETRY, FRANCE
Homo plantat homo irrigat sed deus dat incrementum (Man planteth and watereth but God giveth the increase) is both the motto of the Merchant Taylors' School, where Geoffrey Ward had been a pupil, and the first two lines of the chorus of its school song:
Man plants, man waters,
But God bestows growth.
Man plants, man digs,
Man waters and tends carefully,
But it is only by God's cherishing
That he produces growth.
The 7th Battalion The Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment was heavily engaged in the Somme campaign from the first day and throughout the whole of July. Most of August was spent in the comparative quiet of Flanders before it returned to the Somme at the end of August. Second Lieutenant Ward was killed in action on 30 September during the closing stages of the 18th Division's attack on the Schwaben Redoubt. Brought into the action on 26 September, by the time the 7th Battalion were withdrawn on 5 October they had lost all but one of the officers who had gone into action on the 26th, together with 70 soldiers.
Mrs Geoffrey Ward chose her husband's inscription. She also added some extra biographical details to the War Graves Commission register, noting that he had enlisted in August 1914 so was a very early volunteer, and that his father had been the scholar Henry Leigh Douglas Ward (1825-1906) of the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum.