Clive Ward

Clive Ward wrote Trench 31 as a compact historical novel about three young men from Derby who volunteer for the British Army at the beginning of the First World War. An independently published 2018 print edition carries ISBN 9781729349328. The story follows their movement from civilian expectations and training into artillery fire, mud, fear, and dark humor on the Western Front. Ward dedicated the book to his great-uncle, Private Bertram Allen Ward of the 10th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, and frames the narrative through a later family visit to a memorial near Ypres. That structure keeps the consequences of combat visible across generations rather than ending them with a battlefield scene. The young men initially imagine enlistment as an adventure, but friendship and routine become their defenses against arbitrary danger. Trench 31 combines family remembrance with accessible military detail, using a specific regiment and loss to approach the wider human cost of industrial war.