46th (North Midland) Division

[3][5] The North Midland Division was sent to France in February 1915 and served on the Western Front for the duration of the First World War.

During the Battle of Loos the 46th Division was decimated in an attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt on 13 October 1915.

[6] It was later involved in the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, where in the opening phase as part of VII Corps, the southernmost corps of the British Third Army, the Division took part in the diversionary attack at Gommecourt on the first day on the Somme, 1 July 1916, which was a catastrophic failure resulting in heavy losses.

[7] The event dogged the division afterwards with a poor reputation until 29 September 1918, during the Hundred Days Offensive, when it re-established its name at the Battle of St. Quentin Canal where, utilising life-belts and collapsible boats, it crossed the formidable obstacle of the canal and used scaling ladders to surmount the steep gradient of the opposite bank and captured multiple fortified machine-gun posts.

[9] During the war, it served in the First, Second, Third and Fifth Armies, and in the I, II, III, V, VII, XI, XIII, XIV, XVII and XVIII Corps.

Territorial company parading on mobilisation in August 1914
Men of H Company, 8th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, mobilising for service, 7 August 1914.
A barbed wire gate in a trench system to form a block against raiders at Cambrin in trenches held by the 1/7th Battalion , Sherwood Foresters, 16 September 1917.
Brig-Gen John Campbell VC on Riqueval Bridge addresses men of the 137th (Staffordshire) Infantry Brigade after breaking the German's Hindenburg Line defences on 29 September 1918.