Wednesday 7th July: The village of Benington, Herts, has been saddened by the death at the front of two soldier lads who were close friends and who died together in their sleep from shell explosion. They were Private R J Warner and Private E W S Mayes, both of the Beds Regiment.
Jack and Willie, as they were affectionately known to everyone in the village, were inseparable chums. They had grown up together as lads, had played together, worked together at their trade as carpenters, enlisted together on the outbreak of war, visited home on leave together, gone out to France together, and it seems only a fitting conclusion to their young lives that they should together lay down their lives in the same great cause, killed by the explosion of the same shell as they rested together in the trenches. Side by side in the same grave they were reverently laid in their last long sleep and the same simple cross bears both their names(1).
Source: Biggleswade Chronicle 9th July 1915
(1)They no longer lie side by side. Curiously Willie Mayes lies in Larch Wood (Railway Cutting Cemetery) near Ypres whereas Jack Warner has no known grave and is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial, Ypres; it makes one wonder if Warner is also in Larch Wood but unrecorded or whether the shell so disarranged the bodies that they were put in one plot and, when moved at the end of the war, were assumed to be one man.
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