WORRYING whether your three daughters would recognise you after you'd grown a long black beard would seem to be a minor problem when you've seen scores of fellow soldiers killed by enemy machine gun fire.

Writing home to his wife from the battlefield in France in November 1914, soon after the start of the First World War, Coldstream Guard Private Sam Benham also asked her to send him a few "luxuries".

But then the tone of his letter changed as he outlined the horrors of seeing "the poor chaps being killed".

The following January, Sam wrote to his father reporting how he had seen "heaps of dead...lying in front of our trenches".

He added: "I have been lucky so far (but) what's got to be will be."

Days later, Sam was dead following five months of terrible fighting.

Despite his heroic efforts, Sam's name has never appeared on the Bishops Lydeard war memorial - but that wrong looks about to be righted.

The parish council has applied for planning permission to add plaques with the names of nine soldiers killed in the 1914-18 conflict.

Their names were uncovered by the late David Hinton during research for his book A Wartime Parish and The Fallen.

If permission is granted, Sam's name will appear alongside Sgt Robert Oborne, who must have thought his luck was in when he was sent to India with the 4th Battalion Somerset Light Infantry.

After being despatched to Mesopotamia in March 1915, he had the misfortune to fall from his horse and was sent back to England for treatment and later discharged.

He suffered permanent weakness and underwent an operation, although he never fully recovered and lingered on until April 1920, when he died.

Royal Navy Leading Stoke Leonard Henry Gulliford served on board HMS Silvio and joined in the celebrations after surviving the war, only to die aboard the ship at Plymouth in 1919.

Nothing is known about how Private Walter James Langford met his end - he was with the 1st Battalion Royal Dublin Fusilier when he went missing at the Battle of Broodseinde in October 1917.

His parents were officially informed the following year that their son must be considered to have been killed.

Another man to go missing was Petty Officer James Huxtable, of the Royal Navy Volunteer Force, who was wounded at the Battle of Ancre in November 1916 and never found Cpl Thomas Court died after being hit in the head by a sniper in November 1915 after spending a year on the battle front.

Cpl Arthur John Deen of the 1st Battalion Somerset Light Infantry was 34 when he died in April 1918.

Cpl Jacob Hodges, of the 8th Battalion Somerset Light Infantry was among the 443 men and officers killed during the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916.

Private Charles Stutt was among the victims of the slaughter of the Battle of Cambrai, when all but 60 of the 7th Battalion Somerset Light Infantry were wiped out.