7e Regiment de Ligne, Belgian Army
Jacques Joseph Detrez was one of the first Belgian soldiers to come to Gloucester for treatment shortly after the outbreak of war based on a report of his funeral in the Gloucestershire Echo of 23 October 1918. Other information is contained on his Belgian military headstone in Gloucester Old Cemetery.
He was born in Liege on 12 October 1889. According to his headstone he served with the 7e Regiment de Ligne (7th Infantry) but the Commonwealth War Graves Commission register states that it was the 5e.
The Gloucester Journal of 17 October 1914 reported that two Gloucester detachments of the Red Cross Society had been mobilised on 15 October with instructions to prepare to receive fifty wounded Belgian soldiers. They set to scrubbing and cleaning the new Workhouse Infirmary, setting up two wards, one upper and one lower and an operating theatre, each ward staffed by twenty-one nurses, supported by doctors.
The same newspaper reported, on 24 October, that the fifty soldiers had arrived, mostly suffering from gun shot wounds to the legs and arms, or both and some with rheumatic pain resulting from exposure whilst in the trenches. A couple more soldiers arrived in early November.
Eventually those who had fully recovered returned to the Belgian Army but Detrez appears to have remained in Gloucester, having obtained a provisional discharge from the army.
According to the Gloucester Journal of 26 October 1918 he was initially provided for by the local War Refugees Committee and then obtained employment and became self supporting.
At the time of his death he was employed by Fielding & Platt, an established engineering firm based in the Docks area of Gloucester.
Jacques Joseph Detrez was taken ill with influenza in early October 1918 and developed pneumonia, from which he died at the Great Western Red Cross Hospital, Gloucester on 17 October 1918, aged 29.
His body rested at St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church before being taken for burial in the Gloucester Old Cemetery on 21 October.