During the First World War around 19,000 mailbags crossed the channel every day as people tried to keep in touch with sons, brothers, husbands and lovers.

Now, a new theatrical production Second Minute is set to show how the postal service managed to hold the country together while a generation of men was being destroyed.

Telling stories of soldiers and their families, this drama will explore the lost letters of love, gas attacks, rations, births and deaths in a production based on the archive collection of the Sherwood Foresters regiment.

As part of the Imperial War Museum’s war centenary programme, Spot On, Lancashire’s rural touring network and Nottingham Playhouse will present to selected venues a moving account of the real communications carefully carried between English homes and the chaos and insanity of the trenches.

The Second Minute will be staged at Cliviger Village Hall, on Sunday, May 25, at 7.30pm and then at Samlesbury War Memorial Hall – a venue built in dedication to the First World War – on Friday, May 30, again at 7.30pm.

Sue Robinson, 32, from Spot On said: “The Second Minute is a simply told, moving meditation of the lost stories from the hundreds of thousands of small scraps of paper that survived the mud and slaughter to return to the homes of those that did not.

“Weaving together the heroic, tragic and comic, The Second Minute shares a powerful collection of letters and stories of soldiers and families through their own words.”