Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 155]
we made some cocoa with the Tommy cooker at 4 a.m. [indecipherable] was fine, & the air was alive with German 'planes - where ours were I don't know, but I've never seen so many Huns up before, crowds of them flying where they liked; some came right over where we were, & one big chunky 'plane flying fairly low, Mitchell & I fired at, but he sailed on. It's very exceptional for Fritz to be in the majority in the air. Wrote up my diary in morning & lay down in the bottom of our new trench, & had an uncomfortable sleep. There was a new idea in yesterday's battle, our aeroplanes brought ammunition, & dropped it from above for us in parachutes, which slowly dropped to the earth. Our company had some sad luck today, some big shells seemed to burst very close to 15 Platoon, on our right. One shell hit the trench, & 2 corporals, Charlie Mann & Marie Holt, two of the finest chaps in the whole battalion, were lying asleep in the bottom of the trench. They were blown to pieces, another chap was badly wounded, another deafened & a fifth got a very bad shaking. One chap, instead of sleeping in the trench, decided to sleep in a shell hole just behind it, & he was untouched, although his equipment was blown to bits. The two were so knocked about that they buried them in the broken trench, & I went along there, as Lt Player read