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[Page 55]
when daylight came, right opposite where the shell burst was a shell hole & a man was lying in it. I went & had a look at him & it was one of my own company, stone dead I found out afterwards that he had been having a sleep further up the trench & when the Huns started to open out he said he would move to safer quarters & he must have been passing just at the moment when the shell got the other two men.
We got a Priest at 9 am & buried him further up the valleys where a lot of Australians had been buried. Corporal Charles Dent was his name & the night before he had been showing me the Photos of his wife & daughter, so when I went to collect my things close to where the shell had burst I was dumbfounded to find my waterproof sheet, riddled with holes & a piece of shrapnel right through my Haversack into a tin of bully beef & through the other side spoon & fork broke into & all my biscuits broken up.
so you can imagine what a narrow escape I had as I would have been lying there if the Corporal had not been going on duty & offered me his place in the dug-out.
We went back by easy stages to Warloy again & we were put in billets & fitted out again also got more reinforcements which we need badly after such a lot of men gone west & wounded. Our turn came round again to go into the line again & this time we went into the trenches in the supports, where we did fatigue work, also small parties were sent up to clear away where the trenches had been blown