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[Page 15]
October 2
5.
Sgt. Green woke me early, to go up to Menin Road a [indecipherable] runner, had to turn it down after a trial in the yard. Ankle too twisty.
So Blue Herring up in my place. This time yesterday morning the guns one long heavy drumming. Now there's only the occasional heavy bored report of a howitzer. But this time Fritz was counter attacking – 9.25, and our practice barrage was timed for 9.30, and it was punctual.
6.
In Egypt and till quite lately receiving the Bulletin after looking out Lindsay and Low, then the Red Page, I turned for Lawson. But a month or so back I read carefully a poem of M. Forest's, and now his contributions are worth seeking beyond others. One of his of last week – Bulletin July 5, "Grey Farm". From a cable extract he took his poem, "The Battle raged about Grey Farm". Written in Queensland it might easily have been written here: all the atmosphere, of before war days and now, as in its six verses, all the beauties of its few days & the dull deadness of its war'd days. It ends,
'Grey Farm! The shadow of a dream!
Your walls go with a crash.
The scream of shells, the roar of guns,
The piercing lightning flash!
Grey Farm, you are a smoking heap,
of shattered roofs and ash.
And trodden grass, and buried flowers,
and poplars split with storm,
La Mere is there no more to give
a welcome quick and warm.
Though something on the threshold
lies in bloody uniform.'
It might easily have been Luisenhof Farm in front of Ligney Thilloy, up from factory Corner, or Moquet Farm from Pozieres.
When the second and third Battalion took Hermies suddenly from the Bosch, they were beaten back, heavily losing: and the cutting down of fruit trees and desolating they'd practised from Bapaume upwards, they'd no time to compleat. Just by Hermies, by the railway line, was a prettily formaly arranged garden, of two parts hedge divided, strawberry gardens and flowers one part, and apple and pear trees the other. In each part were small summer houses, and in one a dovecot – used then by our Artillery as an observation post. This was the
Garden… full of bees and tall French hollyhocks,
Pale lavender and privet hedge, and
fern leaved "ladies smocks"
Coquetting with the formal paths a
flare of scarlet phlox.
7.
Tom brings word in this hour, of Ernie Brown's dying of wounds, and Billy Keel being knocked.