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[Page 3]
…. It was just dusk, and I had gone down to the end of the Company to see that they were standing to arms, and was talking to the sergeant watching them drop a couple of shells on one of our saps. Then I saw a bomb coming and we ducked, then a shell, and we slipped into the shelter of one of the bays in the front trench. After that they lifted the lid off hell – bombs, rifle-grenades, shells, coal-boxes, weary willies and whiz-bangs all bursting at once. They made some noise, but the thing that impressed me most was the tearing rending sound they made, like gigantic hail tearing along before a thousand-mile-an-hour gale through an orchard. ….
After the bombardment was over, I had to go along to B Company, next to ours, and see how they were. It was deuced tough going: there were hardly any duckboards left, (these are the wooden footways raised above the mud) and two or three times I fell down holes three or four feet deep. Got rather a shock when I switched on my torch, and on looking up found no parapet between me and the Germans – blown clean away – and fully expected some shots at the light. Things were in a deuce of a mess there, parapets and dug-outs and everything mere heaps of earth. This was Ferguson's Company (he's now a Captain) but I naturally had no time to yarn with him. The three officers with him were outed, one missing and two badly wounded, and he had about 24 killed and 60 wounded. ….
Myrton Allan
A Coy, 20th Battalion