Life in the Trenches Diary Entries

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Life in the Trenches Diary Entries

November 1914

It's cold, damp and I'm tired. Some of the trench was blown apart

today, we had to build it back up. We didn't have many trenches it was

more of a spread out, open battle.

Today I got shot in the leg (it's still hurting). They said they might

have to amputate but luckily I pulled through without that happening.

The commanders were harsh, they knew I had been shot and still sent me

out on a patrol, I don't blame them though they're just following

their orders I suppose. I ate before I went out, plum and apple (yeah,

tinned food again… great).

I started out. Sneaking slowly out of the trench with Private J.P, one

of the friends I had made since this horrible war began. Friends are

hard to come by out here, having the right attitude helps a lot. We

walked about 100 metres, and then had to commando crawl 50 metres to

even start to see the enemy trenches (and with a bandage rapped

tightly around my leg it wasn't so easy). It was such a dark night

(the moon wasn't out). We saw two enemy soldiers setting up a machine

gun. We had to get out of there quickly! The slightest movement and we

would have been discovered and captured instantly. One of the soldiers

had a star shell in his hand. He would have seen us. We left and

reported back. A good night as far as I'm concerned.

June 1915

Dinner time, (thank god) over all I thought the quality and quantity

of the food rations was pretty good. Even if it was mainly corned beef

for a main meal, and jam for pudding. Today was great, I got my parcel

from home, inside it had ham (witch is quite a luxury in a trench),

custard and so...

... middle of paper ...

... a mining operation today, basically it's a tunnel built underground

all the way to the enemies' trench, the idea is to plant explosives to

blow apart their trench. There were quite a few photographs of some of

the lads using some of the more advanced machine guns being passed

around at tea time, I managed to take one for myself, thought I'd

stick it here.

[IMAGE]

While we were eating we saw a couple of tanks passing in the distance

(using our periscopes of course). It was my first sight of these

amazing machines, they literally smashed through defences! From a

photograph from a friend of mine which I was given, I managed to try

out my drawing skills yet again (practice makes perfect). Below is one

of my tank drawings.

[IMAGE]

It's now 8 o'clock, I better get back to digging. I'll write again

soon.

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