The 6th Buffs in the Trenches

I spent a week in the trenches with some more of the boys from Sittingbourne, but they had a bit of hard luck once or twice, as Tommy terms it, with shells. The boys belong to the 6th Battalion, The Buffs. One of their bits of hard luck happened on the 21st July. As they were going into the trenches a shell burst amongst them and knocked over seventeen of them. They are a plucky lot of lads. It was close to our advanced dressing station, and two men under my charge dressed their wounds and wired for the motor ambulances, and got them away to hospital in under twenty minutes, under shell fire the whole time.

The Germans have got no respect for Red Cross. That is one of their special targets, and if they see us carrying a wounded man on a stretcher they turn a machine gun on us, and also regimental stretcher bearers. But they will get paid for all their dirty work when our boys get the shells that they want. I have your paper sent to me every week and I was pleased to see that just as you were going to press you got news to say that my cousin Herbie Harrison, was safe in Norway after I received a letter to say that he went down on HMS India.