I heard a hell of a squeal at this farm and I shouted across, I said, ‘Who’s that?’ Somebody shouted back, they said, ‘It’s your old mate Sid’. My old mate Sid Carroll. I thought , ‘Ooh hell’. I never thought for a second, I jumped out that bloomin’ cellar, and started to run across to this farm and somebody shouted, in fact it were old Arthur Willis, he shouted back, ‘ Go on back', he said, ' He’s alright, go back’. So I turned round and run back’.

All the shelling stopped, quietened down, nothing happened, no breakthrough, nothing. Well at night, when it got dark, a sergeant and a corporal come to this cellar. Sergeant said to me, ‘You’re under arrest’.

Well he took me into old Birchall, in his dugout. So he says, ‘You know what you’re charged with?’ I said,’No’.

'Desertion', he said, 'Cowardice, shell fire, deserting your men’.

I says, 'I didn’t’.

He said, 'You did', he said, 'I saw you'. He said. 'I saw you from my own dugout’, he said, ‘I saw you run away.’

‘Course I told him what had actually happened, you see, and, he understood.

He said, ‘Well’, he said, ‘I won’t report you’, he said, ‘ if I do you’ve got no hope whatever. He said, ‘You was in that cellar with a section, to lead those men if they attacked. It don’t matter whatever happens’, he said, ‘In battle, you mustn’t worry about your friends’, he said, ‘not even your brother. If he falls stretcher bearers are provided for that’, he said, ‘not you’, he said. ‘But’, he said, ‘There was just one very, very small thing in your favour that may have helped to save you.’ He said, ‘When you ran away and left them’, he said, ‘you was running towards the Germans, not away from them’.

So that was a bit of luck wasn’t it?