30th October 1914

Well, I’m sitting down, buried like a rabbit, but not as deep as I should like to be under the conditions, but you can take my word for it I’m deep enough to be safe from the “Little Snipers”. They do not appear to worry us to a great extent. Of course, we don’t put up our heads etc. to feel them; it is bad enough when we are compelled to. It is the ‘coalboxes’ or ‘Jack Johnsons’ that worry us. It is bad enough to hear them screaming over us through the air, but it is like being in hell to get them bursting in front or anywhere near us. The terrific noise, shake, smoke and the waiting for them to drop as one hears them coming is a thing I cannot explain. It is awful waiting to hear and feel the explosion so as to be able to breathe once again freely and wait for the scream of the next one. They leave a hole large enough to bury a horse.

Never did I dream that any of the different sort of things to be done by a European race that has been done here. The hundreds of thousands of homes in Belgium and France that have been purposely robbed and ruined is a disgrace to any nation. It is an awful sad sight for us to see as we came through the villages and towns but what in heaven’s name must have been in the thoughts of the French ‘Tommy’. The Germans were left strewn all up the roads and in the hedges, also the woods. Some were ghastly.

It is really a game of luck and we shall be glad to be out of it. There’s no doubt our boys are in wonderful good spirit. Perhaps you may be sitting in the trenches holding a mother’s meeting, when all of a sudden one of our big guns may fire from right behind us and not noticing which way it is fired at first it is sport to see us all bob down. It is sport of a good sort, played slow, but only let me scrape through safely and I shall always think of all the boys and their splendid spirit. When we have had the chance to buy a loaf of bread out here, we have had to pay as much as 1/2d. Still I expect we must not grumble.