A Bloody Shame

Hi Folks, Albert is here again.

We'll its been a pretty mixed bag again this week. I'm currently in the front line again having come in on the evening of the 13th. We've had 7 men wounded in the last two days from grenades, shells and snipers. On the whole its is fairly quiet, as quiet as it comes these days. There's regular bombing and shelling at sporadic times. It can drive you crazy if you think about it, the not knowing if your times up. But as I've said before I keep myself busy.

At the beginning of the week during the 10th to the 13th we were in billets and had a our usual rest and recreation. C Company was mustered for an inspection by the Brigadier. He comes round every so often to show his face and do his duty of inspecting the troops. The boys turned out in their best uniform and showed bags of swank doing their best marching and drill parade.

I'm in B Company so wasn't part of this event. I was able to take it easy and enjoy the frivolity in the estaminets. There was the usual working parties to improve the communication trenches and of course helping with the tunnelling under the Hun lines. So I volunteered to do some, to keep busy, but being able to return to the billets on the evening and enjoy a beer or two makes it a bit like normality, a bit like an ordinary working day back home.

The village is taking a right hammering nowadays. The Hun sends shells over everyday with regularity. There's plenty of damage to the houses and a lot of the village folk have now moved away. Many of the houses are empty other than our men habiting them on a shift basis, four days in the house and four days in the trench with our counter parts occupying the houses in turn.

We have some large mobile field kitchens that provide hot meals for us when were not in the trenches. We used to get fed by the villagers, who we paid for this service, but with their moving away the men have to feed themselves. In order to ensure we get a good meal the field kitchens now cook daily meals for us. The following photo shows one of these kitchens.

A Field Kitchen

I forgot to mention in my last post that Lieutenant Macdonald and 26 men had joined us on the 5th of March. These were much welcomed as we had been losing a lot of men to disease and trench foot. We are only just managing to keep numbers up. With deaths, injuries, disease and trench foot we must be losing about 50 men a month. Thats about 6% per month. So since starting writing to you in December we've lost and replaced a quarter of our men, that's one company of 200 men!

We've just had another 122 men joined us from Blighty today. That now makes us 70 over strength. Give it two months and we'll be 30 under again!

I feel sorry for the new chaps. They don't know what they are coming to. Back home there's plenty of newsreels in the flicks, the cinemas, but its all been censored to only show the picture that the top brass and Government want to show. There's none of this smashed and ruined houses, rows of graves in the cemetery and bloody broken bodies in the field hospitals and trenches. Its all what a glorious war and how we're giving the Hun a bloody nose. These new lads are in for a surprise!

I have a photo of the Snipers House in the village. This is where we start our run to houses 9 and 10 and where we start the tunnel. You can see the hole we've knocked in the wall to give safe entry and the sandbags around the walls to protect form shell blasts.

Back of Snipers House

This brings me onto another bloody shame in this war. That of severely reprimanding men for basic frailties and mistakes. If you get caught without your basic kit your up on a charge. If your without your gun then its hell and high water, your up on a court martial.

Recently one chap paid the ultimate price for a simple mistake. In the bedroom of the snipers house there is a window that overlooks the Huns front line and looks down towards Frelinghien. From this vantage point we can see what the Hun are up to and report on his movements. A sentry is posted on this window every day and night to gather and provide valuable information. Right by the window is a bed and if you sit on the bed you can still see out and perform your on watch duty.

Well this one bloke was on duty one day and an officer came round doing check on everything. When he went to the room he found the bloke asleep. He gave him a right dressing down and told him in no uncertain words what would happen if he did anything like it again. We'll he came round later on and when he went and looked the soldier was asleep on the bed again. That was it, he was put up for court martial.

We heard he had been shot at dawn. It was a bloody waste. He was a good soldier, a good bloke, a good fellow human being. Now he is gone, not shot by the enemy but killed by his own side for doing what we all do when the tiredness gets the better of us, for falling asleep.

The crime and punishment was read out to us. This was to impress upon us our duty and to make sure we didn't neglect it. Instead it made us angry at the top officers, the fools in the chateaux deep behind the lines with their fine dining and fine comforts.

It was a bloody shame.

Who knows, maybe one day one of those fools may come close enough to the front line to get hit by a stray shell. I doubt it though, the top brass never come that near.

So chums, I'm back on sentry duty tonight in the trench and I won't be making the  mistake of falling asleep. If the Hun doesn't get me either I'll speak to you next week.

Albert x