Personal Diary Entry: August 20th 1916

Dined with Handress Lloyd at the Inniskilling hd qrs in Ypres prison. Gillan came too. A quiet day, hardly any shelling. A KOSB patrol brought in 2 dead Germans from in front of their wire.

The 4^th Divn and 4^th Canadian Divn are going to take over the Canadian Corps line to allow them to go south. This means that all our 3 divns will be in the line the whole time, and no one in Corps reserve.

War Dairy Entry: July 6th 1916

The Inniskilling patrol which went out to capture the machine gun last night found that it had been removed and came back empty-handed. The parties out digging the trench last night had a fairly rotten time, I gather, the trench is nearer the German line than our own by a good deal. They made a lot of noise getting out and brought on gun and rifle fire. I was up in the trenches early this morning and saw pools of blood in places, they also don’t appear to have got down very deep, judging from a distance. You cant get out to it by day. 

It was quite quiet everywhere while I was going round. The men looked very tucked up; going round the trenches this morning I spoke to one man in the SWB who was partly insane, and later on I passed a man in the Borders throwing a fit. This is not to be wondered at as on the 1^st the Bde had about 2150 casualties and most of the men have been under heavy shellfire for 13 days. 

There has been the usual noise going on round here all day. Monkhouse turned in to lunch, they are going to make him a brigadier. Raikes and Perse went round the reserve trenches this morning to see if they could find some place to put the SWB. A draft of 200 has arrived for the brigade, so that the SWB can now be withdrawn from the firing line. They found some RA quarters which have just been evacuated N of Mesnil which will easily accommodate their 250 men.

War Diary Entry: 5th July 1916

Heavy shelling again all day today, Thiepval Wood was given a bit of a rest, but Hamel, Mesnil and Martinsant got it pretty hot, also Aveluy Wood. Our Hd Qrs are just in the centre between all these places and has so far been overlooked. 

The patrol of the Inniskillings went out to the mill last night and found it unoccupied, they crawled about another 150 yards up the marsh and came on a machine gun firing through a hedge about 10 yards away, they watched it for a bit and then came away. They are going out again tonight with a party to try and capture it. The marking out of the new trench was not completed last night as they were very late starting work. Tonight two RE coys and 2 Pioneer battalions are going out to dig it. 

Various people were in here during the day arranging for the work. About 5pm a car with two staff officers in was hit by a shell about 300 yards down the road from our hd qrs. The shell burst under the car & smashed it up, but the 2 officers got out and walked away a bit shaken. I don’t know who they were.