At Ypres with Best-Dunkley

I had been to France before--in 1916, during the Battle of the Somme--but not as an officer; in 1916 I was a private in the Royal Fusiliers, and I had received orders to return...

It has already been observed that the 55th (West Lancashire) Division, after a hot time on the Somme, particularly at Guillemont and Ginchy, had come up the Salient in October,...

"On Sunday (June 10) I went to bed about 10 p.m., and had only been in bed half an hour when a very intense battle appeared to have broken out on our right. A violent artillery...

" ... The weather continues to be glorious: too hot to do anything. I am Orderly Officer to-day. One of my duties as such is to inspect the billets. They are scattered on all si...

I now come to one of the most remarkable, and in some respects certainly the most comical, of all the episodes in which Colonel Best-Dunkley figured--the memorable march from Mi...

This chapter will be a very short one; but, despite its brevity, it seems to me that the event narrated in it should form the subject of a single chapter. General Stockwell's sp...

"I rose at 3.30 this morning, made a hurried breakfast, and went on parade at 4.15. We marched about three miles to the training area. Our dress on this occasion was without tun...

We returned to Ypres on July 1. Everybody was thinking and talking about the great Battle on the Somme of which this was the first anniversary; but before the day was over we ou...

When I got to Bilge Trench I found that the facilities for letter-writing were not quite what they had been before. But there was plenty to write about. Every hour one was confr...

My diary of July 9 tells how we once again got back to the cosy dug-outs in the Ramparts, those ramparts from whence was continually stretched out before our ken, in sunshine an...

"On the night of July 12th we were treated to a new form of gas, 'mustard oil.' The two Companies billeted in Ypres suffered heavily, the casualties numbering 3 officers and 114...

After the bombardment of Ypres there still remained seven more days before our memorable nineteen days' sojourn in the ghastly Salient was to end. And memorable those days certa...

My diary of July 20 goes on to state how our relief was effected: "We were relieved by a company of the 1/5th South Lancashires of General Lewis' 166 Brigade at 8.45 p.m. So I s...

"We got here at 12. Lunch at 2.... My servant Johnson reported sick with gas and departed for hospital; so I asked Sergeant Baldwin to suggest another. He took me to M'Connon. I...

On the evening of July 25 the 164 Brigade marched back from the Watou area to the camps behind Ypres; we went to Query Camp. In my tent at Query Camp on July 27 I wrote my last...

"'Tis Zero! Full of all the thoughts of years! A moment pregnant with a life-time's fears That rise to jeer and laugh, and mock awhile The vaunted courage of the human frame, Ti...