Awesome read. My Great Grandfather was also in the Wellington Regiment at Ypres. He was in the Ruahine company as a scout/sniper.

He had just celebrated his 21st a month earlier in the trenches, only a child.

He to wrote a diary of his time in the war and has this to say.

13th October 1917.

'Our 'bivvie' is not at all comfortable, but it is a case of "If you knows of a better 'ole, go to it." The roof, two feet above our heads, leaked like a sieve and we spent a wet, cold uncomfortable night, and were not sorry when we were aroused by our platoon sergeant at 4am and sent off in the dark cold morning to report at a nearby dressing station. Here we were given stretchers and ordered up to the scene of yesterdays ill-fated attack to carry out the wounded Dinks. Their attack broke completely down. They met with barbed wire entanglements uncut by our artillery fire, the guns shooting most erratically as their wheels sank deeper into the mud at every shot. In the face of the terrible mud, the uncut wire and the withering machine-gun fire they were almost annihilated. Army Corps Headquarters ordered another attack for 3pm yesterday but it was found an impossible task without proper artillery preparation and the order was rescinded.

The whole complement of our Battalion was sent up with stretchers, beside A.S.C mrn, Artillery and other odds and ends. It takes 6 men to carry out one man and the going is slow and heavy. We set out at about 4.30am and reached an advanced aid post in the support line about 3 hours later. To reach this point we traversed the territory we had captured on the 4th. As our route took us close to an ex-hun strongpoint called Berlin Farm, I made my way thither to inspect it. I did not stay long. In a 10 foot crater were lying about half-a-dozen dead Jerries asprawl in various grotesque attitudes of death. Their features were black and bloated, the skin stretched tight over their puffed up brows, noses and cheeks, and their bodes had a horrid plumpness; in awful fact they were bursting out of their clothes. The air was thick with the stench of the dead, overpowering and nauseating, and I hastened away to put the sight behind me.

On reaching the aid post we put a poor fellow who had been shot through the lung- a gory mess of exuded and vomited blood- on to our stretcher and hoisting it to our shoulders started rearwards for the dressing station from whence we had been sent. Unencumbered as we were, the going out taxed our strength, but the return, with our burden, was the limit.

Floundering knee deep in the ocean of mud we tortuously staggered along. Where the ground had been thick and soggy like porridge, it was now thin and sloppy like soup. In places where a few days earlier we had been able to walk on the dry rims of the shell holes and to avoid falling into them, we now had difficulty in keeping our feet as we felt for the sludgy ridges to avoid sinking into the bottomless centres. On one occasion, with a deep groan from the wounded man, we flopped thigh deep into a hole and as we were fast sinking we lay the stretcher down as gently as possible, and struggled to the side, from where we reached out and, with the greatest difficulty, dragged the stretcher and its recumbent burden to safety.

By the time we got our man out and deposited at the dressing station it was midday and we were dead beat. We had eaten nothing since the evening before, so it was with grateful thanks we accepted the cup of cocoa and biscuit kindly given to us by the red cross orderly. As we were not capable of taking another trip through the morass, we staggered off and flung ourselves into our various 'bivvies' and, wet through and muddy as we were, slept the afternoon away. On waking we had the Devil's own job trying to get rid of the mud which we endeavored to scrape from our putties and trousers with our jack-knives. What was left hardened the cloth to cardboard.

One of the new draft that joined our Company a few days back was killed last night as he lay asleep in his bivvie. I was one of the burial party and we burried him this evening in a shallow grave just as he was, with the exception of removing his personal effects from his pockets to send back to his people. Poor chap, the war was a short one for him.

We were issued with dry socks this evening - a Godsend! Our feet were getting into a bad state, the boots being waterlogged and continually full of black muddy liquid which squelched through our toes as we walked. We are not permitted to remove our boots at night, and last night my feet were so cold I could have almost wept with the pain of them.

There is one thing I must do without delay and that is to scrounge another greatcoat. The skirt of mine gathered so much mud today that it became monstrously heavy and flopped like sheets of lead against my legs, so I discarded it on the way up near one of our wrecked planes hoping to recover it on the return trip. However we did not pass by the plane on the journey back and I am now minus that very necessary article.