We had another casualty, a Birmingham lad who was in charge of that gun.

The engineers would rig up a bit of a dug out on a dry spot and make a bit of shelter with corrugated sheeting.

They’d been trench mortared.

This Birmingham lad had been hit in the shoulder with a trench mortar fragment. They brought him to my gun as the duckboard led back from it. Other than that you were walking through the mud.

There were meant to be four in a team, but it never got up to scratch, it was more like two. We were organised in four sections: A,B,C,D. The joke was they had us training in teams of Five at Grantham; that was never going to happen, not the need and not the man power.

I said to this Birmingham lad, “You’ve got a Blighty.”

I kept him there ‘til late. Blair had him taken away.

I saw Blair a few days later. He told me this lad had died.

Blair was the Section Officer; Williams was the C.O.

(The edge of Houthulst Forest was reached by XIV Corps and the French in an attack on the 9th October 1917.

On the 12th October the XIV Corps entered the forest. Haig wanted to force the enemy to evacuate the Forest; an objective he continued to push for throughout October 1917).

As machine-gunners we were sent in to hold the position.

This is what I learnt after the war, the whys and wherefores; what I was doing in that stink.

I was in the spot at least four times.