Forgotten Voices of the Somme Read Online Free PDF Page A

so I said to him, 'I'm lousy, sir.' He said, 'Lousy? Hm . . . we're all lousy.' I said, 'Well, I've never been used to it, sir.' He said, 'Do you think I have?' I'll never forget that. And he said, 'What have you been doing?' So I told him, I briefly outlined what I'd done. And he said I'd rendered myself unfit for duty. But in no way I was going to be excused duty. So I had to just carry on as usual.
    Sergeant Charles Quinnell
    9th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
    For the midday meal, two or three chaps could amalgamate and one would open his tin of Fray Bentos bully beef [corned beef]. On top of the bully, there was always a quarter of an inch of fat. Now that fat was very precious because with it, you could chop up the bully beef, and fry it up in your mess tin lid. And you could smash up your biscuit with your bayonet, powder it, and put it in with the chopped bully. That was quite tasty.
    Sometimes we were issued with raw potatoes. Now raw potatoes in the front line – to the uninitiated – were simply a waste of time, but when the chaps had been out there a few months they utilised everything they could lay their hands on. You could take a raw potato and if you cut it into
    very, very thin slices then you could fry that in your bacon fat in the morning. It was like sauté potatoes, and it was quite edible.
    Signaller Leonard Ounsworth
    124th Heavy Battery , Royal Garrison Artillery
    We used to have Maconochies – a sixteen-ounce tin, which was supposed to have ten ounces of meat and four ounces of potato and two ounces of other vegetables in it. And it was a flat tin, you could heat it up on a fire – puncture a hole in it, you see, otherwise it would burst.
    Private Harold Hayward
    12th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment
    We carried emergency rations that were not to be eaten until we were given instruction to eat them. The best thing I can tell you is that they were made up of hard dog biscuits. It had to be a good dog to bite them. When we were in action, and there was no orderly ration, I had recourse to these biscuits. I saw several fellows with broken teeth trying to bite them. I used to try and break them with my knife, and then just suck them down. Hardly any taste at all. But there must have been some nutrient in them.
    Rifleman Robert Renwick
    16th Battalion, King's Royal Rifle Corps
    We used to go on ration parties when we were out of the line, on rest. It was almost worse than being in the trenches. You could be out in the open, sometimes under heavy fire. You'd carry the food in sandbags, and the water in unused petrol tins. You'd collect it from a dump, and you'd go up through the communication trenches. You'd take it up to the front line, and give it to the sergeant, or the officer, and they'd distribute it.
    Lieutenant Norman Dillon
    14th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers
    There were constant carrying parties . We were carrying forward rolls of barbed wire, pickets for hanging it on, shovels, sandbags, wood, posts and wire for revetments and the sides of trenches, duckboards for wet places. Everything had to be carried up.
    Sergeant Charles Quinnell
    9th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
    During the day, in the front line, there was always some digging to be done. You see, the sides of the trenches were always giving way especially in wet weather, and you would find that perhaps during the night the side of the trench had come in. Well, the trench had to be built up with sandbags filled with earth. There was always a repair job to be done; there was always a support trench needed repair.
    And there was always a lot of sleep going on during the daytime. You see, you reversed the order of your usual living. Night-time was the period of activity. There was always something to do at night-time. There was the ration party, there was the water party, there was a wiring party, there were patrols. After a few weeks, a soldier could curl up, and he could be asleep in two minutes. If nobody came for you to do a job you