Friday 22nd October 1915: Drummer H Emmerton of Water Hall, Salford wrote to his mother on 30th September: “We are all standing to our posts in the trench, which is a regular thing, a quarter of an hour before sunrise and sunset. We could see the German lines as if it were daylight and nearly all of us got wet through in an hour, the water was up to the tops of our boots. You can guess we were pleased enough to see the daybreak and the time rolling round for us to get relieved(1). I have not been in the trenches long but quite long enough to see what life is like in them, and what our comrades had to go through the long weary months of last winter. I hope it is not our luck to have this winter out here, although I suppose with a little grumbling and smiling we shall pull through as they have done”.
“The weather is quite unsettled now and it has been wet nearly every day this week, so I will leave you to guess what we all look like. Most of you have seen men after digging clay in the brickyards – we are worse. I used to laugh when I was told big guns caused the clouds to burst and rain in torrents, but it seems to me now there must be something in it. We have had a heavy artillery bombardment for more than a week. They have cut the Germans’ barbed-wire entanglements all to pieces with the shells, and the trenches we saw them digging one day our shells filled in for them the next”.
“Before we came out here we used to think the Germans could not shoot or do anything, but I can tell you as regards warfare there is not much they cannot do. They use gas, liquid fire, all sorts and sizes of shells. We don’t see or hear so much of their Jack Johnsons now but their latest invention is what they call aerial torpedoes and they are much worse for they shake you off your feet at a hundred yards”.
“Thank you for the Bedfordshire Times I received again quite safely. I gave it to my pals to read after I had finished with it myself and heard the same remark pass between them. One said “I cannot see anything in about our battalion again this week”. “There is a piece about most of our other regiments” another one said “The people in Bedfordshire do not know there is such a battalion as the 6th Beds or, in other words as they are called, “the Gallant Sixth” [we are only too glad to receive and publish (subject to the Censor) news of the 6th Beds but we cannot publish what is not sent – Ed].
“We are quite aware we have not done the good work our 1st and 2nd Battalions have done, but we have been undergoing very hard training for over twelve months. There were times out of number during our stay of about three months on Salisbury Plain we had long route marches, musketry and bayonet fighting and we used to grumble and say to each other, I don’t know how you are but I am just about fed up with it, we are having too much of it. We can see now what it was all done for and after all we did not do too much. We used at one time to do a lot of marches, mostly long ones too, and often times you could hear one say to another “Stick it, you know the Bedfords have a name for marching, and we want to keep it up, and when the time comes and the Germans begin to hit too hard we shall show them that we still have some of the old 1st’s and 2nd’s blood in us”.
Source: Bedfordshire Times 22nd October 1915
(1) The 6th Battalion were on the Somme in the neighbourhood of Bienvillers-au-Bois
