Friday 16th June 1916: Trooper F W Ballard, Bedfordshire
Yeomanry, writing to a friend this past week says: “for the past three weeks a
part of our regiment has been doing trench work in a very hot part of the line,
and this particular ridge has been mentioned in the daily papers for some
considerable time now(1). You will be pleased to learn that several Southill
boys are with this party, viz. C Lockey, Sid Hall and George Bean(2); this is a
fine experience for all of us. We are billeted in a village, or rather the
remains of one, as everything is in a terrible state of ruin, every building,
including the church being in a battered condition. The Sunday night we came
into the line the Boches attacked and got into our front trenches, but were driven out
by the brigade bombers; we were told that Fritz sent no less than half a
million shells over our lines in 4½ hours, so we evacuated our front line
trench, as it was of no use. You can guess when they got in it was of no use to
them.
The next two
nights the laugh was on our side, our artillery bombarding their trenches all
night long; since then things have been much quieter. Really it does not seem
possible for humanity to life in such affairs as these, with so many spare pieces
of iron flying about. We go up the line to work every night and we have been
extremely fortunate up to the present, not having had a single casualty and we
have been working on the top only from 80 to 200 yards from the enemy’s front
line at times.
Source: Bedfordshire Standard 16th
June 1916
(1) The war
diary gives no mention of this but states that the Yeomanry were at Desvres,
well behind the lines near Boulogne.
(2) 30882
Private George Bean, from Broom, would die on 8th December 1918 and is buried
at Maubeuge (Sous-le-Bois) Cemetery
