Looking round the Hun’s quarters and inspecting a battery of huge guns, abandoned, together with all their stores, ammunition etc. They bear the name “Krupp”. Rather pathetic to find half-written letters among the debris.
Balloons all over the place. Fritz lobbed a “toute suite” shell somewhere near whilst we were at tea and one fellow remarked that “many more of them would make a fellow swallow a hot spud”. Had another holocaust this afternoon and burnt all my precious letters. It is not wise to keep them, an old hand told me that more than once he had had to interfere with men reading and commenting on the letters of men who had been hit.
Oh those terrible mules of mine! They take long slow strides like camels. When the shelling started yesterday, I lashed the Hibernian Steeplechaser into a prodigious loping canter wonderful to behold. The Poet’s groans and grunts seem to say “But this is a fearful business!”
Dozens of our planes going over bombing.
Had a look at German graveyard; their wooden crosses are much grander than ours. One of the dead was “Englander” so and so, but they had given him the same kind of cross.
[Image: British and Australian troops examining 150 mm artillery guns (captured by the British in the Amiens sector) at Longueau, 29 August 1918. IWM (Q 80023). Longueau is on the eastern outskirts of Amiens, south-west of where Lincoln was with the NZ Division. The image is however illustrative of ‘huge guns’ abandoned as the Germans retreated.]
[Image: Battle of Amiens. A dump of German artillery guns and howitzers captured by the British Fourth Army, 27 August 1318. One in foreground was captured by the Australian Corps (note a message scribbled on the barrel – “Captured by Anzac Corps. What about the Tanks?”). Those in the foreground are all 21 cm Mörser 16 heavy howitzers. IWM (Q 9269)]
Walk March 