Soldier Record

Don't eat that boy, it'll get in your inside !

Grandfather talked little about his WWI service except how cold it was in the winter and how hungry they were. He served with his brother Bill and they had some good times when they were out of the line on rest but it was hell on earth when 'the job was on' as he put it. They both worked on the mining of Messines ridge but their main job was to go in behind the barrage when a push was on and clear up any wire that the guns had missed by using bangalore torpedoes. This enabled the infantry to move up without obstruction. When doing this on one occasion he was hit by shrapnel from a British shell which had fallen short and he was badly wounded and brought back to blighty to recover. When asked where he lived he replied London and they sent him to Manchester to a hospital there. He went back again and was demobbed in 1919. I recall that he would never eat corned beef because he saw so much of it in the army he got thoroughly fed up with it. He started smoking while in the army and got through twenty or thirty Gold Flake for the rest of his life and the fags did what the Germans failed to do.