Tag Archives: rain

3 August 1917 – To Odile

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Transcription

3. 8. 17

My dear Odd,

Thanks for your last. They say you may now be going to Walton. If you want the pram – why not borrow it. You will have to get a license & I suppose you as a Doctors wife will be allowed juice by the gallon – but the pram is there if you want it.

As you may know by now, we have been in the great battle & took all our objectives only thanks to the rain the Bosch has had a respite. If it had kept fine I should have been writing this from Berlin or some such place. I gather however that the Army Authorities are quite satisfied with the result up to now & will carry on when the ground dries up. They can certainly do nothing now. The ground is indescribable at the moment, having

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been pounded to bits by our artillery which & then the rain came & was soaked up like a sponge.

I see the papers make very little of the show, though the results are far bigger than the Messines business – simply because there are not so many prisoners or guns captured. The number of guns he has had put out of action & the number of Divisions knocked about must be far greater than at Messines already & one can hardly imagine that we have finished our push yet. The people we met were quite a fresh lot, which in

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a way is a good thing, as it means that the first lot got knocked about by our guns for the days before the show & the second lot by us on the day. If they had not relieved the first one only one Division would have suffered. Unfortunately our Division is getting a reputation for strafing. our Brigade hasn’t been in anything much before this year, but both the others have & have done all right & we did what we were wanted to this time, so we shall probably be treated to more of these shows later on. However we shall gain as we shan’t be kept in the trenches so much.

Thanks for another letter from London. I send this home as I don’t know where you intend to stay

Yrs

Jack