Tag Archives: aeroplane

3 August 1917 – To Father

Peirs_Le_1917-08-03_Father_01 Peirs_Le_1917-08-03_Father_02

Transcription

3. 8. 1917.
My dear Father,

Many thanks for your letter of 29. 7. 17. I am sorry to hear you are losing weight, as you are probably overworking yourself & wish you could manage a holiday. This rain has come along & spoilt the whole battle for the present. It was extraordinarily difficult to get up to the line on the 30th owing to the state of the ground but when we came out yesterday the conditions passed imagination. The ground is so pulverised that it soaks up water like a sponge & the mud is indescribable & the further we go in to Bosch territory the worse our communications become. The Battn. had 2 objectives to take – an advance in all of about 1100 yds. & we got them both. Unfortunately the people on either flank did not with the result that we were lying out on a ridge sticking out towards the Bosch with his machine guns playfully dusting us whenever we moved. We got it pretty hot from his

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guns just before we came out & I expect that the people we handed over to will have to come back out of it & level with the rest. We got a fair number of prisoners – about 30 – 50 but it is impossible to say for certain. We were about the centre of the push. I hear that the Bosch collected a lot of men for a big counter attack North of us, so they got every gun they could in the army to bear on the area & they simply disappeared. The aeroplanes couldn’t do much good on the day of the show & we saw as many Bosch planes as our own, but neither side could do much with them. I don’t know about leave. I am not due for it till the middle of September & if the C. O. takes a month before then I may have to wait.

Yrs
Jack

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