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- Fifty square miles of slime and filth from which every shell burst threw up ghastly relics, and raised stenches too abominable to describe; and over all...the sickly reek of deadly mustard gas. (en)
- You have no idea of the state of the ground near these advanced posts. Wherever one looked, one saw the same endless extent of black mud and water, christened all over the place with the remains of old trenches and wherever one walked, one slipped or slithered about among the innumerable shell holes. Almost every day both British and Bosche lose their way and get into the enemy lines...Wandering about in the mud at night was rather an uncanny business as there were a great many dead bodies lying about, some already half sunk in the mud. The mud will have swallowed them all up before the winter is over. (en)
- I think the only thing that saved us that night was the amount of liquor the Bosches found in Estaires and Neuf-Berquin, as I have never heard such a noise in my life as they made, singing. (en)
- Cold, damp day; mud sticky and plentiful. (en)
- ...It [the trench] lay along a ridge of a small hill [Mount Sorrel] and so it was well drained. It was also pleasantly deep so that one had not to walk about half doubled up. I believe the trench was originally dug by the French, as there are a lot of their graves around here. The odour suggests that they were not buried very deep! (en)
- For honest filth and disgusting conditions it would be hard to beat...There was an excellent academy picture of an aeroplane flight above, i.e., 1916 or 1917, and I was interested to see that our position was shown by the artist as a cloud of dust and bursting shells, which we found very true to life. (en)
- Apart from the heavy casualties, the worst feature of the Somme fighting was undoubtedly the incredible fatigue and lack of sleep. Men simply could not keep awake despite the danger, and the slightest respite found them in deep slumber. Any bed was a good bed—a heap of stones by the roadside, a ditch, an open field, a sloping bank. Cold and hunger were forgotten in Nature's overwhelming clamour for sleep. Passing through Moureuil on the eve of Good Friday, men dropped asleep on doorsteps for three or four minutes, walked a few yards further, slept on another doorstep and so on.... Physically the men had come to the very end of their tether—only sheer will power kept them going. (en)
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