After ending a 2 3/4 hour duty at midday, Sherriff settled into his dugout to write two more letters home. He could hear the German shells falling above him, but was confident that their dugout, tunnelled into the chalk hillside, could withstand the enemy ‘strafe’. And besides, their ammunition stores must be limited, since ‘we seldom get more than 10-20 shells a day’. [The Battalion diary confirms that the Germans had sent over about 20 trench mortars, but the British replied ‘very vigorously…and speedily silenced him.’]
His dugout was a room in a long gallery of deeply dug burrows, with rooms communicating by long low passages with beams across (‘to knock our heads against’). He and two others slept in the long dugout where they all messed, while the other officers slept in a room nearby. Each room had a stairway leading out, ‘down which you hear men tobogganing when a German shell comes near.’
From Memories of Active Service, Vol 1, facing page 98; with permission of the Surrey History Centre)
His servant had obtained an old wire reel to act as a table, and provided him with a ‘pail of muddy water out of a shell hole to wash in’. They had a gramophone which, although he did not care for them as a rule, helped the time to pass.
His next spell of duty would be from 8:30 till 10:30 in the evening, and he told his father that, while a total of 6 3/4 hours a day might not seem much, it was ‘quite sufficient, as it is very arduous work going round seeing that the sentries are alert and usually catching them dozing, and besides this you must be perpetually on the alert for shells and grenades, and you must be ready to run along and dodge them’.
He told his mother that he was fine bodily, but that ‘mentally I feel rather tired and worried.’ He had been tremendously cheered, though, by the arrival of some letters from home (including from his brother, Bundy), and a package from his mother containing ‘my favourite chocolate, my favourite ginger cakes…those cigarettes, a packet of peppermints and, in short, everything I could have wished for’. He had shared the ginger cakes at Mess the previous evening, but he was keeping the chocolate for himself.
He apologised to his mother, for not having sent her birthday wishes in time for her to receive the letter on the 14th (her 45th birthday) – but he was sending her a cheque with which to buy herself a nice ring, and ‘a little scarlet pimpernel which I found calmly growing on the side of a communication trench near the front line’ It was a flower he had picked when returning from his night in the line with Captain Penrose, and, four years later, would find a place in his Memories of Active Service.
[Next letters: 14 October]