Diary Entry - 27th April, 1917

Walford: Friday, Hoyland arrived up from wagon lines about eleven a.m. and I spent the time getting the lines laid out and the two new guns ready to shoot. The funeral being at two thirty p.m. I did not think I could face it but Kellagher rang me up and said he thought I should go and so I went to lunch with him, going on from there afterwards. On the way home, called in at the OP to meet Hoyland who was going to register the two other guns. The Hun was very aggressive and I sat and waited for Hoyland to arrive after he had lunched with the brigade. About the appointed hour, four p.m. I saw GAH strutting across the field with showers of five nines making him drop into shell holes here and there, so I made off to the old gun pits to meet him and reached them just as the signallers arrived. We went into the pit but could not get through so as we had to wait. I suggested it would be as well to run out a wire to a shell hole on the left flank, but Godfrey would not assent. However, after two salvos of high velocity gun (10-cm) had been hurled at us and a dud had landed at the mouth of the pit, he decided it would be a good plan. The line was dis[?] again and it was getting very dull but the light improved later just as we got through and we registered all right. Funnily enough while walking back, on looking at the house we had registered on, I was rather surprised to see that it was no more, during the five minutes we had not been looking at it a heavy howitzer must have hit it. That afternoon Bosche must have wanted to knock the railway arch in the embankment down, as he fired a number of heavy rounds at it - the bridge though badly pitted still holds out.