Private George Ferguson - Day 16, 28th June 1916.

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Private George Ferguson.

Day 16, 28th June 1916.

Our first day fending for ourselves. It was like the black hole of Calcutta. A vast huddle, hundreds of us. I was giving up hope of making friends at all until I met Walter. He was to be my look out partner. My life depends on him and his life depends on me. Eternal partners. This is it. All the training in the world couldn’t have got us mentally prepared for this. Even though our corporal made us do everything under the sun, he put us through 100x more than our bodies can manage with. But we all are hiding our number of feelings.

Firing broke out about 200 yards from where we were. We were all at camp. The sergeant told us to drive them away from the camp. We retrieved our guns. We swiftly kept low and ran northwest of the camp. The mud was splashing up out boots and up to our faces. I could taste it on my tongue bitter and horrible. We hurried through the pools of deep squelching mud. Walter turned and asked me what we were going to do when we reached them. I said it was best to think of that when we get there.

We heard more guns going off, sounding like fast-firing machine guns. The towering grass-vines were cutting through my arms and legs. We came to the end of the grass-vines. We spotted bodies. We jumped to the floor, hiding behind the

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grass-vines. We quietly loaded our guns. Walter was next to me. I whispered to him, want a drink? He accepted. I got my metal spirit canister out. It was topped up. I gave it him first, he had a mouthful. I had two. We all opened fire at the opposition. After a minute of gunning down they were all down. None moving. We re-loaded, got up and walked into their territory. Our mission was complete – search and destroy any opposition. We collected some of their machine guns and ammunition and headed back to camp. That night we had a ...

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