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I went on duty again at noon till midnight, and during that time got pretty familiar with one section of trenches. On our right flank we had the rear lip of one of the Twin Craters and on our left the [illegible] Crater, and in each case we held the lip and the Hun the further lip. The [illegible] was quite a dangerous post and we lost 5 men the following day (2 captured and 3 killed). The Huns apparently crawling right up just in front of our men. During the day I had 4 bullets whistle past my head, as at various times I comfort myself, and some Rum Jars (shells from trench mortars) spattered me with mud, and a chunk of iron dropped by me, so I may now say I have been under fire. During the day, I had to visit the [illegible] post, and to avoid the mud at a certain point (where previous I had sank up to my waist, and had to be pulled out) I went overland and passed the 3 bodies of the men killed [?] in the day - they looked very weird lying in the positions in which they had fallen - all crumpled up and muddy, and it seemed curious that those things had once been men moving and talking and full of life. This was my first close association with death on the field. I had been talking to those men 2 hours before and somehow it hardly seemed real that those living men could be the same as these dead bodies. However, a bullet sang by me and I felt the breeze it made on my face, and I cut short my meditations very quickly, and didn't waste any time in getting back into the trench, luckily I slipped as I got down, which probably saved me from another bullet that just missed my head.

That night we had an adv. post out in No Man's Land and I visited it during my patrolling. The first time I went out in the dark I

BC Archives, MS-0089 Box 1 File 5 GLASSFORD, Deborah Florence (Leighton). Vancouver Correspondence inward, 1917.