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Deborah Florence Glassford Letters and Memorabilia

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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 Chassery] Crater, and in each case we held the lip and the Hun the further lip. The Chassery was quite a dangerous post and we lost 5 men the following day (2 captured and 3 killed). The Huns apparently crawling right up [?] in [?] of our men. During the day I had 4 bullets whistle past my head, as at various times I [?] myself, and some Rum Jars (shells from trench hunters) shattered me with mud, and a of dropped by me, so I may now say I have been under fire. During the day, I had to visit the Chassery post, and to [?] 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 [?] 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 [A-?]-[post?] out in No Man's Land and I visited it during my [?-ing]. The first time I went out in the dark I

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