Billets Essars-lez-Bethune In billet Essars -lex-Bethune- make friends in town & get promise of letter to home. Told we had made a name, by Gen. Turner. Saturday night a continuous string of guns moved forward thru Essars for 1 1/2 hrs.. Write Ada. Still in the billets-resting up and no use for anything. Try to get into the town of Bethune but all bridges are guarded over the canal. Woke up last night at 2 am to act as interpreter -the boys sleeping over the cow stable had left a rifle below-with which the calf got disastrously entangled -irate lady wanted court martial & sudden death- suavely explained to her just how the Boches would take her tirade. Feed three of the boys in town-owing to my 'stand in' are fed in the kitchen, while [?] Tommies are told 'nothing doing'. Very bad headache all day-shrapnel bullet I suppose. Going to try and stick it out though. Return to Festhubert. Paraded to Bethune to shower baths-in some religious institution. Marched out 7 pm & put in old German trench while the 15th & part of our dig a trench 200yds ahead & 300 yards from the 1st German line. 25% on guard on the parapet, including myself. Attack on near LaBussee-we are 1/2 mile right of our attack on the 20th, Corporal Shaw very drunk, so we carry on without him.

BC Archives, MS-0392 Box 1, Volume 4, FRANK SWANNELL PAPERS, Diary and enclosures, 1915.