OSE WWI Transcriptions from the Archives

07 : J.G. Bussell – Front Line – 16 Jun 1915 Dear Sing,

Some news came to Winchester after all. I should like to have seen you. Life is good out here and I do not for a moment want to be anywhere else. A week ago, I was in Ploeg Steert Wood – merely exploring on my own – and found Ronny Poulter’s grave. This at the back of the wood wh[ere] shells have not visibly profaned; as Mike Furse who buried him remarked it is like Oxford Woods, and I heard a Cuckoo, and Nightingales, and Wood Pigeons. But shells do come over all the time and Ploeg Steert village is a strange sight. I climbed up the shattered church tower guided by the Curé [Parish Priest] and every house one saw seemed shattered. The people – those still there – are pathetic. They cling to their broken homes and belongings – sleep in the village and go out at dawn for fear of shells and come back again at night. Since then, we’ve had two days and three nights in the trenches, nothing doing except a certain amount of aimless shooting with rifles, and maxims, and occasionally guns [artillery] at one another’s parapets. Slightly ludicrous I thought it. In that sector it is entirely a policy of reprisals. If you indulge in rapid fire or bombs or shells then they reply in kind only a little more so, and vice versa, and so it goes on. So that both sides think twice before being over frightful! Sniping is causing many casualties and we had a few. Two things stand out, first going out in front of the parapet at night to see my wire party – the Saxons are 300 yards away there, but I did not like it much – and secondly the curious fact that you can bathe, a real good swim in a river from a diving board up in the trench line. The Germans are 300 yards away and it is made possible by a ruined house and a high sandbag barrier, and the curved bank of the river itself, but it is not safe to swim right across and I got sniped at the second time. They shelled us in our billets in the town, but without much result, and I think that is the total of our excitements. We are back out of it now, resting, bivouacked round a pleasant farm, and waiting to be told to go somewhere. My love please to Miss Sing. Yrs affect. J.G.B.

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