?Day to day life at the front - World War One

The following are first hand quotes and diary extracts from the First World War. They are taken from Paul Allens book "Neath a foreign sky."

Attached to the 150TH Brigade of 50TH [Northumbrian] Division, by the time that Warwick had joined the unit, the 1ST/5TH Yorks had been still been stationed in the same Flanders soil where the battle had undergone its terrible ?baptism of fire? at St Julien, and endure the terrors of the remainder of the Second Battle of Ypres the previous year [between the 22ND of April and the 25TH of May 1915 the Battalion had lost over thirty men killed and over a hundred wounded]. In trenches in the dreaded Ypres Salient at a place called Eecke, a village a few miles to the north west of the town of Baillieul, where the battalion had been serving in the nearby front line. Where, despite having escaped the slaughter of the opening stages of the Somme Offensive, Warwick and the remainder of the Battalion had not been afforded a quiet life. An unnamed soldier of the Battalion would later recall?

?Shelling, mortaring, machine gun fire, and sniping occurred at all times of the day and night; no part of the line was ever free from one or the other. Patrol work was assiduous: casualties were sometimes heavy and, at other times extremely light, but generally speaking there were no untoward incidents and those months spent in the Ypres trenches and at Kemmel may be written down as quiet??[17]