[Insert: manuscript letter 7/9/16 My own darling Kath I had a splendid night last night & slept the sleep of the just. Today is perfectly lovely with a clear blue sky & is warm as warm. I hope I shall not be disturbed whilst I write you a bit of a screed & try to give a more or less clear account of what has been happening to us lately. We went into the [illegible] bit of line down here on the 21st August & our orders were to attack Guillemont in conjunction with the attacks on our right & left. The attack was postponed several times, sometimes because the French were not ready, at others because of the rain etc. All this time every night we had to have large working parties up digging new trenches & rebuilding the old ones which had been knocked down in several places by the shelling. One of the most important & at the same time most difficult duties before an operation is the collection of stores, such as food, water, tools, bombs, flares, wire etc & to get them up as near as possible to the front line so as to have them handy to send up when the enemy's position is taken, they have to brought up [sic] along narrow communication trenches many hundreds of yards; directly a position is taken men have to immediately set to work & dig themselves in or convert the German trenches to their own use, so as to get a strong defence to beat off counter attacks, then the men may not have food with them although they carry one day's & half rations with them, but they eat this in no time & ask for more. Water is the difficulty too: after a fight a reaction sets in & men suffer from thirst, so it is very necessary to have water handy. Well we had collected all these stores fairly close up two days before, when the Germans began shelling very heavily & torrents of rain fell so that all our stores were either buried in the mud or shelled to pieces; so this had to be done all over again the next night. The trenches here are not good, as we have not had the ground long & there is not too much cover. One of my brigades was so hard up in the few days before the battle that they had to give me a fresh one from another division, & this was an