July 25-29th 1915

Nothing very much happened during this time except shelling and trench mortars and bombing duels; this is where we first made the acquaintance of ‘aerial torpedoes’ (so called) and saw a German aeroplane brought down by one of our own. Here too we had a rather starling experience; Wainsborough and I were sitting in the trench one night talking when a ‘Very Light’ Star shell fell into the trench between us and gave us rather a scare. We were relieved by our 8th Battn.

July 26th 1916

A big squadron of our areoplanes was passing over today. Fritz hit one of them and brought it down; it fell very gently like a leaf twirling round and round and landed about a hundred yards behind our trench. Beyond a few burns the pilot was unhurt. He was carrying three 112llb bombs which fortunately didn’t go off.