"During a shelling of our shelter in the trenches, we found no trace of Corporal Everett; he must have been struck by the shell and blown to atoms. Bennett was badly shattered and most of his head was gone while Hollins was unrecognisable.
A few minutes, two figures staggered back, one with his arm gone the other shot in the side; one collapsed and died, the other we patched up and sent back.
From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony and despairing shrieks.
It was too horribly obvious that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell-holes and now the water was rising about them and powerless to move they were slowly drowning.
Feeling sick and lonely I returned to my tent to write out my casualty report. But instead I sat and drank whiskey after whiskey as I gazed into a black and empty future.
Out of our happy little band of 90 men, only 15 remained." - Capt. Edwin Vaughan, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Ypres, Belgium, March 1917 #war #ww1 #reality