"The Australian casualties have been very heavy - fully 50% in our brigade, for the ten or eleven days. I lost, in three days, my brother and my two best friends, and in all six out of seven of all my officer friends (perhaps a score in number) who went into the scrap - all killed.
Not one was buried, and some died in great agony. It was impossible to help the wounded at all in some sectors. We could fetch them in, but could not get them away. And often we had to put them out on the parapet to permit movement in the shallow, narrow, crooked trenches.
The dead were everywhere. There had been no burying in the sector I was in for a week before we went there.
Shrapnel, minnewerfers, whizz-bangs, bombs, lachrymose shells, gas shells, sulphur shells - and thousands of gaping dead. The stench, and the horridness of it can but be mentioned.
I have sat on corpses, walked on corpses, and pillaged corpses. I got many interesting German souvenirs and could have secured cartloads from their trenches, but I lost most that I took, and usually was too busy to pick up anything.
I lost nearly all my equipment and clothes and with them my curiosities, but I brought back one bonzer souvenir that I did not expect to bring back — myself." John Raws, Australian Imperial Force, Aug 12, 1916, Somme, France. #stayzero #war #reality #ww1