"Today awful: was obliged to carry some of the wounded into the graveyard and look on helpless till they died. Sometimes we could not even obtain a drink of water for them.
Conditions terrible. The ground is a quagmire. It requires six men to every stretcher. Each journey to the dressing station could not be accomplished under four hours. This sounds rather incredible but no one realizes the difficulty of getting about, even for a man unhampered by anything. The mud in some cases is up to our waists. One party of stretcher-bearers was bringing down a wounded man when an airman swooped down and dropped a bomb deliberately on them. The enemy shells the stretcher-bearers all the time.
The infantry took a few pill-boxes and a line or two of trenches from the enemy in this attack but at a fearful cost. It is only murder attempting to advance against these pill-boxes over such ground. Any number of men fall down wounded and are either smothered in the mud or drowned in the holes of water before we can reach them. We have been working continuously now since the 13th. The stretcher-bearers are done up completely.
I have had no sleep since I went on. Had over thirty casualties, killed, wounded and gassed - and this out of one hundred men who were doing the line." - Sgt. Robert McKay, 109th Field Ambulance, Battle of Ypres, August 1917 #stayzero #reality #war #ww1 #diary