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vicarage – I hope he gets on all right. Write soon and let me know how you are getting on. Jack has sent me some sardines and chicken paste which is all right here and it works the bread
     and butter down. I am glad Connie is going on alright at school I don’t think it will do her any harm. They tell me Willie and Connie keep very good friends which I am glad to
     hear.
    With best love from
    Harry
    Note the difference between what he tells his brother and what he writes to Kate. ‘We have had a very rough time lately,’ as against ‘we have had a fine time this last
fortnight’.
    Here we also have Harry’s first mention of the food at the front. It has been estimated that the soldiers’ bread would have taken a full eight days between baking and reaching the
front line; no surprise, then, that it took some ‘working down.’ I think, too, that Harry is saying that the extra victuals from home are welcome. Perhaps, very politely, he is also
hoping to prompt another package, this time from sister Kate.
    An embroidered card Harry sent to Connie after she had started school.
    Connie, who is seven years old by this time, is at school. That must be a milestone. With the cerebral palsy, and the resulting difficulty in walking, it would have been a major achievement.
From Mill Street in Ilkeston she would probably have gone to Chaucer Street School, as did Willie once he was old enough. Coincidentally, Willie’s wife, Nancy (my mother), was to teach there
many years later.
    By the first week in June Harry has been with C Company, 9th Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment, for around three weeks. From the battalion’s war diary we can work
out that he spent three or four days in the front line and a similar time in support. He would have experienced shelling and a gas attack, both of which caused casualties. Significantly, he would
have repeatedly practised the routine for an assault on the training-ground area at Boescheppe, behind the lines, which had been set up using flags to mimic the enemy’s positions on a part of
the Messines Ridge, a small rise in the ground known as Mount Sorrel.
    A British trench map from 1917, showing a part of the Ypres Salient, with German trenches and wire entanglements marked.
    By then, he had seen what shelling could do, as the war diary for 12 May records: ‘D’s Company Headquarters dugout had been blown in about 5.30 a.m. 2Lt [Second Lieutenant] Bunce
S.H. was wounded & 2Lt Proctor M. & 2Lt Breingen S.K. were killed.’ (The war diary only records the names of officers; casualties among other ranks are recorded just by their number.)
Following that, when in the reserve line, a 5.9-inch shell blew in the battalion orderly room and ‘records and papers were destroyed’. Any men hurt? Nothing is recorded.
    The war diary goes on to log the total casualties for that tour in the front line: ‘Officers 1 wounded, 2 killed. O.R. [other ranks] 4 killed, 24 wounded.’ This was rather different
from working in a lace factory.
    Also noted is the fact that for five days of that month, May, ‘The Bn [battalion] practised offensive for MT SORREL system on a flag course situated in the BOESCHEPE training area.’
From this and other indicators, the men of the 9th York and Lancasters would have known that they were to be involved in serious warfare in the very near future. Harry would be going ‘over
the top’ for the first time. That prospect must have been chilling.

CHAPTER 4
    MESSINES RIDGE
    T HE FIRST WEEK OF J UNE 1917 was a significant one on the Flanders battlefields.
    The Messines–Wytschaete (Mesen–Wijtschate) Ridge is nothing particularly special on the ground. Visit it today and there is simply a slightly higher area, largely
covered in trees, which extends from Messines in the south, to Zillebeke in the north.
    Some of the names given to the hills during the campaign there illustrate the reality of the ‘high’ ground west and south-west of Ypres. ‘Hill 60’