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Updated: June 7, 2025
I judged they must be bombarding the outer forts, and once there came a loud explosion and a red glare as if a magazine had suffered. It was a sound I had not heard for five months, and it fairly crazed me. I remembered how I had first heard it on the ridge before Laventie. Then I had been half-afraid, half-solemnized, but every nerve had been quickened.
It was all four French soldiers could do to get my motor-cycle out. Another time I stuck endeavouring to avoid some lorries. It is a diabolical joke of the Comic Imps to put fog upon a greasy road for the confusion of a despatch rider. On the next day I was sent out to the 14th Brigade at the Rue de Paradis near Laventie.
We were not present at the ceremony, but for a week preceding it all four companies were daily engaged weeding potato patches, tarring roofs, and evacuating a dump of several hundred thousand empty tins. Rarely were the energies of an Infantry Battalion more curiously devoted. At Laventie no startling events had filled our absence.
On March 31st General Turner took Colonel Loomis and me along with him to Laventie to reconnoitre the ground about the Rue D'Enfer. I was again told in confidence that the Canadian Division was expected to frame up an attack on this justly named road. We rode to Laventie and walked down to what was left of the village of Fauquissart.
W. H. AMES, Colonel. The 61st Division lands in France. Instruction. The Laventie sector. Trench warfare at its height. Moberly wounded. B Company's raid. Front and back areas. July 19th. Changes in the Battalion. A Company's raid. A projected attack. Laventie days. Departure for the Somme. On May 24, 1916, the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry landed in France.
We were approaching, from an odd direction as it seemed, the old area where the Battalion had first held its trenches. La Gorgue, Estaires, Laventie were places rich in association. How much the two former were altered! La Gorgue, where in 1916 Divisional Headquarters and Railhead had been, was heaped in ugly ruin. Its expensive church had been blown in two.
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