Letter 59 From Private W. Bell, of the South Lancashire Regiment, to His Wife
I shall never forget this lot. Men fell dead just like sheep. Our regiment was first in the firing line, and we were simply cut up. Very few escaped, so I think I was very lucky, for I was nearly half-a-mile creeping over nothing but dead men. In the trenches, bullets and shells came down on us like rain. We even had to lift dead men up and get under them for safety.
When we got the order to retire an officer was just giving the order to charge when he was struck dead, and it is a good job we didn’t charge, or we would have all been killed. I passed a lot of my chums dead, but I didn’t see Fred Atkinson (a friend of the family).