Sunday 29th September 1940

Ye gods! This is the first few disengaged minutes I've had today. And it'll be dark before I've finished the cigarette which is between my lips at the moment. Vic has had a touch of dys. and this is his third day without food, poor bugger. He's been working an awfully inefficient exchange all day with hardly a break, whilst I've been digging, sand bagging and camouflaging – damned flies all around. It's getting too dark now.

9:30p.m. I was determined to write this tonight so rigged up a rough but effective black out in this pit and switched on one of the indicator lamps on the set. Some replacements arrived today – 23 men and an NCO came to this battery. Our first replacements...

I suppose after there have been a few engagements and a few more hospital (sickness) cases the original Essex Yeomanry which we knew at Epping Camp last year (only last year, yes!) will be almost lost, submerged. Apparently now that we are “in the field” it is very difficult for anyone to return to the unit after a spell in hospital. That applies to officers, also.

“Funny!” said Gayler, “After all that talk about you being unfit for field service a couple of months ago, you're here and you're about the only one who hasn't been ill!”
Lets hope I keep so. Dysentery is an unpleasant disease, by all accounts.