TCD MS 10821 folio 18 recto
[June 24th 1916] heavy gun fire to the South continues without <intermission>. Poor Fritz must be having a poor time of it & I am glad that I am not in his shoes. The morning was quite peaceful but in the afternoon we had our usual compliment of missiles. They were too close to be pleasant to our dug out & up in the front line, the finn bombs made it equally unpleasant. A spent piece from one hit me quite smartly on the shoulder. The night was fairly quiet except for machine gun fire & there was luckily no rain. The bombardment continued throughout the night without stopping. I keep killing rats as I go round the trenches. They are very bold & are all over the place.
Jun 25th. The bombardment still goes on without intermission a constant roar in the distance. I am very glad that I am not undergoing it. The mud in the trenches is still very bad, but is drying up slowly. The morning was peaceful & I walked down to Battalion Headquarters to talk over our little show here. In the evening we had rather a bad bombardment from all kinds of weapons for nearly two hours. We had only one man killed & another injured, which was very lucky as many fin[n] bombs landed in the trenches, but the men are now getting pretty smart in dodging them. The night was very quiet & the Germans occasionally turned a search light