“Arrived after 12 hour journey, my god what a place. It is up to the neck in dead bodies and horses littered about in hundreds. [The North Staffs Regt dead of 1/7/1916, 9 months earlier]
Heaps of dead lie about the ground, our drinking water up to a few days ago was from shell holes and was almost blood red”
Bombardier Harry Marren’s Diary, Somme, March 1917
“My first trip back into the front lines observation posts I will never forget, because all the North Staffords who had died still lay out in no mans land in heaps just as they had fallen on the 1st July the previous year. What is more, upon looking through the glasses, we could see that the barbed wire was festooned with the bodies of the men of the North Staffs Battalions.”
Corporal George Scott MM of the Leek Battery
If you should hear the sound of horses feet or the rumble of gun limbers in the street, then pause and say a prayer where e’re you roam, it’s the ghosts of the Old Leek Battery coming home.
There by destiny…… Home in memory…..