6th January 1915
Today was a very quiet day, according to the Battalion’s war diary. However quiet it was to the diary’s author, German shelling still claimed the lives of two men from the Dorsets: George Kenway, from County Cork, and Frederick Abel (spelled incorrectly as Able on the CWGC records) Skinner, from Poole in Dorset. He was only 17.
The 5th Division writes that “a good proportion of the enemy’s shells were blind”. Some of them clearly weren’t.
The weather got even worse throughout the course of the evening with heavy rain making work on the trenches very difficult. It looked like all their previous hard work was going to be washed away.