Harry Drinkwater was in World War I, volunteering to a private army, called Pals battalion. Harry was a young man, 25 years old and a former grammar-school boy. During his time in the trenches, he writes a remarkable diary, about his brutal introduction to the trenches at the Somme in Northern France, even though it was strictly against the rules to keep. The soldiers lived in a city called Suzanne, where they had to march to, which was very hard. They were encamped in tents by 12 people in each, between the enemy and their own guns, and in the night, they can hear shells shriek. The conditions in the trenches were horrible, which he also writes in his diary: ‘’No words can adequately describe the conditions. It’s not the Germans we’re fighting, but the weather.’’ The trenches were filled with mud and water, so the soldier was standing in cold muddy water to their knees for hours, and the mud was only getting deeper. To move forward they had to use their elbows for leverage. The firing lines is described as; ’’Imagine a room underneath the ground, whose walls are slimy with moisture. The floor is a foot or more deep in rancid-smelling mud.’’ Even their foods were cold and became muddy when they ate it, because of their bodies fully covered in mud. The only food they had, was cold bacon, some bread and jam, and many of the rations fails to come because the communication trenches were water-logged and being continually shelled. They constantly looked at destroyed and depressing surroundings. It’s a battle field, and you can get the feeling of how sad the surroundings were, when he writes: ‘’Nothing here but trench after trench and, in places, the ground blown into heaps of dirt. The trees have been hacked to pieces - only black stumps remain. Nothing grows. Utter desolation.’’ Rest days are few, and when they finally get to have some, they have to march to their billets, where they get a chance to wash