Sunday 3rd February 1918

Front line trenches on the Montello, between roads 14 and 19.

The recent good weather continued.

Overnight 3^rd/4^th the Battalion was relieved by 11West Yorks. and moved into billets as the support Battalion. The new billets were on the road between Crocetta and Biadene, about one mile south of Crocetta. 

Ptes. George Green (22749) (see 1^st January) and James Longworth (see 5^th October 1917) were reclassified as being medically fit only for Permanent Base Duty and transferred to the Trench Mortar School at the Base Depot at Arquata Scrivia.

Sgt. Harry Benson (see 19^th June 1917) was commissioned Temoporary Second Lieutenant with the Tank Corps. I am, as yet, unable to establish when, and under what circumstances, he had left 10DWR.

Pte. John Thomas Mason (see 27^th November 1917), who had, in September 1917, been transferred to 878^th Area Employment Company of the Labour Corps, was transferred back to 10DWR.

Memorial services were held to remember two men who had been killed when the troopship Aragon had been torpedoed just outside Alexandria Harbour on 30^th December 1917. A memorial service was held at Long Preston Parish Church to remember Cpl. John Henry Hitchin (see 30^th December 1917) and a similar event took place at Bolton-by-Bowland Church in memory of Cpl. Harry Wilkinson of the ASC; he was the brother of James Wilkinson jnr. (see 30^th December 1917). Reports of the memorial service for Hitchin stated that, “the local Volunteers were present in uniform, and the church was completely filled by relatives and sympathisers. The Vicar, Rev. R. Shipman, in his sermon, said he thought Lance Corporal John Hitchin was the first to join Mr. Tunstill's Company when recruiting at the beginning of the war. He tried to make good and rose to the opportunity when he won the Military Medal, which was not an easy matter. In his last letter to his father he had said if he did not come back they would know he was trying to do his duty. They could picture him on that boat from which 800 lives were lost, brave to the last. The Dead March was played on the organ, and the Last Post sounded. The flag on the Church tower was at half-mast”. The service at Bolton-by-Bowland also commemorated another local man, Pte. Dawson Parkinson, who had died whilst a prisoner of war in Germany. It was said that, “The Rector, in referring to the loss said:- ‘Death, after all, is the common lot of everyone, but to each one death is the entrance into a newer fuller life. The sadness is not the death, but the incompleteness and unsatisfactoriness of our lives. God meant each life to be perfect, therefore He must have some method of completing elsewhere that which is imperfect here. So we shall leave that which is imperfect to enter that which is perfect, and to those who realise what death really means; the entrance into possession, into fuller powers, and wider life, is but the lifting of a latch which opens the door into the bright light beyond. This is what those of whom we are thinking today are experiencing. They both fought for their country - one became a prisoner of war, with all its hardships, the other lost his life on a transport. Now they are at rest’."

Cpl. John Henry Hitchin

Cpl. Harry Wilkinson