The camp was only separated by the bombing-field from Brotherton’s, where a specially sensitive explosive for detonators was made. The munition makers had permanently yellow faces and hands and drew appropriately high wages. Attwater used to argue at mess sometimes what would happen if Brotherton’s blew up. Most of us held that the shock would immediately kill all the three thousand men of the camp besides destroying Litherland and a large part of Bootle. He maintained that the very closeness of the camp would save it; that the vibrations would go over and strike a big munition camp about a mile away and set that off. One Sunday afternoon Attwater limped out of the mess and suddenly saw smoke rising from Brotherton’s. Part of the factory was on fire. The camp fire-brigade was immediately bugled for and managed to put the fire out before it reached a vital spot. So the argument was never decided. I was at Litherland only a few weeks. On 1st July 1916 the Somme offensive started, and all available trained men and officers were sent out to replace casualties. I was disappointed to be sent back to the Second Battalion, not the First. It was in trenches at Givenchy, just the other side of the canal from the Cuinchy brick-stacks. I arrived at the battalion on July 5th to find it in the middle of a raid. Prisoners were coming down the trench, scared and chattering to each other. They were Saxons just returned from a divisional rest and a week’s leave to Germany. Their uniforms were new and their packs full of good stuff to loot. One prisoner got a good talking-to from C Company sergeant-major, a Birmingham man, who was shocked at a packet of indecent photographs found in the man’s haversack. It had been a retaliatory raid. Only a few days before, the Germans had sent up the biggest mine blown on the Western front so far. It caught our B Company—the B’s were proverbially unlucky. The crater, which was afterwards named Red Dragon Crater after the Royal Welch regimental badge, must have been about thirty yards across. There were few survivors of B Company. The Germans immediately came over in force to catch the other companies in confusion. Stanway, who had been a company sergeant-major on the retreat and was now an acting-major, rallied some men on the flank and drove them back. Blair, B Company commander, was buried by the mine up to his neck and for the rest of the day was constantly under fire. Though an oldish man (he had the South African ribbon), he survived this experience, recovered from his wounds, and was back in the battalion a few months later.