EVERYDAY life in the trenches is punctuated by deadly incidents in a Keighley soldier’s memoirs.

Private Vasco Velosa wrote of seeing “dead men everywhere” in the terrible surroundings of Devil’s Wood and his stomach churning whenever the sky lit up with flares.

But he also recalled being taken to the front line at Ypres on an old London bus, and the never-ending cycles of two hours work, two hours sentry duty, two hours sleep.

Then there were the times Private Horner had to swim along flooded trenches while wearing full equipment, with only hard biscuits and bread bits for nourishment.

The insights into frontline conditions were part of reminiscences that Private Horner, scrawled across five pages of a notebook after he survived the war and came home to marry.

Private Horner is the subject of this week’s Men of Worth column, elsewhere on this page.

He began his reminiscences with basic training at Sheerness where he learned how to dig trenches along with drill and bayonet fighting.

The tent-dwelling recruits were woken by Zeppelin airships flying overhead to bomb nearby Sittingbourne and Southend.

Once in France the fresh-faced soldiers were marched to the notorious St Martin’s Camp where they had their “baptism of fire”.

Vasco said: “I can’t describe the feeling I had as we neared the trenches to hear the heavy guns and rifle fire and see the sky lighting up – it was something to make you feel a bit funny in your middle.”

Stationed in and around Hellfire Corner, Private Horner had a relatively peaceful first 12 months that included a meeting with King George V during a visit to the Western Front.

It was in Delville Wood, dubbed Devil’s Wood due to the ceaseless shelling and dead bodies littered around, that Private Horner was hit by shrapnel during an attack on the German lines.

Private Horner said: “It was a good thing it hit my wrist instead of one of the bombs I was carrying – I had 21 on me.

“The worst part about being wounded was we had to go back down a communication trench change 3km long, which was covered with fire. I was lucky, many weren’t.”

Private Horner went on to write of his time convalescing in back in England, including wagonnette outings to local villages for sports matches and lots of cigarette smoking, then his final two years of service in France well away from the frontlines.