BNPS.co.uk (01202 558833)<br />
Pic: PoppylandPublishing/BNPS<br />
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Two soldiers in the trenches.<br />
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Left to gather dust in a darkened attic for decades, they are the diaries and secret photos documenting the hell and horrors of the battlefields of the First World War.<br />
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It wasn't until Heather Brodie had a clear out that the unknown but remarkable archive kept by her late father, Sergeant Horace Reginald Stanley, came to light.<br />
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His emotive diary and remarkable images taken with a camera he smuggled into the trenches paint a harrowing picture of life on the front line at Ypres and The Somme.<br />
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He wrote of how he witnessed comrades next to killed by German shelling and described the hopelessness and terror one felt as the men waited for their turn to be hit.<br />
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His writings were even more poignant as his elder brother Frederick was killed after his dugout suffered a direct hit near Arras.