STAFF Sergeant James Hall's moving diary of his time serving with the Royal Horse Artillery in the First World War is just one of a collection of wartime memories at the Bolton Revisited exhibition.

The diary, written in pencil over a two-year period starting in 1915, details a catalogue of lucky escapes during the conflict.

March 1915 sees the Royal Horse Artilleryman joining thousands of troops welcomed aboard a boat bound for Gallipoli to a rousing rendition of "Tipperary" by a naval band.

Within weeks of his conscription, he found himself in a fierce gun battle with enemy troops in the Gallipoli campaign when his troop came under relentless machine gun fire.

Chillingly, after the three-hour battle in which dozens of his comrades fell, he simply states: "We have slaughtered thousands."

Many of the other small entries describe the "murderous" conditions he and others found themselves in before Allied forces were forced to flee the Gallipoli beaches.

His most dramatic escape came before the evacuation when he was hit in the arm by a bullet. He says: "I had just dropped down at that second and it saved me from a fatal wound in the stomach".

After he recovered from his wound, Mr Hall thought he would be returning home - but he was sent to the trenches for the battle of The Somme in 1916.

The diaries recall terrifying shell and gas attacks and relentless machine gun fire which saw 70 per cent of some British regiments wiped out.

A further entry reads: "12.30am, large shell burst over my dugout. I heard a groan and rushed up with my torch and saw the officers' hut smashed in. Went inside through debris and found our officer Mr Drake lying in the bed, a piece of shell through the left lung and heart, dead."

The memories, now faint and worn, were supplied by his granddaughter Bernadette Tither, along with photos which show him with comrades riding camels in front of the Sphinx in Egypt and at home in Vernon Street, Farnworth, after the war with wife Teresa and first son Jack. Before joining the Army, he was a fitter at Trencherbone Pit at Kearsley. He died in 1952.