When C Company reached the German trenches at around midday, they found them empty. By the harsh standards of Passchendaele, the attack had gone reasonably well. Patch and his comrades had emerged unscathed, but their luck would last only another month. On the night of September 22, the Lewis-gun team were making their way back into the reserve trenches, walking across open ground because there were no communication trenches in this area of the front line. They were waiting in a huddle while No 1 was “attending to the call of nature”, when a shell exploded above them in a flash of light. Patch was thrown to the ground, and lay there conscious but “incapable of anything” for a couple of minutes before realising that he had been hit in the groin by shrapnel. He applied the field dressing that all soldiers carried with them and waited for the stretcher-bearers.