Letters from the Front: From the First World War to the Present Day
Page 5
Well ‘Weenie’ dear, I hope you are not ‘bored’, this must seem very uninteresting?!!!
Have no more news. Give my kindest regards to the Girls.
Write soon – dear
Concluding,
With love and kisses
Yours,
Norman
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PS. Please excuse writing and mistakes as I am in a hurry to catch the post.
Love,
Norman
The following are a series of extracts from the letters sent by Second Lieutenant Robert Peyton Hamilton describing the trials and tribulations of constant service in the front-line trenches while serving with the 20th (County of London) Battalion (Blackheath and Woolwich), London Regiment.
24 May
I have just come out of the trenches. As luck would have it, our crowd were doing a spell of fire drops, of which they had done three when we reported at 9 o/c at night. We went straight in and stopped until 8 o/c last night. The trenches are a manual of clean, mechanical workmanship. These particular trenches were built by the guards, and one cannot too highly praise the splendid way they are built; much better than our previous ones, and they were built at leisure, and these under fire… The men are all very cheerful. I’ve had shells drop very near me, and have been near guns going off, but do not think the noise will do me much havoc, though of course I am yet but an infant in such things. For the moment our feelings are interested very; want letters from England very; and a game of cricket very; and that’s just all.
27 May
I have seen it, and am a little older, I can’t write a collected letter. I am supposed to be sleeping now; I have two hours on and two hours off. Our Battalion has been getting used to things, and when I arrived they were being pushed up a bit.
I started at 4am Tuesday for a reconnaissance, which went well and took till 8.30. Had breakfast, censored letters and had a sudden call to go with 100 men and take ammunition from the rear to a reserve depot in the back trenches held by another Brigade who were attacking that night. Did this, got back at 5.30; had no lunch. Had to parade with Battalion at 6 o/c and stand in reserve in case we were wanted for the attack. At 12 o/c midnight I was told to take my platoon up to the trenches and take ammunition to the firing line. In the communication trenches we [were] stuck, with dead and wounded and reliefs etc, and we couldn’t move either way, and all the time we were under constant shell fire. Men were dropping all round, and some were horrible sights. Oh, Govenor, it was awful to see those poor boys… My platoon was most fortunate and got off practically free. The Brigadier thanked me nicely for helping…
It was the worst show my battalion has been in, they tell me, so I had a pretty good introduction. I keep alive, and bucked my men up, which helped me considerably… At 5 o/c we took over the trenches which were the scene of shelling and attack. We had to clear up; it was awful. We went out in front when it was dark, and got some poor wounded devils in, and dragged the dead to the back and buried them. I mustn’t give you the figures of the casualties, but it is a high price to pay for an advance of any description, and it’s due simply to our not having enough shells to cope with their artillery.
I don’t know when we come out, and can’t get an envelope till we do. I am writing this in my message-book, and will put your address on in case.
June 5
I hope you won’t think from my letters that I’m wailing. Of course things shocked me, and I was very much checked into bully beef, no sleep, and the usual hardships of a picnic of this sort; but now I have got over that, and can cheerfully eat every course and every meal from the same plate… I really do feel that I’m lucky to be here, and that after all it’s something beside beastly slaughter. It’s sort of taking a part in the biggest game [that] ever happened, and the whole place has no room for any petty or artificial feelings. One is on rock-bottom all the time…
June 13
I’ve had two new men from home who came up on Friday and it was their first time in the trenches. I was talking to one, who was on look-out, about 12 o/c when a whizz-bang came over. We both ducked and I got up when the thing had finished, but the poor fellow didn’t; a bullet from the shell had gone through the peak of his cap into his temple, and he died in ten minutes. Later on – about an hour – his friend, the other new man, came up from further down the sap with his nose blown about, he’ll get better. Rotten luck, though; isn’t it?…
July 1
I will talk anon of my men and their ways and my overlords. This I do know. I had 50 of my platoon up working the other night. They did fairly well; but all the time they’re much too well educated and intelligent to dig with ease. My platoon are all products of Goldsmith’s School, nearly all half and fully fledged schoolmasters, not so badly brought up. They quote poetry, and can’t see that digging trenches is ‘fighting’. You know that cursed education that leaves them half stranded on decency’s shore. They do well when they forget and their true selves come out. If they think of their job or of their superior education, they’re very boring. My general attitude to them, except in the trenches, is one of great scorn, and I jump on them severely for not ‘washing behind their ears’… I’m trying to get them to realise they’re stupid babies – know nothing and must do what they’re told. In the trenches they do it, because they know there’s death knocking very near, and a prompt obedience might save ‘em. Out of the trenches they begin slacking, and turn up with dirty equipment, and other odd things and I just give them all the punishment they’ve got time to do. It ain’t popular but the CO told Hooper, my OC, that my platoon was decidedly smarter.
Peyton Hamilton would see active service for just short of a full year. He died on 25 September 1915 as a result of wounds received in action.
For some servicemen life in the armed forces was simply abhorrent and they struggled to see the point of the war. One such soldier was Lance Corporal J.H. Leather who served with the Royal Fusiliers. In a series of letters he described his loathing of army life and his lack of enthusiasm for the conflict.
Monday
No 8, Barrackroom
B Company
20th S. Battn: Royal F usilluiers
No 7 Lines: Clipstone Camp
Nottinghamshire
Dear People,
Thank you all so very much for the letters that I have had from you at Woodeste, and the one I got the other day. I should really have answered them a great deal better but, as a matter of fact, one always feels either too tired or too bored, or something, to write any letters at all. What usually happens with all the people I know is that they write to me, don’t get an answer; write to remind me and still don’t get an answer; write a postcard asking if I am dead or something, still don’t get an answer; then give me up with a final angry note. Four months after that I write and make the best excuse I can…
The Army is undeniably the most dismal experience I have had yet… I haven’t got the faintest enthusiasm about this war; and I feel pretty sure now that the question is not whether we shall win or lose, but whether we shall lose or just manage to save our bacon. The idea of breaking the Germans is so much nonsense, and you have only to be in this Army to see the mess and muddle of everything; the lack of training in the men and the thick-headedness of the officers – nine out of every ten of whom I wouldn’t touch with a yardstick in civilian life – to realise that this nonsense about beating the Germans is so much water on the brain. I compare everything I see around me with what I saw for the last eight years or so in Germany, every year, and I compare the foolish, ill-educated, stupid officers here with the German officers, many of them my own friends, one or two of them very dear friends indeed: and the only thing I think is that Germany is as strange and unknown a country to most English people as the Sudan…
Shall write again quite soon.
Yours,
JH
Lance Corporal Leather was subsequently killed fighting at High Wood during the battle
for the Somme in 1916. Ironically, the letter of condolence sent to his father expressed the usual platitudes about commitment to the cause.
August 20th 1916
Dear Mr Leather,
In answer to your enquiry about Lance Corporal Leather, which I received today, I can only say that your son met his end in the Wood on July 20th almost in the forefront of the battle.
He was first wounded in the legs, and more than one of his comrades was killed in trying to bring him in, and a little while later he was killed outright by a shell. This is all that I have been able to gather, but everyone tells me that your son bore himself, as always, like a man and a soldier.
We were all of us exceedingly sorry to hear of his death, as we appreciated his good fighting qualities, whilst his thorough knowledge of German made him a more than ordinarily useful man to have in the company.
Please accept our sincerest sympathy with you in your great loss. It has not yet, so far as I know, been possible to recover his body, as the spot where he fell is still disputed territory, but he may have been given burial by another Division; but be that as it may, may it be of some comfort to you to know that your son met his end as a soldier should, in that great cause for which we are fighting.
Faithfully yours,
E. Mannering
Even Army chaplains were not immune from the depravations of the front lines. Reverend Canon Cyril Lomax served as a Church of England Army chaplain in France between July 1916 and April 1917, attached to the 8th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry. An accomplished amateur artist, many of his surviving letters are illustrated including this surviving extract entitled ‘The First Tanks’ sent on 7 September 1916.*
… Everybody hates shells – the man who is naturally fearless is almost a wash out in this war – but in spite of hating them so everybody goes on solidly doing whatever his job happens to be with a really fine dry humour and stoicism.
Everybody too hates mud, but we bathe in it, wade in it, sleep in it and clods of it adorn the most secret recesses of one’s clothes, books and papers.
To see the poor brutes of horses straining through ankle deep mud with food for the hungry guns goes to my heart. Even more than seeing the unfortunate men coming out of the front line. The poor beasts have such a pathetic droop, look so patient, and miserable, and respond so bravely to some tremendous effort to suck a timber out of mud…
But of course, one thing that has put the wind up the Boche more than anything else is our perpetual artillery fire. Ever so many have gone mad under the strain. So the horses must be overworked to keep the rain of shells up. It is a rain of shells.
I was humping stretchers all one night through mud nearly as bad. The stretcher-bearers had been at it for 36 hours and I was a bit tired with just one night, especially as I ran into a Boche barrage and had to take cover in a trench where I cried my eyes out for an hour in response to his tear shells.
The tanks were a great success. I did not see them in action but our men were full of them. They certainly put the wind up the Boche. His favourite strong places were as nothing, and they crossed trenches with ease. An RAMC [Royal Army Medical Corps] man said to an upstanding wounded German who knew the vernacular, ‘Well, we’ve got you properly beat this time.’ The reply was, ‘What can you expect when you come over in bl––dy taxis.’
I saw a quaint sight myself in which one of them figured. They had been heavily shelling the scrag end of a wood just behind a ridge where I was in a Collecting Post for the wounded.
Great gouts of flame, black smoke, stones and balks of timber had been flying thirty feet in the air at least. We all felt rather glad we were well out of it and that it was well behind our line. When it was all over, out from what had been the thickest of it, waddled a tank painted green and yellow, as it might be rubbing its eyes and saying ‘Dear me, I believe somebody woke me! I think I must find a quieter spot.’ Thus it proceeded to do waddling over trenches into shell holes, out of shell holes, until it came to rest…
In April 1915 the Gallipoli campaign was launched on the Dardanelles. A joint British-French operation, using a large quantity of ANZAC troops, an attempt was made to seize the Gallipoli peninsula from the Ottoman Empire and thus secure a sea route to Russia. It was one of the major Allied failings of the war and became renowned for the terrible fighting conditions experienced by the troops.
Lieutenant Patrick Duff served with the 460th Battery, 147th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery (29th Division) on Cape Helles, Gallipoli, and wrote a series of letters home describing the general conditions and the determination of his Turkish adversaries with a resolute cheerfulness.
May 18th
Dear Ma,
I got your letter of April 27 yesterday. I was so sorry to hear of Grannie’s death and am afraid you’ll miss her a lot. Hope you’re not tired with the long journeys – but I forget that when this reaches you it will be a month or so after the event.
I suppose you’ll be hearing news of this expedition in the papers by now: we don’t hear much either of what goes on here or anywhere else except in a small leaflet circulated daily from Headquarters and entitled ‘Peninsular Press’. This contains extracts from what Lord Crewe says in the House of Lords about ten days old; and even when fresh from the mint I have never felt much thrilled by the utterances of the noble peer.
Am having a slightly more peaceful time than when last I wrote: the ‘Morning Hate’, as we call the shooting the Turks do from 7.45am till 8.30, didn’t come near me this morning, and there has been no Lunchtime Hate at all… Life here is any amount nicer than when I was on Hounslow Heath last August with the HAC [Honourable Artillery Company]; mayn’t [sic] be quite so safe, but it’s more interesting…
Am going to send this off now, as I’ve been writing it for three days. Picture me walking about in the sun all day long, and the Turks missing me by rods, poles and perches.
Best love to all.
May 27th
Dear Ma,
Many thanks for your letters. I suppose you’ll be getting mine by now tho’ [sic] you always say you haven’t heard in your letters. I am again with the Battery and living in the Eagle’s Nest, as we call it: incidentally, it’s not a bad name, as I saw a Sikh a bit further up the ravine feeding a young eagle about the size of Uff which he must have found here.* The Sikhs are good to see in the mornings combing their long black hair: in this setting it puts one in mind of the Spartans before Thermopylae. The Gurkhas are ripping too: I never saw such fine little men…
We had a water-spout here two days ago: in 20 minutes the ravine was a rushing stream, in the gullies the harness and even the men’s clothes were nearly washed away. My dug out, cut in the side of the cliff and heavily protected with a tarpaulin, kept out the rain wonderfully. It doesn’t matter how wet one gets here as the next day it is baking hot. We are now getting up at the loathly hour of 3.45am and exercising the horses in the semi-darkness so that Gallipoli Bill won’t see us.
By the way, parcels and papers etc reach us perfectly easily: in fact we send in an Indian with a little cart and two mules to fetch the mail when there is one. Had rather fun the other day: I had gone down to the beach and saw that the ship I came from Alexandria in was here. I managed to get on board and [get] a bottle of fizz and a bottle of whisky. Seemed so funny to have it out here. I had tea with some officers at their mess yesterday and had butter, which I hadn’t tasted for a month: one poured a spoonful of it onto the bread.
I want to see the papers awfully, because for one thing it makes writing so much easier when you know what you can say. Wish I could send my films home to be developed, as I’m so afraid of them getting spoiled or lost. When we came down this morning we found that the battery had been augmented by one foal – which is a very jolly little beast – I had lost one on the way from Alexandria…
We have had news in the ‘Peninsular Press’ that Italy has joined in and the Lusitania has been sunk. Wish one could have weekends here to learn all the news… Ho
pe all goes well with you and that you’re all going strong; and that people don’t talk war all the time.
Best of love to all,
P.
June 6th
Dear Ma,
Got your last letter in the midst of a huge bombardment – I had been shouting orders to the guns from 8.30am till 4.30pm almost continuously and found your letter when I came away for a bit of food. That was June 3rd or 4th; expect there will be something in the papers about our advance on that day, as things had been very quiet just before and probably will be quiet again for a bit. It is an extraordinary sight to look out of our observation trench, which one mostly does with great caution through a periscope; one sees simply a maze of trenches, and it is awfully hard to tell which are ours and which are the Turks’. In one trench there were English and Turks throwing hand bombs at each other like mad. Seen a fair number of Turkish prisoners lately – they stick them for [the] time being in compounds closed in by barbed wire and guarded by sentries. Rather aquiline evil-looking men, but devilishly strong and hardy looking…
Have some long days now and again, getting up at 4am and going to bed about 1am occasionally: but sleeping practically out of doors makes what sleep one has go further, and after all, war is war. The time one feels it most is about 2pm when there is no shade of any kind; in the trenches the sun simply beats down on one, and one’s clothes get full of sand… The great comfort is having the sea so handy: by means of a communication trench we can go from the guns to the edge of a cliff and so down to the great and wide sea also without showing ourselves on the skyline…