Another welcome letter: soldiers' letters from the great war

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1994 by Anne Powell

DURING the First World War the fighting man's principle means of communication to his loved ones at home was by letter. Over the post-war decade a prodigious number of privately printed volumes of letters were published as memorials to a beloved son or husband who died on active service. Over subsequent years many other such books have been produced by survivors, their families or friends, and bundles of original letters are still discovered every year. For the most part these letters were written by young junior officers but the private soldier also communicated his thoughts and impressions. Charles Sorley, censoring letters written by soldiers in his platoon between stretches of trench duty at Ploegsteert Wood, wrote that 'no amount of work will break the men's epistolary spirit'. Robert Vernede vividly described the conditions in and out of the trenches in letters home; he too, censored his men's letters and wrote to his wife: '. . . Did I tell you of a rather nice boy in my platoon who writes a family letter daily always beginning -- "Dear Mum and Dad, and dear loving sisters Rosie, Letty, and our Gladys, -- I am very pleased to write you another welcome letter as this leaves me. Dear Mum and Dad and loving sisters, I hope you keeps the home fires burning. Not arf. The boys are in the pink. Not arf. Dear loving sisters Rosie, Letty, and our Gladys, keep merry and bright. Not arf." It goes on like that for three pages -- absolutely fixed; and if he has to say anything definite, like acknowledging a parcel, he has to put in a separate letter -- not to interfere with the sacred order of things. He is quite young and very nice, quiet, never grouses or gives any trouble -- one of those very gentle creatures that the War has caught up and tried to turn into a frightful soldier, I should think in vain . . . '.

The soldier-poets whom the war produced came from many different social backgrounds; their often hastily pencil-scribbled first hand accounts sent from the trenches, behind the lines, hospital beds, and during leave periods, covered a wide range of outlook and response to the brutal world of war. Every human emotion was shared and evoked. Common to almost every man was a nostalgia for the way of life he once knew, love of his family, revulsion of violence, and anticipation of death. Apart from the war scenario which haunted every letter, numerous every-day domestic details, anecdotes and trivial incidents were recounted; literature, music, family and friends were discussed and requests made for warm socks, vests and other clothing, chocolate, cigarettes and food.

A large proportion of letters were written to parents -- particularly to mothers. Many were protective and underplayed the horror. Others made no attempt to disguise the carnage and the suffering experienced during specific actions, like the following: '. . . I can see no excuse for deceiving you . . . I have suffered seventh hell . . . ', wrote Wilfred Owen to his mother after spending four days in a front line dug-out in the Beaumont Hamel area. In a letter to his mother, John Crombie, a Wykamist and potential politician in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, vividly described the 'sheer desolation' he found in the town of Arras in March 1917 but spared her the grim details he gave a friend the following day: '. . . for "mopping up" a captured trench i.e. bombing out the remaining inhabitants, you have parties of nine men specially equipped. When you come to a dug-out, you throw some smoke bombs down . . . so that they must either choke or come out. Now when they come out they are half blinded and choked with poisonous smoke, and you station a man at the entrance to receive them, but as you have only got a party of nine, it would be difficult to spare men if you took them prisoners, so the instructions are that these poor half-blinded devils should be bayoneted as they come up . . .'.

Edward Wyndham 'Bim' Tennant was seventeen years of age when he was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards; a year later he was in France despite a Brigade order that no-one under the age of nineteen should be sent to the trenches. Although Tennant wrote full and descriptive letters almost every day to his mother, he was always anxious to reassure her -- 'there is nothing concerning me you need worry about at all'. A sensitive young man with an unquenchable faith, he wrote to her in September 1915 before the Battle of Loos: 'I have the feeling of immortality very strongly. I think of death with a light heart and as a friend whom there is no need to fear . . .'. He continued to 'trust implicitly in God' while the Battle of the Somme raged all round him. This quiet assurance and adoration of his mother shone in his last letter home, written on the eve of the action in which he was killed. '. . . I feel rather like saying "If it be possible let this cup pass from me", but the triumphant finish "nevertheless not what I will but what Thou Wiliest" steels my heart and sends me into this battle with a heart of triple bronze . . . I always carry four photos of you when we go into action, one is in my pocket-book, two in that little leather book, and one round my neck, and I have kept my little medal of the Blessed Virgin. Your love for me and my love for you, have made my whole life one of the happiest there has ever been . . .'. 'Bim' Tennant is buried close to Raymond Asquith in the Guards Cemetery near Guillemont.