Read Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War Online
Authors: Bill Lamin
Tags: #World War I, #Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs
Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War
from the
TRENCHES
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by
Michael O’Mara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ
This electronic edition published in 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84317-833-0 in ePub format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-832-3 in Mobipocket format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-373-1 in hardback print format
Copyright © Bill Lamin 2009
Maps copyright © Bill Lamin 2009
The illustration on the half-title page shows a cap badge of the York and Lancaster Regiment from the Great War (York and Lancaster Regimental Museum, Rotherham)
The right of Bill Lamin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright
queries is invited to write to the publishers, so that a full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of this work.
All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Designed and typeset by Design 23
Chapter 1:
Harry and Family Before Conscription, 28 December 1916
Chapter 2:
Preparing for War: February–May 1917
Chapter 3:
First Taste of the Trenches
Chapter 6:
Mid-September 1917 Onwards
Chapter 7:
The Journey to Italy
Chapter 8:
The Piave River Defence Line
Chapter 9:
Asiago – Spring and Summer 1918
Chapter 11:
Italy – The War Is Over
To the memory of Harry Lamin and his comrades of the Great War
PREFACE
H
ARRY
L
AMIN WAS AN
unexceptional man who lived through the exceptional horrors of the First World War. Through his letters from
that time we can gain some insight into the fate of the ordinary soldier – for Harry was a private soldier for the whole of his service. The letters are not sensational. The style is limited
and often rather flat, but somehow the character of the man is immediately accessible. Online readers have commented that they feel that they know Harry personally; as his saga progressed on the
Internet, some came to feel that they had gained an extra member of their own family. He was my grandfather.
The source of the material seems to fascinate many people. There is no great mystery, however, no exciting, sudden discovery. One drawer of a desk at my parents’ home housed old family
documents, photographs of long-forgotten relatives, newspaper cuttings and the like. I was around eleven or twelve years old when I first became aware that Harry’s letters were in that desk
drawer. I suspect that they had been recovered and placed in the desk when Ethel, Harry’s wife, died. They were in no particular order, just bundled together in the drawer. I don’t
think that I read any of them until a little later, but I can remember, aged around sixteen, being fascinated by his letter of 6 October 1917 to his brother Jack, in which he describes beating off
a German attack and ‘did not feel nervous when I saw them coming over’.
Once I’d claimed the letters, after my sister Anita and I had cleared the family home, I did little with them for months. Eventually, I took them into the comprehensive school where I
worked to see whether teachers in the History Department could use them for pupils studying the First World War. Their response was very enthusiastic. A book was suggested, but the amount of work
required to get the letters and other material into a suitable form was daunting, especially as I was holding down a demanding teaching job. Then, of course, there was no guarantee that a publisher
would be interested.
The idea of creating a blog from the letters was a wonderful inspiration. Researching the use of blogs for the schoolchildren (I was Head of IT), I made the connection between the letters and
the (then) accepted format for a blog. I realized that I could use the Internet to ‘time shift’ and publish the letters in precisely the same timescale as that in which my grandfather
had written them. In this I was lucky: not only was 2007 exactly ninety years after Harry Lamin was first sent to the front, but the days of the week in 1917 fell on the same days in 2007 –
so Harry’s letter of Wednesday, 7 February 1917 was published on Wednesday, 7 February 2007. Readers of the blog could experience the same anxieties that had confronted Harry’s family
back in 1917 and 1918. They wouldn’t know when the next letter would appear. They would have no idea whether Harry was all right, or had become a casualty – perhaps even been killed.
Crucially, I only had to deal with one letter at a time – quite manageable.
The photographs that had surfaced with the letters proved to be an important element of the blog. In fact, there were only two photographs of Harry up to the end of the war in 1918: the Awsworth
Board School photograph of him as a child among his classmates and teachers, and the picture of him with his squad that was almost certainly taken when he was first conscripted. From each of these
I doubled up the photographs by cropping individual images of Harry from the groups. When I started the blog in the summer of 2006, however, I had only the photograph from the school taken in the
early 1890s. I had no knowledge of the squad picture showing Harry in uniform.
I had been posting on the blog for about a year when my sister turned up the dog-eared photograph from a box of ‘bits’ left over from the house clearance. That picture is crucial to
the blog. An image of Harry the soldier made it much easier for readers to identify with Harry the man. As soon as the distressed picture was published, readers with expertise in photograph
manipulation offered to ‘do their best’ to restore it. The results were pleasing, sharpening the image and removing the blemishes that had defaced the original.
The first posts to the blog introduced Harry and described his background and family. The idea was to see whether I could generate a little interest before the ‘live’ letters started
appearing. On 7 February 2007, exactly ninety years after it was written, I posted on the blog a transcript of Harry’s first letter from the training camp in Rugeley, Staffordshire. After
that, each of his letters appeared on the same date on which it had been written, albeit nine decades earlier. Those reading on the web could see his story, his war, unfold as though it were
happening now.
Since the launch, the success of the blog has been astonishing. What had started as a hobby has grown into a worldwide phenomenon. The ‘real-time’ serialization of Private Harry
Lamin’s letters has attracted well over 2 million page loads and drawn media attention from the press, television and radio around the world. It has gained a devoted set of readers, anxiously
checking the blog to find out what was happening to Harry ninety years earlier. ‘I check for a Harry letter before I check my own emails,’ was a typical response. Readers seemed to
identify with this man from ninety years ago, and frequently added words of encouragement over events taking place in a completely different time frame. The neatest analogy came from a reader who
reminded me that we look up at the stars and observe events that happened thousands, if not millions, of years ago, and yet we accept them without question as ‘now’ events.
The blog became such an event, not only for those who followed it, but for me as well. As soon as we started to read the letters, we would be transported back to another era, feeling, even
sharing, the anxiety that Harry’s family would have felt so many years earlier.
In this book, as on the Internet, the transcriptions of Harry’s letters are as faithful and as accurate as possible. Harry’s grammar and spelling are not always perfect, but still
reflect great credit on the education he received at Awsworth Board School. State schooling at that time (for those not educated privately) was compulsory, but generally limited to around four
years of drilling in the ‘three Rs’ – ‘Reading, wRiting and ‘Rithmetic’. The quality of his letters – especially since his schooling ended when he was
thirteen – would certainly bear comparison with the efforts of the pupils I teach today – National Curriculum, SATS, myriad ‘initiatives’ and all.
Again as on the blog, I have tried to be a little selective in the choice of letters that appear here. There is a fair amount of repetition in them, and not all contribute a great deal.
Similarly, the war diary of Harry’s battalion, the tersely worded daily account of the activities of the unit, contributes much to our understanding of the experiences of Harry and of other
‘ordinary’ soldiers but, in its listing of everyday occurrences, would become tedious if reproduced as a complete document.
It is useful, I think, to stress the most important aspect of the blog. ‘World War I – Experiences of an English Soldier’ (
http://wwar1.blogspot.com
), to which this book is a
companion, attracted attention and followers through the unique feature of the publication of the letters in ‘real time plus ninety years’, each being posted on to the Internet exactly
ninety years to the day after Harry wrote it. The only way of determining what was going on in his life was to wait for the next letter. There were, too, some significant gaps which
worried many readers, since they had no way of discovering whether Harry lived, was wounded or had been killed in action. The next post might well have been a standard letter or telegram from the
War Office giving Ethel, his wife, terrible news. My instruction for visitors to the website simply read: ‘To find Harry’s fate, follow the blog.’ There was no other way for them
to learn what happened to him.
Even on the blog, the journey towards the finishing line – the end of the war – was not quite as effective for readers because the date on which the fighting ended is well known
(something denied to Harry at the time, of course). Questions were asked about whether I would give an account of Harry’s life after the war. Naturally, to maintain the suspense, I could give
no indication that he would survive, and had to ignore the questions.
The extent and seriousness of the involvement of readers of Harry’s blog is probably best reflected in the comments made. To date (the blog continues as I write) there have been over 1,500
comments posted by people who have followed it (enough for a separate book –
wwar1comments.blogspot.com
). The support, appreciation and intense engagement that became so evident have been
extraordinary. In the whole collection of comments, I can remember but two that were slightly critical; the rest, in total, made all the hard work well worthwhile.