Tommy (82 page)

Such journals contained announcements of decorations, promotions and casualties: the February 1917 edition of
The Fifth Gloster Gazette
proudly reported that Private H. W. Voller had been commissioned in the field, adding sadly that he had been ‘since killed in action'. There were genuinely helpful hints on how to fill in the army-issue correspondence card or how to write to a prisoner of war in Germany, and tongue-in-cheek advice, for instance about the need for soldiers standing to attention while holding a dead rat to ensure that the creature's tail was in line with the seam of the trousers. But what makes them so valuable is the insight they provide into what junior officers, NCOs and men – it is rare to find an editor above the rank of captain, and many contributors were private soldiers – actually thought about the war. Of course there were limits to comment and criticism, but the trench journals of the First World War, with their bottom-up attitudes, were quite different to other war publications, including, for instance, the Gulf War's
Sandy Times
– essentially a top-down official publication.

If
The Fifth Gloster Gazette
and
The Wipers Times
are, because of their modern facsimile editions, the best known of the trench journals, they are simply the tip of a mighty iceberg: the war reserve collection in the University Library at Cambridge comprises no less than 118 British and Commonwealth titles. Battalion journals had titles that were baldly descriptive (
The London Scottish Regimental Gazette);
humorous (
The Gasper
for the public schools battalions of the Royal Fusiliers or
The Mudlark
for 1/Bedfords) or historical (
The Minden Magazine
for the Lancashire Fusiliers). The titles of divisional journals varied from the punnish
The Direct Hit
(58th London Division) and
The Dump
(23rd Division) to the more patriotic
The Dagger, or London in the Line
(56th London Division).

Strong threads of consistency link trench journals. Overt patriotism was rare, and criticism of the government and its policy common. In January 1916
The GASPER
satirised Asquith, then prime minister.

Nor did the Labour politician Ramsay Macdonald escape unscathed. In August 1917
The BEF Times
described how ‘Flamsey MacBonald' had addressed a great Labour meeting only to be heckled and booed: ‘Mr Flamsey only looked pained and surprised at the ingratitude of the working man who grudged him his self-appointed task of doing nothing at £400 a year.'

‘Are you a victim to optimism?' inquired
The Somme Times
of its readers in July 1916.

England, according to
The Whizz-Bang of
January 1916, was a far-off land ‘where no shells burst and no bullets fly'.
The Welsh Division New Year Souvenir
for 1917–18 described the war in an alphabet:

And yet there was still a regard for the Empire. As late as November 1918
The Dagger
assured its readers that the British Empire was founded on hope and humanity, and the Canadian
Dead Horse Corner Gazette of
October 1915 affirmed that ‘imperialism has ceased to be an empty phrase, it has become an actuality revitalized by national sacrifice'.

Pay was a constant theme. In July 1916
The Fifth Gloster Gazette
set its readers a mock examination which included the question: ‘A munitions worker works 5 hours a day, 5 days a week and draws £5 pay per week. Compare the scale of pay of those who make the shells and those who deliver them.'
The BEF Times
of 1 December 1916 declared:

Officers and NCOs were gently sent up. A poet in the Welsh Division described a trench inspection.

In Christmas 1916 the editor of
The Dump
commented on an unhelpful senior officer.

Poetry ranged from doggerel to dramatic and from parody to profundity. When we think of First World War poets we should consider not simply the great and the good, but the thousands of men who found in verse the only way of expressing the inexpressible. The poem
The Offside Leader
may feature in no anthology, but it says a good deal about the way field gunners thought about their horses.

Will Harvey had himself been posted as missing when the
Fifth Gloster Gazette
printed his tribute to his friend Second Lieutenant R. E. Knight DCM, who had died of wounds received on the Somme.

But whether poetry attained such high seriousness, or was yet another parody of Omar Khayyam (‘Awake! For Minnie in the Bowl of Night/Has flung the Bomb that puts the Rats to flight') it all helped make the trench journal what it was: part-funny and part-serious, proud and self-deriding, cynical yet supremely confident, an echo of a generation brought up to endure. It both reflected morale, and helped to sustain it.

The prospect of leave helped maintain morale, although, as we have already seen, it had a bittersweet tang, as so many men felt increasingly out of sympathy with the land that had given them birth. Once the leave system got into its swing in early 1915, leave was allocated by unit, with officers and men moving up steadily in a leave rota. Men received leave warrants which enabled them to travel to Boulogne and board a leave ship which took them to Folkestone, whence they travelled by train to Charing Cross or Victoria stations. Leave was normally for a week, although it was soon recognised that men travelling to the Western Isles would have run out of time by the time they reached home, so they were allocated extra days. In times of particular crisis leave was cancelled, and those still on the Continent were ordered to return to their units at once. There were frequent complaints that the system of leave allocation was unfair, and it was certainly true that generals and senior officers were able to get home far more regularly than private soldiers. One of Walter Nicholson's divisional commanders, Philip Robinson, always became irritable if he did not get back to his family every three months, while a private in an infantry battalion might well have to wait a year.

However, like so many of life's sought-after experiences, the reality of being on leave was often an anti-climax. P. J. Campbell wrote of the essential strangeness of being back in England, ‘thinking about the men, wondering whose turn it was to go to the OP, and what the shelling had been like today'. When he was walking through Oxford in plain clothes, a corporal asked him if he would not rather be with the lads in France: ‘a true answer would have been that I was already there, not here in the middle of Oxford'.
³³²
John Reith should have enjoyed dinner with his brother in London, but:

H. E. L. Mellersh thought that ‘there was always some disappointment in these leaves, the difficulty to fit back, in so short a period, into home life, the feeling of alienation from the home front outlook. Rather, one wanted to be with one's companions but not at war: one wanted a binge, a spree, a night on the town, which meant going to “a show” which is to say to the theatre.'
³³⁴

To the difficulty of fitting in was added the anguish of parting: it nearly finished even Frank Crozier. After saying goodbye to his wife and child at Charing Cross he declared: ‘I vow to myself never to come on leave again, even if I get through.' Two days later he received a letter telling him: ‘After you left … we went to the hotel and cried ourselves to sleep, Baba in my arms.'
³³⁵
It is small wonder that some men declined leave. ‘I said Goodbye, Sir, when we left home,' said one soldier, ‘I couldn't stand it again.'
³³⁶
And there was the final agony of returning to one's unit to find that familiar faces had gone. Norman Tennant ‘was grieved to hear that Arthur Driver's brother and Gunner Gee had been killed at the OP during my absence. I felt very bad about this and in some way responsible for their loss.' Like so many hundreds of thousands of men who made that short sea crossing he was drawn back to the front by a combination of legal obligation, the expectation of family and friends, and, above all, a sense of obligation to those he had left behind. The mixture was infinitely variable, but for most men, almost despite themselves, the carrot of mateship weighed heavier than the stick of coercion.