trench letter assignment ww1

Spartacus Educational

Letters from the trenches.

Twelve and a half million letters were sent to the Western Front every week. In 1914 the Postal Section of the Royal Engineers had a staff of 250 men. By 1918 the Army Postal Service employed 4,000 soldiers. Letters only took two or three days to arrive from Britain. Even soldiers in the front line trenches received daily deliveries of letters.

Soldiers were also encouraged to write letters to friends and family in Britain. Most men decided it would be better to conceal the horrors of the trench warfare. As a result of the Defence of the Realm Act that was passed in 1914, all letters that the men wrote should have been read and censored by junior officers.

Some officers could not bring themselves to read their men's letters and these arrived in Britain unaltered. For example, Lieutenant John Reith later admitted in his autobiography, Wearing Spurs (1966): "I did my best to take an interest in the members of my platoon personally. In manual exercises and in extended order drill in a field I could take none; and they knew it. I was supposed to censor their letters home, but I informed them that they were on their honour not to say things they should not say, and I handed over the censor's stamp to the sergeant."

Primary Sources

(1) private h. f. leppard of east grinstead wrote a letter to his mother on 19th december, 1914. the letter was not censored..

The soldiers at the front need more rest. While in the trenches the water is over our knees most of the time. The war is going to last some time yet, and might be another twelve months before it is over. The war has only just begun and its going to be a war of exhaustion. After the regular armies have done their work it means that all the young lads at home being trained and disciplined and will take our place in the field. The sooner people understand this, the better, it will be for the nation.

(2) Private Stanley Terry of 15 North End, East Grinstead, wrote a letter to his family in November, 1915. The letter was not censored.

We have just come out of the trenches after being in for six days and up to our waists in water. While we were in the trenches one of the Germans came over to our trench for a cigarette and then back again, and he was not fired at. We and the Germans started walking about in the open between the two trenches, repairing them, and there was no firing at all. I think they are all getting fed up with it.

(3) Private James Mitchell of 7 Church Lane, East Grinstead, wrote a letter to his father on 17th October, 1914.

We started away just after dawn from our camp and I think it was about an hour later that we encountered the enemy. They were on the opposite side of the valley and as we came over the brow of the hill they opened on us with rifle fire and shrapnel from about 900 yards. We lost three officers and about 100 men killed and wounded in that half hour. I do not want any more days like that one. (this section censored) Anyway we drove the Germans back and held them there for eight days. I cannot tell you all I should like to, as it would never reach you.

(4) Rudolf Binding , letter (April, 1915)

I have not written to you for a long time, but I have thought of you all the more as a silent creditor. But when one owes letters one suffers from them, so to speak, at the same time. It is, indeed, not so simple a matter to write from the war, really from the war; and what you read as Field Post letters in the papers usually have their origin in the lack of understanding that does not allow a man to get hold of the war, to breathe it in although he is living in the midst of it. The further I penetrate its true inwardness the more I see the hopelessness of making it comprehensive for those who only understand life in the terms of peacetime, and apply these same ideas to war in spite of themselves. They only think that they understand it. It is as if fishes living in water would have a clear conception of what living in the air is like. When one is hauled out on to dry land and dies in the air, then he will know something about it. So it is with the war. Feeling deeply about it, one becomes less able to talk about it every day. Not because one understands it less each day, but because one grasps it better. But it is a silent teacher, and he who learns becomes silent too.

(5) In the 1930s Guy Chapman wrote an account of his experiences during the First World War .

I have an old platoon roll before me; three pages of names, numbers, trades, next-of-kin, religions, rifle numbers, and so forth. Faces come back out of the past to answer to these barren details, the face of this man dead, of that vanished for ever. Here and there rise memories of their habits, their nicknames, the look of one as he spoke to you, the attitude of another shivering in the night air, as he leaned over the parapet, watching with tired bloodshot eyes. Some of the faces have disappeared. did I know you? I censored your letters, casually, hurriedly avoiding your personal messages, your poignant hopes.

(6) Charles Hudson , letter to his sister (undated, 1915)

We are now 150yd from Fritz and the moon is bright, so we bend and walk quietly onto the road running diagonally across the front into the Bosche line. There is a stream the far side of this - boards have been put across it at intervals but must have fallen in - about 20yd down we can cross. We stop and listen - swish - and down we plop (for a flare lights everything up) it goes out with a hiss and over the board we trundle on hands and knees. Still. Apparently no one has seen so we proceed to crawl through a line of "French" wire. Now for 100yd dead flat weed-land with here and there a shell hole or old webbing equipment lying in little heaps! These we avoid. This means a slow, slow crawl head down, propelling ourselves by toes and forearm, body and legs flat on the ground, like it snake. A working party of Huns are in their lair. We can just see dark shadows and hear the Sergeant, who is sitting down. He's got a bad cold! We must wait a bit, the moon's getting low but it's too bright now 5 a.m. They will stop soon and if we go on we may meet a covering party lying low. 5.10. 5.15. 5.25. 5.30. And the moon's gone. "Cot the bombs, Sergeant?" "'No. Sir, I forgot them!" "Huns" and the last crawl starts. The Bosch is moving and we crawl quickly on to the wire - past two huge shell holes to the first row. A potent row of standards are the first with a nut at the top and strand upon strand of barbed wire. The nut holds the two iron pieces at the top and the ends are driven into the ground 3ft apart. Evidently this line is made behind the parapet and brought out, the legs of the standard falling together. All the joins where the strands cross are neatly done with a separate piece of plain wire. Out comes the wire cutter. I hold the strands to prevent them jumping apart when cut and Stafford cuts. Twenty-five strands are cut and the standard pulled out. Two or three tins are cut off as we go. (These tins are hung on to give warning and one must beware of them.) Next a space 4ft then low wire entanglements as we cut on through to a line of iron spikes and thick, heavy barbed wire. The standard has three furls to hold the wire up and strive as we can, it won't come out. "By love, it's a corkscrew, twist it round" and then, wonder of wonders, up it goes and out it comes! It is getting light, a long streak has already appeared and so we just make a line of "knife rests" (wire on wooden X-X) against the German parapet and proceed to return. I take the corkscrew and Stafford the iron double standard. My corkscrew keeps on catching and Stafford has to extract me twice from the wire, his standard is smooth and only 3ft so he travels lighter. He leads back down a bit of ditch. Suddenly a sentry fires 2 shots which spit on the ground a few yards in front. We lie absolutely flat, scarcely daring to breathe - has he seen? Then we go on with our trophies, the ditch gets a little deeper, giving cover! My heart is beating nineteen to the dozen - will it mean a machine gun, Stafford is gaining and leads by 10yd. "My God," I think, "it is a listening post ahead and this the ditch to it. I must stop him." I whisper, "Stafford, Stafford" and feel I am shouting. He stops, thinking I have got it. "Do you think it's a listening post?" There! By the mound - listen." "Perhaps we had better cut across to the left Sir." "Are you all right Sir," from Stafford. I laugh, "Forgot that damned wire." (Our own wire outside our listening post). The LP occupants have gone in. Soon we are behind the friendly parapet and it is day. We are ourselves again, but there's a subtle cord between us, stronger than barbed wire, that will take a lot of cutting. Twenty to seven, 2 hrs 10 minutes of life - war at its best. But shelling, no, that's death at its worst. And I can't go again, it's a vice. Immediately after I swear I'll never do it again, the next night I find myself aching after "No Man's Land".

(7) John Reith , Wearing Spurs (1966)

I did my best to take an interest in the members of my platoon personally. In manual exercises and in extended order drill in a field I could take none; and they knew it. I was supposed to censor their letters home, but I informed them that they were on their honour not to say things they should not say, and I handed over the censor's stamp to the sergeant. I was thankful when our three days in billets were over and we were back in trenches again. I was still dreaming about Sailaway and Transport, still bewildered almost every time I woke, but there was at least a chance of something happening in the trenches and one was clear of CO and Adjutant.

(8) Harold Chapin , a self-censored letter to Calypso Chapin (23rd May 1915)

I have been up to my eyes in work (at the main dressing station in " ----- ") since Sunday morning when the British and French attack began (or rather when its fruits in wounded began to reach us. The actual attack began on Saturday night). Nominally I have been on night duty in the operating tent, but naturally with wounded and wounded and wounded flowing in neither night nor day duty means anything. I had had eight hours sleep in three days, when heavy fighting out here developed and the message came down for more bearers, so out I came with a dozen others by horse ambulance (time two a.m.) and going on on foot just as day was breaking, found a Regimental M.O. in a room in a gutted house with some half dozen wounded and two or three dead on the floor about him. His own regimental stretcher bearers were carrying and carrying the long mile down to a spot where an ambulance could meet them, in comparative safety. I gave a hand with my party of six and between us we carried down two: you have no idea of the physical fatigue entailed in carrying a twelve stone blessé a thousand odd yards across muddy fields. Oh this cruel mud! Back in " ----- " we hate it (the poor fellows come in absolutely clayed up), but out here, it is infernal.

Carmarthen Pals

British Postcards of the War

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Last updated 08 october 2014, war letters: communication between front and home front.

In nations where literacy was well-established by 1914, letter-writing was critical to the emotional well-being of soldiers and their families. Men in uniform often circumvented the censors and sent home surprisingly frank descriptions of combat. Civilians sent letters and parcels to the front. Parcels provided a welcome supplement to soldiers’ rations, but when food shortages became chronic in Germany and Austria, the scarcity of parcels and the lamenting letters that made their way to the front made soldiers aware of the depth of civilian suffering and contributed to a deterioration of morale in the German and Austrian armies.

Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Learning to Write Letters
• 3 Postcards, Parcels, and Family Correspondence
• 4 Letters of Affection; Letters of Lament
• 5 Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Introduction ↑.

During the Great War, the efficient circulation of mail was essential to the well-being and morale of soldiers and civilians alike. Soldiers relied on it for reassurances that those at home remembered and loved them; that their welfare mattered to them; and that they continued to have a civilian identity to which they could return when the war was over. Letters, whether sent from or to the front, were eagerly awaited, often committed to memory, and assigned a totemic significance; but letters and postcards were not the only evidence that a soldier remained central to his family. Parcels, too, provided material and psychological comfort: home-made delicacies supplemented an often dreary and sometimes wholly inadequate diet; warm clothing offered protection from the elements; and mementoes from home, as mundane as a local newspaper, as essential as a family photograph , and as moving as a lock of baby hair, became cherished objects. At the same time, civilians depended upon the regular delivery of mail for reassurance that the man they loved remained, at least for the moment, unharmed. When lapses in correspondence inevitably occurred, even for the most innocuous of reasons, wives and parents waited at home with ever intensifying anxiety, eager for respite from the spiraling horror of uncertainty and dread.

Relative proximity to the battle fronts – as was the case in Great Britain , France or Germany – made it possible for families to stay in regular contact with men in uniform. Letters mailed from London or Lyons, Berlin or Bordeaux sometimes arrived at the Western front within three days, and although censorship of front-line correspondence and the customary embargoes placed on outgoing mail in advance of major battles often delayed the return mail, families at home could usually expect to receive letters within a week. In all the fully industrialized, comprehensively educated nations of Europe, where railway networks were extensive and universal literacy well established, letter-writing became an almost manic enterprise. For the duration of the war, German soldiers and civilians exchanged close to 30 billion pieces of mail, of which 7 million letters and postcards were sent home every day. [1] French civilians sent at least 4 million letters per day to the front-lines and received as many in return. [2] By 1917, British soldiers were sending home between 1 and 2 million letters and postcards every day. [3]

The significant distances that separated Dominion and colonial troops from their families impeded but did not fully undermine regular correspondence. Canadians waited at least three weeks and often well over a month for mail from home; Australians and New Zealanders, twice as long. Bad weather, submarine warfare , and human error could cause even greater delays. Rarely, however, was the mail system so thoroughly inefficient as to merit this caustic mention in The Times : a birthday card, mailed from England on 29 January 1917 to a soldier in Egypt , finally arrived two years later. [4]

Notwithstanding its extraordinary volume, historians have often dismissed wartime correspondence as uninformative and overly sanitized. Censorship and self-censorship, it has been claimed, prevented soldiers from saying anything in their letters home that would allow civilians to comprehend, however imperfectly, the horror of war. There is some merit in this argument, but not enough to dismiss wartime correspondence as historically insignificant. Without doubt, some soldiers did refuse to say anything that would unsettle the sleep of their wives or parents; but the correspondence of front-line soldiers, from many different armies, when read in its entirety, is extraordinarily revealing not only for what it said about the war, but also for what it tells us about how combatants remained connected psychologically and emotionally to the families they had left at home. Soldiers confided their anxieties, their hopes for the future, their love for their wives and affection for their children and parents. [5] They sent home sentimental souvenirs and the detritus of battle; they implored their wives and mothers to provide them with clean socks, palatable food, and anything that could keep lice at bay. In turn, families – wives and mothers especially – wrote conscientiously, describing not only the minutiae of everyday life but also the increasing hardships of life on the home front. They assembled parcels, sometimes as frequently as once a week, to be shipped often at considerable cost to men in the front-lines and, even more urgently, to prisoners-of-war . In the main, they did what they could to reassure the men they loved that home awaited them at the end of the war.

Learning to Write Letters ↑

The generation of 1914 grew up in an age of widespread but not yet universal literacy. In Britain, France, Germany, and the German-speaking Habsburg lands almost all men and women born after 1880 were literate. In eastern and south-eastern Europe, where schooling was more erratic and literacy rates more modest, the ability to read and write varied dramatically, by region, by gender, by age, and by occupation. As a general rule, women were less likely to be literate than men and peasants less literate than city workers. Within the Habsburg Monarchy, for example, only 3 percent of men and 5 percent of women in Lower Austria were illiterate while 65 percent of men and 82 percent of women in Dalmatia were. [6] In Russia literacy had made significant inroads in the ranks of the urban working classes – on the eve of the war at least 80 percent of men living in St. Petersburg and Moscow were literate – but this was the exception rather than the rule. Among rural women only 25 percent could read and write. [7] Similar patterns were evident in Italy , where the north was more literate than the south, and men more literate than women. By 1913, only 10 percent of Italian conscripts were illiterate, but when writing home they addressed themselves simultaneously to those who could read – wives and fathers, most notably – and those who could not. [8] These striking variations in literacy meant that wartime correspondence was commonplace among the highly literate armies fighting on the Western Front and less widespread (but by no means non-existent) in other military sectors. Much of the research on wartime correspondence has, as a consequence, concentrated more on British, French, German, Austrian and, to a lesser extent, Italian letter-writing practices than on those of eastern and south-eastern Europe.

Literacy alone did not guarantee that all were equally adept – and equally comfortable – correspondents. Even in countries where literacy was well-established, familiarity with the forms and protocols of letter-writing was not always a given. In the middle classes, the ability to write a well-phrased letter, as explicated by the letter-writing manuals (or secrétaires , as they were known in France) that proliferated in the 19 th century, was by the beginning of the 20 th century essential to bourgeois identity. Considered a necessary arrow in the quiver of middle-class German suitors, for example, the art of letter-writing distinguished the bourgeois gentleman from his rough-edged contemporaries. [9] German children of the working classes, whose families could not afford letter-writing manuals, learned at least the rudiments of letter-writing in the classroom. [10] So, too, in France, where children from the earliest grades practiced how to compose a New Year’s letter or describe a day spent away from home. More than anything else, they learned how important letter-writing was to the cultivation and maintenance of family affection. [11] British children, however, were not introduced to the art of letter-writing until the last year of the elementary curriculum, and not all children stayed in school that long. [12] This does not mean that the English working classes had no experience with family correspondence. Like their counterparts in Germany and Italy, where immigration had made obvious the advantages of epistolary competence, some British working-class families would have exchanged letters with siblings and relatives who had emigrated to the colonies. [13] Many more would have made use of the ubiquitous penny postcards which proliferated in the decades before the Great War. [14] From the 1890s onwards, when discounted postage rates for cards were first introduced, the affordable, attractive, and all-purpose illustrated postcard became the preferred – and sometimes only – means for people of modest means to stay in touch. As Edith Hall, a young English girl of the working class, recalled, her family sent and received postcards almost daily: “My grandmother would send us a card each evening which we received by first delivery the next morning. She would then receive our reply card the same evening .” [15] It is not for nothing that the postcard became known as the "poor man’s telephone." [16]

Postcards, Parcels, and Family Correspondence ↑

The cultural practice and presumptions of family correspondence, inculcated in the years prior to the war, accompanied men from across western and central Europe when they went to war. If circumstances permitted, they would write letters, the much preferred method of communication (especially between husbands and wives); but when circumstances or limited skill conspired against them, postcards had to suffice. Three different kinds of postcards were available: official "field postcards"; inexpensive, commercial picture postcards; and carefully embroidered cards intended as keepsakes. The military-issue postcards were free, convenient, and easily mass produced: in the Austrian-Hungarian Army alone the military authorities distributed 655 million service postcards in the Austrian ranks and 171.5 million to men conscripted from Hungary. [17] However, these service postcards were roundly despised as impersonal and almost completely uninformative. Offered a pre-printed menu of options – from “I am quite well” to “I am being sent down to the base” – British soldiers had to heed the emphatic warning that “If anything else is added to the post card it will be destroyed.” Soldiers in the multi-lingual army of the Habsburg Monarchy were given even fewer choices: the service postcard that was distributed during the last two years of the war contained only one sentence – “I am well” – written in nine official languages.

Much more popular were the illustrated postcards whose varied designs accommodated all tastes and most occasions. Some offered scenes of devastated villages within the battle zone, indicating thereby where the soldier found himself at the front. These cards often fell afoul of the military censors: in one sample, from 1917, French censors in Amiens reviewed almost 23,000 letters, but destroyed only 156, of which 149 were illustrated postcards. [18] Other postcards amused, titillated, or offered patriotic assurances to soldiers and civilians alike. Children sent their fathers postcards to remind them that they were missed; fathers sent cards in honor of special occasions. Husbands and wives tried to find the card that expressed just the right sentiment of tenderness, love, and (sometimes) erotic longing. More elaborate still were the birch-bark cards sent from the Russian front to families in the Habsburg lands and the hand-embroidered cards, embossed with heartfelt greetings of love or patriotic enthusiasm popular among British, Canadian, and, in 1918, American troops. In late 1916, Wilfrid Cove (1882-1917) sent his wife such a card, embroidered with the optimistic message “Every joy this Xmas.” Struggling to stay warm in her semi-detached suburban house and ever more anxious about her husband’s well-being, Ethel Cove probably had a joyless Christmas, but she no doubt appreciated her husband’s inscribed message: “To My darling Wife, with fond love and best wishes for a Happy Christmas from her devoted Husband, Wilfrid. Xmas 1916.” [19] The marginally literate Canadian soldier, Martin Suter (1891–1955) , wooed his intended bride with a series of embroidered cards which revealed both his imperfect mastery of written English and his authentic affection for the distant Flo (d. 1967): “Well Dear flo I wish that I wos home with my Dearing girl we wod hav sum tim wot do you think but I geas that we won be hom for chris I do hop that I can cum to Galt with you Deary well I ges I will clos for this tim good by best love and kises to my dear Girl flo rit sun as you can. [sic]"

Home-sickness, a recurrent theme in postcards dispatched from the front-lines, was temporarily eased by the arrival of a parcel from home. Like the distribution of letters, the shipment of packages was an enormous enterprise that sometimes threatened the efficient functioning of every nation’s military postal system. As early as Christmas 1914, the French postal service was processing at least 200,000 packages (and monopolizing the use of 100 freight carriages) every day. Families were asked henceforth to keep their shipments to a minimum and were reminded that military regulations prohibited the shipment of liquids, food, and perishable items. Few regulations were more consistently ignored for the duration of the war. French families sent their men a cornucopia of local delicacies: fresh fruit, home-made preserves, sausage, paté, cheese, slabs of raw meat with cooking fat for sautéing, even raw eggs. During the weeks leading up to Christmas and New Year’s the French postal authorities sorted upwards of 600,000 packages each day. [20] Although the British sent fewer parcels than the French they nonetheless shipped on average 60,000 parcels a day (and 4.5 million in December 1916), soon overwhelming the vast sorting facility built in Regent’s Park in 1915. [21] Some parcels were custom-made by gourmet grocers; others by philanthropic women’s groups and school children. Indeed, teachers across western and central Europe worked tirelessly to coordinate the charitable impulses of their pupils, helping them to assemble and then ship parcels – dubbed “Liebesgaben” in Germany and Austria – to troops at the front. [22] Although men certainly appreciated the socks, newspapers, tobacco, and other necessities of front-line life that were staples of these "love gifts", the parcels they opened with greatest pleasure were the ones sent by mothers, wives, and daughters. On 14 November 1916, Wilfrid Cove acknowledged receipt of a parcel that resembled a veritable pantry: “Your parcel was a treat. The sausage rolls are A. 1 also the cakes, and the ounce of the good old stuff in a nice new pouch was the very thing! But the eggs! Oh! The eggs!!! Before I’d taken off the canvas cover I detected "something." I put on a pipe and carefully extracted the noisome articles and promptly immersed them into the water in a shell hole before they exploded. It is a pity they went bad, for apart from the expense they are a great treat.” [23]

Parcels sent from England and France usually arrived at the Western Front within a week. Those shipped from distant British Dominions could take two months or more. This meant that every parcel had to be sturdily wrapped and filled only with items that would survive several weeks of unrefrigerated transit. Canadian families prepared boxes of fruitcake, fudge, and maple sugar, but spoilage was inevitable, as Laurie Rogers (1878–1917) ruefully admitted: “those raisin cakes keep fine and even if they are a little bit stale they are from home.” A few weeks later another parcel arrived, this time in excellent condition: “Dear May...Since we arrived here the parcel of eats arrived and believe me we four enjoyed them. Everything was in fine condition nothing smashed or squashed. ...It is awfully good of you to go to so much trouble in baking and making candy when you are so busy but if you only knew how much we think of the things from home you would feel highly complimented.” [24]

Parcels offered much more than relief from the monotonous rations sent up the line. Tangible reminders of familial affection, in the Entente armies they also helped maintain front-line camaraderie. Although every parcel contained something intended for the exclusive enjoyment of the recipient – cookies made by young children, esoteric essays to satisfy the intellectual appetites of a highly educated soldier, family photographs to wear close to one’s heart – men in the French, British, and Dominion armies usually shared most of their temporary bounty. One Canadian soldier noted: “Most boys get parcels very often indeed, and naturally your own crowd all share up alike. Last night, one of us got a cake, chocolate, café au lait, etc., and sitting round the old brazier we were quite happy for a time.” [25] French officers called upon the generosity of parents, wives, and friends to send packages the contents of which were meant for distribution among their men. Following the death in 1916 of Maurice Masson (1879–1916) , his company sergeant wrote appreciatively of his generosity: “when he received [parcels] of warm clothing or linens he always distributed them [among us]. He also liked to give us tobacco, cigars and little gifts which give soldiers such pleasure.” [26] Masson relied upon his wife and family friends to supply this largesse; unmarried officers often expected their mothers to do the same. Etienne de Fontenay (1893–1916) frequently asked his mother to provide aid to the men in his company and, when need arose, their widows and children. Like regimental wives in England who arranged for the distribution of packages to the men under their husbands’ command, Mme de Fontenay routinely sent parcels filled with the very essentials of front-line life: “warm clothing, sweaters, socks, pencils and writing paper.” [27]

Working-class soldiers appreciated the parcels they received from home, but they also worried that their families spent money they could ill afford to provide them with packages. French soldiers were angry that their families had to pay for parcel post, when letters sent to men in uniform went free of charge. More than once, Paul Pireaud (1890–1970) groused about postage rates that he deemed extortionate, and Fernand Maret (1894–1974) wondered how his family could continue to pay for all the packages they sent him. [28] In Britain, where postage rates applied to all mail destined for the front, parcels were an onerous expense, especially for working-class families. Herbert Oates (1882?–1917) , a working man from Leeds, enjoyed the packages his wife and sister sent, but feared they were taxing an already over-burdened family budget: “well I hear food stuff is very dear in England so do not send any more parcels as what with the price of stuff and then sending it over hear [sic] I do not think you can afford it.” [29] This was also Laurie Rogers’s fear. Only weeks before he was killed in action, he implored his wife: “now dear girl I don’t want you to send me cake and candy for two reasons first it gives you a lot of extra work and secondly everything is so expensive I know you will go without yourselves just to be sure that I get something and I don’t want that. Don’t think dear girl that I don’t appreciate the trouble that you go to for I do and also enjoy the cake and fudge but I won’t have you and the kiddies doing without for me.” [30]

Grateful recipients of their families’ gifts, soldiers reciprocated as best they could. Christmas and birthdays, in particular, were not to be forgotten, however meager the array of goods on offer. Herbert Oates found his four year old daughter “Rosery Beads for her Christmas box” and promised that he would send his wife a “Ankerchief as soon as I see wone.” [31] Laurie Rogers thought that his eight-year old son might appreciate “a pocket knife I took from a wounded German it is not anything very beautiful but no other boy in his school would have one, do you think he would like to have it?...It may be late for Christmas but it will be just as good.” [32] Sometimes, however, the most prosaic parcel was the most appreciated. After Caporetto , when the Central Powers made significant territorial gains into northern Italy, Leopold Wolf (1891-1952) , a staff officer in the Habsburg army, took advantage of plundered stockpiles to send his new bride packages of food to supplement her own insufficient rations. [33]

Hunger on the home front in Germany and the Habsburg Monarchy made it increasingly difficult for families to supply their sons and husbands with even the most modest food parcels. Hans Spieß, a Bavarian peasant, perhaps overestimated his parents’ affluence in June 1916, when he somewhat churlishly thanked them for a recently delivered package: “you are quite well off, because you still have something to eat, unlike us. All things from the parcel are gone and now I don’t know what to do.” Nine months later, they were still able to send him parcels, for which he appeared more genuinely grateful: “I received the parcels No. 11 and 12 yesterday and 13 and the letter and card today, many heartfelt thanks.” Josef Beigel, worried about food shortages at home, noted at the end of March, 1917, that “we are not supposed to get any [food] parcels anymore.” By the end of the year, when Spieß received a parcel containing nothing more than “meat and two apples,” the hardship of life on the German home-front was all too evident. [34] In the Habsburg Monarchy, where by 1917 the food crisis restricted most residents of the capital to a daily ration of only 830 calories [35] Viennese families were rarely in a position to ease their soldiers’ plight with food parcels. Indeed, as mentioned above, the most fortunate among them – like the newly married Christine Wolf (1891-1975) – did not send packages to their men in uniform; they received them.

Whether abundant or almost non-existent, packages directly affected soldiers’ morale. The practice of sharing the contents of packages with the men under one’s command, which occurred often in the British and French armies but almost never in the armies of the Central Powers, or with one’s front-line comrades reinforced a soldier’s respect for his officers and fondness for his mates. The arrival of a parcel, and the distribution of its contents, thus became an important occasion for building and reaffirming front-line morale. Beyond that, however, the contents of a package constituted demonstrable proof that life on the home front was not yet so difficult as to reduce the soldier’s family to penury. And for these very reasons, the absence or paucity of parcels proved dangerously demoralizing in the German and Austrian-Hungarian ranks. From 1916 onwards, men grumbled ominously about the relative abundance their officers enjoyed – believing in some instances that officers were skimming off the lion’s share of parcels sent from home – and despised those who refused to share their largesse. [36] As Benjamin Ziemann has demonstrated, unequal access to food parcels also threatened the solidarity of Germany’s rank and file. For as long as rural soldiers could count on their families to provide them with some desperately needed additions to their daily rations, their comrades from the cities looked on with envy and rancor: “How painful it is to watch while others open up their packages full of good things and gobble them down, while I have no hope of receiving a package like that.” [37]

Parcels were especially important for prisoners-of-war (POWs), whose very survival often depended upon the generosity of their families and the efficiency of national relief agencies. Until October 1915, when by international agreement the Allied powers were authorized to supplement the bread ration distributed in German prisoner-of-war camps, British and French prisoners subsisted on German rations and the contents of parcels received from home. [38] Thereafter, family parcels offered welcome additions to the supplies disbursed by British, French and, in the last year of the war, American relief agencies. Even though parcels destined for prisoners-of-war were shipped free of charge, they still constituted a significant charge on the household budgets of ordinary families: after the war, the French government calculated that each family of a French POW spent on average 2.50 francs per day for every day the prisoner remained in captivity, for a national total in excess of 1 billion francs. [39] But for the prisoners who received them, parcels from home could mean the difference between life and near-death. Georges Connes (1890–1974) , a French officer taken prisoner in 1916, received almost two hundred packages during the thirty months of his imprisonment. [40] The Russian officers held at the same camp were much less fortunate: almost entirely deprived of food parcels, they (like their Romanian and Italian counterparts) lived on subsistence rations and occasional hand-outs from their more affluent allies. [41] Conditions for rank-and-file prisoners were even worse: those whose families could not provide supplemental rations often suffered near starvation.

In 1918, when the German offensives of the spring and the Allied counter-offensives of mid-summer resulted in the capture of thousands of new prisoners on both sides, conditions for many POWs deteriorated dangerously. Rank and file soldiers taken prisoner in 1918 were usually assigned to labor companies that operated immediately behind the lines; and many of them had to live on starvation rations. As Heather Jones explains, parcels rarely made their way to these newly captured POWs either because the soldier was unable to inform his family that he had been taken prisoner, or because parcels were sent first to Germany where their contents were often plundered by civilians on the verge of starvation. [42] German prisoners also suffered from the economic disaster that beset their homeland: by September 1918, they heard repeatedly from their families that “they were unable to send them anything...: ‘If you knew what we have become I think you would not even dare to ask us for a pin.” [43]

Parcels made a soldier’s life something other than pure misery. They were, however, no substitute for a letter. Indeed, almost every soldier insisted that nothing mattered more to his morale than the regular receipt of letters from home. Similarly only a letter in the soldier’s own hand offered his parents, siblings, wife and children the much needed reassurance that he was still alive. To be fully satisfying letters had to be honest, informative, affectionate, and confiding. Yet they also had to be sufficiently anodyne, vague, and politically inoffensive as to pass the censors. Censorship occurred in all armies, to guarantee that militarily sensitive information would not fall into the wrong hands, to identify instances of political (or military) subversion, and to assess the morale and well-being of front-line troops. But each army imposed censorship as it saw fit. In Germany until April 1916 and in Britain for the duration of the war, mail was censored at the company level: junior officers were responsible for reviewing all mail produced by the rank and file soldiers in their company. [44] The unit-level censorship of family correspondence found few admirers. A German soldier recalled how “every one of us had a strange and bitter feeling...we felt disgusted watching this sergeant reading our letters to our wives at home.” [45] In the British and Dominion forces junior officers found the task laborious; their men felt it insulting. As Desmond Morton has argued, “[p]art of a soldier’s humiliation was the knowledge that his officers read every word of his personal letters and, as mess waiters knew, sometimes joked about them with brother officers.” [46] By mid-1916, however, both the German and French armies had put in place a more randomized system of censorship similar to that in effect in the Austrian-Hungarian army. The task devolved to censors who read only a random sample of letters generated in any given regiment – perhaps only 2 percent of all letters dispatched from the French front-lines – and who operated sufficiently far behind the lines that the soldier and the censor were unknown to one another. [47]

Whether enforced at the unit level or implemented by random selection behind the lines, censorship of personal correspondence proved a major irritant for all soldiers; for some, it effectively denied them the freedom to write at any length or with much detail about the war. This was especially evident in the British ranks, where censorship by one’s commanding officer often stifled frank communication. Herbert Oates was a most reluctant soldier and during the few months he spent in the front-lines before his death in the spring of 1917, he conveyed very little in his letters home of what he experienced. Perhaps he chose to censor himself, out of respect for the feelings of his wife and children; perhaps he would have said more had his mastery of written English been more assured. But the reason he gave his wife was simple enough: his letters had to be read “before they leave here so we cant [sic] put mutch [sic] in.” And thus he wrote in banalities. The weather was awful; the food, not too bad; the trenches, filthy: “I had a poor Christmas as we was in the trenches all the time so you can guess what it was like but we have just come out for a day or two rest I have just been to the baths and we have got a clean change of shirt socks pants and we washed them I can tell you afor [sic] if we had put them down they would have walked away by themselves so you can gess [sic] what it was like.” [48] Everything else was left to Beatie Oates’s imagination.

Many soldiers, however, were more willing than Herbert Oates to court the ire of military censors. Recognizing that their families were anxious to know exactly where they were at the front, most soldiers tried to send this information home, one way or another. Some soldiers were able to do this openly and with impunity: Paul Pireaud, serving with the heavy artillery at Verdun in 1916 , sent his wife a hand-drawn map, indicating the precise position of his battery. Others ran the risk of court martial. One hapless soldier in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry faced a court-martial for having written the word ‘Vimy’ in one of his letters. [49] To avoid such severe punishment, soldiers in all armies invented codes, some of which were so impenetrable as to be all but useless to writer and reader alike. Other codes were simple but effective: one favored by many soldiers allowed them to reveal their location at the front by placing a dot under a succession of letters. Fernand Maret used this simple subterfuge to tell his parents where he was during the height of the 1917 mutinies, when censorship in the French ranks was most punctilious. [50]

Soldiers also attempted, with uneven results, to circumvent the military censors entirely, either by using the civilian mails or by sending private correspondence home with men going on leave. French troops had a clear advantage in this regard: they had direct access to their own civilian postal system, which was subject to censorship but closely scrutinized only during the mutinies, and unlike the British and Germans, they were not searched when going on leave. Dominion troops could use the civilian mail while on leave, and some did so to write freely about their war experiences. In March 1916, for example, while William Coleman (1879-?) was on leave in London, he confided to his wife that “the Canadians are now taking over a piece in the Ypres Salient. At present our Brigade is on the left and has left flank on Hooge. ...The British have taken over new line from the French and this is part of the general scheme of allotment. Please do not show this to anyone.” [51] A few months later, Laurie Rogers, whose wife repeatedly urged him to tell her as much as he could about the war, waited until he was on leave in London to describe his harrowing experiences at Ypres : “the Bombardment we have just come through was the worst since the war began so you will immagine [sic] what it must have been like. The ground just shook like a jelly and the explosions were so heavy at times that I was lifted right off the ground. I sincerely hope I never have to go into another like it. I went into the front line with 75 men and two officers and there was only one officer and twelve of us left to march out.” [52] Although May Rogers no doubt wept as she read this stark description of combat, her husband confided in her because she (like many other wartime wives) insisted upon it. As Marie Pireaud observed to Paul, however many tears she shed upon reading – and re-reading his letters – she “preferred to know the truth and all the truth.” [53]

In the long interim from one leave to the next, troops in the British and Dominion forces could enjoy a temporary respite from the over-bearing censorship of the front-lines by using much coveted, albeit irregularly distributed green envelopes. First issued in the spring of 1915, they were imprinted with the assurance that “correspondence in this envelope need not be censored Regimentally,” and with the warning that “the Contents are liable to examination at the Base.” Captain Frederick Corfield (1884–1939) , a career officer in the British Expeditionary Force , thought that the new envelopes would be appreciated by men in the ranks: “he can say things wh: [sic] he doesn’t want the officer who censors here to know.” [54] Green envelopes were, however, more a privilege than a right and any misuse of the system carried with it the threat that the privilege would be revoked. George Ormsby (1879–1967) regretted that “[s]o many of the boys took advantage of them and wrote home about their petty squabbles how such an officer treats his men, etc. and making complaints all around that the privilege was partly withdrawn and may be withdrawn altogether so then every letter we write home will have to be censored by our officer.” [55]

British officers had more opportunity than their men to circumvent the censors. Although all outbound correspondence was subject to random checks at the base, officers could often avoid the embarrassment of front-line censorship by signing their own envelopes or having a trusted fellow officer do so. Upon his arrival in France in October 1914, Corfield warned his wife: “It’s awfully hard to write anything when every word is read and censored before it’s licked up!!” But it soon became evident that he could rely upon a fellow officer to censor his letters, with little attention to their contents. Indeed, he lamented the death of his friend and fellow officer for many reasons, not least of which was that “Nairne always censored my letters so I don’t know how I shall get this one off.” [56] Other officers, usually of higher rank, censored their own letters. [57] In his letters to his wife, Colonel Rowland Fielding (1871–1945) created a record of his front-line service that hid little of its horrors. [58] Although some officers believed it was “not playing the game to insert information which the men are not allowed to give,” [59] others had few such scruples. When Corfield’s brother-in-law wrote more than he should have, Corfield was appalled: “Darling do write and tell Dennis not to write the things he does, it really is most awfully wrong of him and if he does for heavens sake make the Vernons shut their mouths...Really if the censor opened those sort of letters he’d quite rightly be court martialed.” [60]

Censorship thus had varied effects, across ranks and from one army to another. French and German soldiers despised the censors as voyeurs and busybodies, but they still wrote more about the war (and their demoralization) than their commanders would have liked. They described the blasted landscape of the Western Front, the misery of everyday life, and their own near misses with death. Lucien Kern (1889–1920) , one of three brothers who had immigrated to Canada shortly before the war, returned to Europe in 1914 to serve in the French army. As early as February 1915, he confessed in a letter to his mother, sister, and brother-in-law: “Two of my comrades were killed right at my feet. I was up to my knees in blood. Each time that I lowered my head I saw their crushed heads, hit by a bullet from a rifle only 13 meters away. ...My heart broke to see such good comrades spread out at our feet like that.” [61] More than a year later and under the new censorship regime, Fernand Maret took stock after a week in the front-lines at Verdun: “I’ve come back from the dead because I’ve never seen such butchery; our regiment had many losses, 60 percent; in one company, only 30 men came back. I suffered martyrdom for a week, that’s to say I was crazy for eight days straight, almost everyone was and some still are... It is a true war of savages, curses on those who are responsible, I damn them.” [62] Conditions in the German lines were, of course, no better. When writing to his parents, Hans Spieß was as appalled as Maret, as disgusted as Kern, and as honest as both of them: “[w]e are in a very dangerous position here. ...The Frenchmen bring mines over more than three cwt. If one of those hits a dugout, it crunches ten men without leaving a single limb in one piece. It is so sad to watch and see all that. ...The worst and most moving of all is when one’s best comrade is getting torn apart, and one is supposed to leave him next to you until it is dark. Then he can be buried...This is not a war any more, it is just murder, who is to blame for that.” [63]

Not all soldiers were as forthcoming when writing to their parents as Maret, Kern, and Spieß. Some chose to confide more frequently in their siblings; married men often wrote most expansively to their wives. As Martyn Lyons has shown, Italian troops did not usually unburden themselves to their parents but “often wrote more freely to another correspondent, perhaps a brother, the local priest or a lover.” [64] In the British forces, sisters and fathers were often confidants; mothers, much less so. [65] But even mothers learned, directly or indirectly, much about the war that must have kept them awake at night. Ella Bickersteth (1859–1954) had three sons in uniform – Burgon Bickersteth (1888–1979) , Julian Bickersteth (1885–1962) and Morris Bickersteth (1891-1916) – and only occasionally did they feel constrained by the censors’ regulations. Although Burgon could not, in good conscience, tell his mother where his company was heading in late 1915, he could (in a subsequent letter) describe its malodorous nature: “There is the awful smell of the trenches after an engagement, the smell of gunpowder, and dead bodies and blood. It is a stench I shall never forget.” Julian, a military chaplain, wrote not only of the spiritual consolation he twice had to offer men condemned to death for desertion, but also of the wounded men huddled helplessly at a casualty clearing station: “My eyes are glutted with the sight of bleeding bodies and shattered limbs, my heart wrung with the agony of wounded and dying men. ...It is pitiful to see the men suffering from gas. They lie, their eyes streaming, their bodies burnt and blistered, and vomiting out their very souls – and but little can be done to relieve them.” [66]

Letters of Affection; Letters of Lament ↑

To concentrate exclusively on what front-line soldiers did, or did not, say in their letters home about the horrors of the war is both to misconstrue the multifaceted, conversational character of wartime correspondence and to minimize the importance of correspondence generated on the home front. When men in uniform inquired about the family farm, the scholastic progress of their children, or the health of aging or infirm family members they simultaneously affirmed their civilian identity, as fathers, husbands, and sons, and engaged their parents, wives, and children in domestic conversations that helped efface the distance that separated them. Husbands offered opinions from afar about their wives’ disputes with over-bearing in-laws or irresponsible tenants; fathers corrected the spelling errors of their children, while taking pride in their scholastic achievements; and almost everyone affirmed their affection by sending home sprigs of flowers, incongruous snippets of beauty plucked from the mire of the front-lines. [67] Just as importantly, mothers, wives, and children reminded men in uniform that they were loved; sought their advice on matters momentous and merely irksome; and in open defiance of official recommendations confessed their emotional anxieties and material misery.

Women and children knew what was expected of them: they were to reinforce the morale of their men-folk by reassuring them that they were loved and remembered. Because fathers at the front feared that they would soon be forgotten, they urged their children to take up the task of regular correspondence. Children old enough to be acquainted with the rules of grammar and composition often took this responsibility very seriously, composing letters filled with family news, classroom triumphs, and minor mishaps. [68] George Ormsby preserved and clearly cherished the ink-smudged letter he received from his daughter, Margaret. Younger children were, not surprisingly, less loquacious: the very youngest might illustrate a family letter with a kiss or a winsome drawing. And some simply balked at having to sit still long enough to write a letter. Although Laurie Rogers heard often from his daughter, his seven-year old son preferred to play, to skate, and to avoid the tedium of letter-writing period. Mothers were, in the main, more reliable correspondents than young children, although the semi-schooled women of rural Europe often struggled to put pen to paper. Rosa Pireaud, less literate than her son, daughter-in-law, or husband, battled fatigue and her own sense of inadequacy when she wrote to her son. She begged Paul’s forgiveness for not writing on the lines: “in the evenings I can’t see properly and during the day I don’t have time.” However halting her penmanship, she nonetheless assured him that she remained his “mother forever” (“ta mère pour la vie”). [69] The more educated mothers of the middle-classes became their sons’ regular correspondents. In the words of Michael Roper, “letter-writing was a way of mothering at a distance” and mothers took the task seriously. [70]

For married men, nothing mattered more than the regular – often daily – receipt of letters from their wives. Just as a husband’s letter offered his wife temporary assurance that he still lived, a wife’s affirmed that he was still loved. Wives wrote about many things: the price of coal, the precarious state of the harvest, and the precious antics of infants. They complained about their neighbors, provided updates on the condition of sick children, and offered commentary on international politics. Nothing was more important, however, than their avowals of affection. Often phrased in ways that displeased civil and military authorities, who feared that women’s laments of loneliness would only demoralize frontline soldiers, war wives nonetheless frequently expressed their love by confessing their loneliness. [71] By October 1917, May Rogers’s husband had been overseas for more than two years and she hoped desperately that he would be eligible for one of the few extended leaves granted to long-serving Canadian soldiers: “if only I could see you, I think it would make a different woman of me loneliness is eating my heart out and yours too probably.” [72] Marjorie Fair, an English newlywed in 1917, was more fortunate than May Rogers – she at least had seen her husband recently – but just as lonely: “I am making a vast effort to remember (with no success) that I have the best man in the world for my sweetheart. I forget that (a) he is away; (b) no prospect of leave; (c) I am darned tired of the lonely life.” [73]

Women knew that they were not supposed to say anything to cause anxiety or contribute to demoralization in the front-lines; but they also knew, because their husbands and sons insisted upon it, that they were expected to tell the truth about developments at home. If a child was sick, family living arrangements stressful, or food shortages critical, then the men in the front lines wanted to be told. Thus letters from home spoke not only of love, loneliness and the persistent anxiety known only to families separated by war, but also of the material difficulties that became ever more pervasive in the last years of the war. When compared with the plight of families in central and Eastern Europe, civilians in Britain and France were well off. The intensely cold winter of 1916-17, the resumption of submarine warfare that threatened temporarily Britain’s food supply, aerial bombardment which targeted London and coastal towns with deadly effect, and the introduction of rationing late in the war gave them ample cause for complaint nonetheless. In 1917 Ethel Cove and her two little girls were, she avowed, comfortable enough, but her elderly mother was suffering from the effects of coal shortages: “Mum can’t keep warm (her hands are bad) and Poppy buys coal by the 1d or 2d worth ...I’ve sent Mum 2/6 as it’s dreadful to think of one of your own going hungry and cold in this weather.” [74]

Even more dreadful were the fear and terror that accompanied bombing raids. In November 1916, rumors of a serious raid over London alarmed British soldiers in France who feared for the safety of their families at home. Wilfrid Cove waited anxiously for word that Harrow had not been hit, and Stuart Tompkins, whose Canadian-born wife had accompanied him to Britain, was equally unsettled: “Do you know there have been rumours of a great air raid on London. I do not believe it but it can’t help but make me anxious. I shall look for letters to reassure me.” [75] Letters from home were not, however, always reassuring, as Susan Grayzel’s study of civilian responses to aerial bombardment makes evident. In July 1917, when London suffered a raid that killed thirty-seven and injured 141, one young war-wife confessed: “Oh darling this life is getting too terrible for words & one’s nerves cannot stand much more. When I shut my eyes can see those huge things like great blackbirds right over us...” [76] In comparison, Mary Corfield’s plight was much less alarming: hard-pressed to live on her allowance of £360 per year, she thought she should find herself a job. Her husband demurred: “About the work Darling I don’t know what to say 32/- a week isn’t too bad if the hours are reasonable and provided you can give it up the moment I come home on leave.” And, he insisted, she was not even to think about using her wages to settle her mother’s debts. [77] Disagreements about money punctuated the Corfield correspondence and when combined with the disruptive effects of absence and new (albeit temporary) economic opportunities for women infused their marriage with intermittent tension.

In the Central Powers, where food shortages endangered the health of civilians, women were entirely indifferent to the injunction that they were to suffer in silence. In Vienna, “by 1917 state censors had become alarmed at the despairing tone of private letters sent from the home front to soldiers in the field...Comments such as ‘When you all return home, you won’t find us alive’ were not uncommon.” A teenage girl in Bohemia warned her father that “our mother doesn’t want to and cannot support us...Everyday she goes without breakfast...and at night she comes home totally exhausted and cries from hunger, and we cry with her.” [78] Women in Germany and Russia wrote of political unrest, mistreatment at the hands of the police, and the relentless, increasing misery of everyday life. [79] These so-called “lamenting letters” were more than mere confessions of material misery. Insofar as they challenged the legitimacy of the state, exposed its inability to provide civilians with the necessities of life, and ignored injunctions to suffer in silence, they were acts of political and cultural defiance.

Conclusion ↑

Correspondence and the parcels that periodically alleviated the misery of front-line service were critical components of wartime life for soldiers and their families. Literacy made the regular exchange of letters possible; longing for home and safe reunion made it necessary. Many, but not all, soldiers described in unnerving detail the tedium and terror of combat thus tacitly and sometimes openly defying the censors’ right to control their speech. Women at home – mothers, wives, and sisters – were thus less insulated from unsettling knowledge of conditions at the front than we have long believed. They did not know, as soldiers knew, what it was to endure the hell of the trenches; but they were not entirely ignorant, either. Regular correspondence did more, however, than present civilians with an imperfect knowledge of a soldier’s life. Its conversational character allowed wives, mothers, and children, as well as husbands, sons, and fathers, to affirm their affection while also giving voice to their anxieties. The regular exchange of letters, parcels and postcards thus offered soldiers and their families emotional sustenance and psychological consolation. As Roy Gullen (1881–1917) confessed to his wife, Mary, in September 1916: “it does my [sic] good to know I am writing to you dear heart.” [80] But letters of lament, marked by unapologetic accounts of psychological and material misery, challenged the social convention that civilians were to endure with stoic resignation the tribulations of war. When read in its entirety, the family correspondence of the Great War demonstrates that neither soldiers nor civilians accepted uncritically the right of the state to censor their thoughts and render mute their grievances.

Martha Hanna, University of Colorado

Section Editor: Christa Hämmerle

• ↑ Ulrich, Bernd: Feldpostbriefe im Ersten Weltkrieg – Bedeutung und Zensur, as cited in Chickering, Roger: Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914 – 1918, Cambridge and New York 1998, p. 101.
• ↑ Ministère de la Guerre, Etat-Major de l’Armée – Service Historique, Les Armées Françaises dans la Grande Guerre, tome XI: La Direction de l’Arrière, Paris, 1937, p. 395. The Ministry of War calculated that the “central military office [Bureau central militaire, or BCM] sorted, in normal times, between 3,500,000 and 4,000,000 letters. At certain times, particularly at the end of the year, the traffic intensified and grew to approximately 5,000,000. This counts only letters sent to the front as correspondence from the front did not pass through the BCM. This correspondence was more or less the same as that going in the other direction."
• ↑ Marie-Monique Huss estimates that by 1917 the British army on the Western Front was sending 2 million cards or letters each day: Huss, Marie-Monique: Histoires de famille: Cartes postales et culture de guerre, Paris 2000, p. 89; Michael Roper suggests the more modest, but still impressive, statistic of 8 million letters per week: Roper, Michael: The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War, Manchester 2009, p. 50.
• ↑ The Times, 18 January 1919.
• ↑ On the affectionate character of wartime correspondence between husbands and wives, see Hanna, Martha: Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War, Cambridge, MA 2006; between sons and mothers, Roper, The Secret Battle 2009; and between fathers and their children, Pignot, Manon: Allons Enfants de la patrie: Génération Grande Guerre, Paris 2012, ch. 4.
• ↑ Graff, Harvey J.: The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture, Bloomington 1991, p. 295.
• ↑ Guroff, Gregory and Starr, Frederick S.: A Note on Urban Literacy in Russia, 1890 – 1914, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, December 1971, pp. 520-531.
• ↑ Reeder, Linda: Women in the Classroom: Mass Migration, Literacy and the Nationalization of Sicilian Women at the Turn of the Century, Journal of Social History, Fall 1998, pp. 101 – 124; Graff, The Legacies of Literacy 1991, p. 298; Lyons, Martyn: The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c. 1860 – 1920, Cambridge 2013, ch. 7.
• ↑ Wyss, Eva L.: From the Bridal letter to online flirting: Changes in text type from the nineteenth century to the Internet era, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 9/2 (2008), pp. 228-229.
• ↑ Elspaß, Stephan: Between linguistic creativity and formulaic restriction: Cross-linguistic perspectives on nineteenth-century lower class writers’ private letters, in: Dossena, Marina and Del Lungo Camiciotti, Grabriella (eds.): Letter Writing in Late Modern Europe, Amsterdam and Philadelphia 2012, p. 55.
• ↑ Hanna, Martha: A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I, American Historical Review, 108/5 (December 2003), pp. 1338-1361.
• ↑ Vincent, David: Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750 – 1914, Cambridge 1989, p. 89.
• ↑ On the significance of correspondence in immigrant societies, see Reeder, Women in the Classroom 1998; Gerber, David A.: Authors of their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, New York 2006; Dossena, Marina: "As this leaves me at present": Formulaic usage, Politeness, and Social Proximity in nineteenth-century Scottish Emigrants’ letters, in Stephan Elspaß et. al, eds: Germanic Language Histories "from Below" (1700 – 2000), Berlin and New York 2007, pp. 13-29; Lyons, The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe 2013; and Elspaß, Between linguistic creativity and formulaic restriction 2012, pp. 45-64.
• ↑ Huss, Histoires de famille: Cartes postales et culture de guerre 2000, p. 29.
• ↑ As quoted in Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture 1989, p. 51.
• ↑ Gendreau, Bianca: Putting Pen to Paper, Special Delivery: Canada’s Postal Heritage, ed. Francine Brousseau, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Fredericton 2000, pp. 27-29.
• ↑ Hämmerle, Christa: "You let a weeping woman call you home?" Private Correspondences during the First World War in Austria and Germany, in Earle, Rebecca (ed.): Epistolary Selves: Letters and letter-writers, 1600 – 1945 , Aldershot 1999, p. 154.
• ↑ Section Historique de la Défense (SHD), 16 N 1448: GQG, 2ème Bureau, Contrôle postal crée de Abbeville, Amiens, week of 24 May 1917.
• ↑ Liddle Collection, Special Collections, University of Leeds Library (subsequent references to materials from the Liddle Collection will be given as “Liddle Collection”. Correspondence of Gunner Wilfrid J. Cove. Wilfrid Cove to Ethel Cove [December 1916]. Although every effort has been made to identify the birth and death dates of all individuals cited in this essay, this information is not readily available for everyone, including the Coves. In general, such biographical data are more accessible for the men who served in uniform than for their mothers, wives, and children.
• ↑ Ministère de la Guerre, Etat-Major de l’Armée – Service Historique, Les Armées Françaises dans la Grande Guerre, tome XI: La Direction de l’Arrière, Paris, 1937, p. 395.
• ↑ Roper, The Secret Battle 2009, p. 9, p. 93.
• ↑ Roper, The Secret Battle 2009, p. 94; Goebel, Stefan: Schools, in Winter, Jay and Robert, Jean-Louis (eds.): Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914 – 1918, vol. 2: A Cultural History, Cambridge and New York 2007, p. 220; Pignot, Allons enfants de la patrie 2012, p. 86; Healy, Maureen: Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I, Cambridge and New York 2004, pp. 243 – 244; Hämmerle, Christa: Von ‘Patriotischen’ Sammelaktion, ‘Kälteschutz,’ und ‘Liebesgaben’: die ‘Schulfront’ der Kinder im Ersten Weltkrieg, Beiträge zur Historischen Sozialkunde, 24/1 (1994), pp. 21–29.
• ↑ Liddle Collection. Correspondence of Wilfrid Cove. Wilfrid Cove to Ethel Cove, 14 November 1916.
• ↑ Canadian War Museum Research Center (hereafter CWMRC). Correspondence of Lawrence Rogers. Laurie Rogers to May Rogers, 8 April 1916, 18 April 1916.
• ↑ R. A. L., Letters of a Canadian Stretcher-Bearer, ed. Anna Chapin Ray, Boston, 1918, p. 90.
• ↑ Masson, Maurice: Lettres de guerre, août 1914 – avril 1916, Paris, 1917, p. 261. Sergeant Valois to Mme Masson, undated.
• ↑ de Fontenay, Charles and de Fontenay, Etienne: Lettres du Front, 1914-1916, Paris 1920, p. 217. Etienne de Fontenay to his parents, 14 November 1915; Roper, The Secret Battle 2009, p. 94.
• ↑ Section Historique de la Défense (Vincennes):1Kt T458 Correspondance entre le soldat Paul Pireaud et son épouse 10 jan. 1910 – 1927. Paul Pireaud to Marie Pireaud, 13 March 1916, 28 March 1916 (all subsequent references to the Pireaud correspondence will be to this collection; Maret, Fernand: Lettres de la guerre 14-18, Nantes 2001, p. 80. Letter dated 22 February 1916.
• ↑ Liddle Collection. Correspondence of Herbert Oates. Herbert Oates to Beatrice Oates, undated [letter #24].
• ↑ CWMRC, Correspondence of Lawrence Rogers. Laurie Rogers to May Rogers, 10 October 1917.
• ↑ Liddle Collection. Correspondence of Herbert Oates. Herbert Oates to Beatie Oates, letter #26, December 1916.
• ↑ CWMRC. Correspondence of Lawrence Rogers. Letter of Laurie Rogers to May Rogers, 1 December 1916.
• ↑ Hämmerle, "You Let a weeping woman call you home?" 1999, p. 170.
• ↑ Letters of Hans Spieß, dated 25 June 1916, 12 March 1917, and 16 December 1917; of Josef Beigel, dated 2 March 1917, as cited in Ulrich, Bernd and Ziemann, Benjamin (eds.): German Soldiers in the Great War: Letters and Eyewitness Accounts, trans. Christine Brocks, Barnsley 2010, pp. 159, 161, 162, 165-166.
• ↑ Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire 2004, p. 31.
• ↑ On the demoralizing effects of unequal access to food within the Central Powers, see: Watson, Alexander: Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale, and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918, Cambridge and New York 2008, pp. 127-129; Davis, Belinda: Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin, Chapel Hill 2000; and Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire 2009.
• ↑ As cited by Ziemann, Benjamin: War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914-1923, trans. Alex Skinner, Oxford and New York 2007, p. 77.
• ↑ Rousseau, Frédéric: Paroles de femmes de poilus: Jours de guerre au féminin sur le front intérieur Languedocien, Annales du Midi, 12/232 (2000), p. 486.
• ↑ Abbal, Oddon: Le Témoignage de la correspondence des prisonniers languedociens, in: Canini, Gérard (ed.): Mémoire de la Grande Guerre: témoins et témoignages, Nancy 1989, p. 185.
• ↑ Connes, Georges: A POW’s Memoir of the First World War: The Other Ordeal, trans. Marie-Claire Connes Wrage, ed. Lois Davis Vines, Oxford and New York 2004, p. 48.
• ↑ Speed, Richard B.: Prisoners, Diplomats, and the Great War: a Study in the Diplomacy of Captivity, New York 1990, pp. 74-75.
• ↑ Jones, Heather: Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914-1920, Cambridge and New York 2011, pp. 192-3, 195.
• ↑ Ibid., p. 246.
• ↑ On censorship in the Austrian army, see Hämmerle, ‘You let a weeping woman call you home’ 1999, p. 155.
• ↑ As cited in Ulrich and Ziemann (eds.), German Soldiers in the Great War 2010, p. 124.
• ↑ Morton, Desmond: When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War, Toronto 1993, p. 238.
• ↑ Lyons, Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe 2013, pp. 79-80; Ulrich and Ziemann (eds.), German Soldiers in the Great War 2010, p. 126.
• ↑ Liddle Collection. Correspondence of Herbert Oates. Herbert Oates to Beatie Oates, letter #26 (undated).
• ↑ Library and Archives Canada, MG 30 E149: Letters of Agar Adamson: vol. 7. Agar Adamson to Mabel Adamson, 6 April 1917.
• ↑ Maret, Lettres de la guerre 14–18 2001, p. 202.
• ↑ CWMRC. Correspondence of Capt. William Coleman. William Coleman to Della Coleman, 28 March 1916.
• ↑ CWMRC. Correspondence of Lawrence Rogers. Laurie Rogers to May Rogers, 9 June 1916.
• ↑ Marie Pireaud to Paul Pireaud, 1 June 1916.
• ↑ Liddle Collection. Correspondence of Frederick and Mary Corfield. Frederick Corfield to Mary Corfield, 3 April 1915, 10 April 1915.
• ↑ CWMRC. Correspondence of George Ormsby. George Ormsby to Maggie Ormsby, 6 September 1915.
• ↑ Liddle Collection. Correspondence of Frederick and Mary Corfield. Frederick to Mary Corfield, 11 October 1914, 31 October 1914.
• ↑ Finn, Michael: Local Heroes: War News and the Construction of ‘community’ in Britain, 1914 – 1918, Historical Research, 83/221 (2010), p. 528.
• ↑ Fielding, Rowland: War Letters to a Wife: France and Flanders, 1915 – 1919, Walker, Jonathan (ed.), Staplehurst 2001.
• ↑ Tompkins, Stuart Ramsay: A Canadian’s Road to Russia: Letters from the Great War Decade, Pieroth, Doris H. (ed.), Edmonton 1989, p. 187. Letter dated 2 December 1916.
• ↑ Liddle Collection. Correspondence of Frederick and Mary Corfield. Frederick to Mary Corfield, 15 October 1916.
• ↑ Lettres des tranchées: Correspondance de guerre de Lucien, Eugène et Aimé Kern, trois frères manitobains, soldats de l’armée française durant la Première Guerre mondiale, lettres choisies et présentées par Claude de Moissac (St. Boniface, Manitoba 2007), 86 – 87. 25 February 1915.
• ↑ Maret, Lettres de la guerre 14-18 2001, 5 August 1916.
• ↑ Hans Spieß to his parents, as cited in Ulrich and Ziemann (eds.), German Soldiers in the Great War 2010, p. 159.
• ↑ Lyons, Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe 2013, p. 157.
• ↑ Roper, The Secret Battle 2009, pp. 61, 67.
• ↑ Bickersteth, John (ed.): The Bickersteth Diaries, 1914–1918, London 1996, pp. 55, 59, 220.
• ↑ Bacconnier, Gérard et al: “Quarante millions de témoins,” in: Canini, Gérard (ed.): Mémoire de la Grande Guerre: témoins et témoignages, Nancy 1989, p. 148.
• ↑ Pignot, Allons enfants de la patrie 2012, ch. 4.
• ↑ Rosa Pireaud to Paul Pireaud, 15 January 1915.
• ↑ Roper, The Secret Battle 2009, p. 51.
• ↑ For example, Marcel Prévost of the Académie Française exhorted French women to resist the urge to write letters that would undermine the confidence or resolve of men at the front; they were, instead, to fill their letters with “comforting truths.” Prévost: Pour Celles qui écrivent aux Soldats, Bulletin des Armées de la République (3 mai 1916). Marie Pireaud kept a copy of this article among the letters she preserved from the war.
• ↑ CWMRC. Correspondence of Lawrence Rogers. May Rogers to Laurie Rogers, 17 October 1917.
• ↑ Fair, Reginald and Fair, Charles: Marjorie’s War: Four Families in the Great War, 1914–1918, Brighton 2012, p. 324. Marjorie to Charles Fair, 23 November 1917.
• ↑ Liddle Collection. Correspondence of Wilfrid Cove. Ethel Cove to Wilfrid Cove, 31 January 1917.
• ↑ Tompkins, A Canadian’s Road to Russia 1989, p. 173. Letter dated 17 November 1916.
• ↑ Letter from Edie Bennet to Edwin Bennet, 9 July 1917, as cited in Grayzel, Susan R.: At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz, Cambridge and New York 2012, p. 76
• ↑ Liddle Collection. Correspondence of Frederick and Mary Corfield. Frederick Corfield to Mary Corfield, 31 December 1916.
• ↑ Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire 2009, pp. 40–41; Zahra, Tara: ‘Each nation only cares for its own’: Empire, Nation, and Child Welfare Activism in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1918, American Historical Review, 111/5 (2006), p. 1391.
• ↑ Davis, Home Fires Burning 2000, pp. 96, 113; Engel, Barbara: Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I, Journal of Modern History, 69/4 (1997), p. 712
• ↑ http://www.canadianletters.ca/letters.php?letterid=4345&docid=1 (retrieved 1 October 2014). Letter from Roy Gullen to Mary Gullen, 4 September 1916.
• Canini, Gérard (ed.): Mémoire de la Grande Guerre. Témoins et témoignages , Nancy 1989: Presses universitaires de Nancy.
• Cook, Tim: Shock troops. Canadians fighting the Great War, 1917-1918 , volume 2, Toronto 2008: Viking Canada.
• Davis, Belinda: Home fires burning. Food, politics, and everyday life in World War I Berlin , Chapel Hill 2000: University of North Carolina Press.
• Dossena, Marina / Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella: Letter writing in late modern Europe , Amsterdam; Philadelphia 2012: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
• Hämmerle, Christa: 'You let a weeping woman call you home?' Private correspondences during the First World War in Austria and Germany , in: Earle, Rebecca (ed.): Epistolary selves. Letters and letter-writers, 1600-1945, Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vermont 1999: Ashgate, pp. 152-182.
• Hanna, Martha: A republic of letters. The epistolary tradition in France during World War I , in: The American Historical Review 108/5, December 2003, pp. 1338-1361.
• Hanna, Martha: Your death would be mine. Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War , Cambridge; London 2008: Harvard University Press.
• Healy, Maureen: Vienna and the fall of the Habsburg Empire. Total war and everyday life in World War I , Cambridge 2004: Cambridge University Press.
• Huss, Marie-Monique: Histoires de famille. Cartes postales et culture de guerre , Paris 2000: Noésis.
• Jones, Heather: Violence against prisoners of war in the First World War. Britain, France, and Germany, 1914-1920 , Cambridge; New York 2011: Cambridge University Press.
• Lyons, Martyn: The writing culture of ordinary people in Europe, 1860-1920 , Cambridge; New York 2013: Cambridge University Press.
• McCartney, Helen B.: Citizen soldiers. The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War , Cambridge; New York 2005: Cambridge University Press.
• Morton, Desmond: When your number's up. The Canadian soldier in the First World War , Toronto 1993: Random House of Canada.
• Pignot, Manon: Allons enfants de la patrie. Génération Grande guerre , Paris 2012: Éd. du Seuil.
• Roper, Michael: The secret battle. Emotional survival in the Great War , Manchester; New York 2009: Manchester University Press.
• Ulrich, Bernd: Die Augenzeugen. Deutsche Feldpostbriefe in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit 1914-1933 , Essen 1997: Klartext Verlag.
• Ulrich, Bernd / Ziemann, Benjamin: German soldiers in the Great War. Letters and eyewitness accounts , Barnsley 2010: Pen & Sword Military.
• Vincent, David: Literacy and popular culture. England, 1750-1914 , Cambridge; New York 1989: Cambridge University Press.
• Vincent, David: The rise of mass literacy. Reading and writing in modern Europe , Cambridge; Malden 2000: Polity.
• Ziemann, Benjamin: War experiences in rural Germany, 1914-1923 , Oxford; New York 2007: Berg.

Hanna, Martha: War Letters: Communication between Front and Home Front , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI : 10.15463/ie1418.10362 .

This text is licensed under: CC by-NC-ND 3.0 Germany - Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works.

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Home Lessons IBDP History IB History Paper 2 Topics Causes and Effects of 20th Century Wars First World War (1919-1918) World War One Letter From the Trenches

World War One Letter From the Trenches

This modern history lesson idea ‘World War One Letter From the Trenches’ is a great opportunity for students to immerse themselves in the lives of soldiers during World War One. Writing letters home from the trenches was an integral part of communication for those fighting on the front lines, often providing solace amidst hardship. Through this activity, students will gain insight into life in the trenches and develop an understanding of what it was like to endure such a challenging and emotional experience.

Students can hone their skills of using correct historical terminology to accurately depict events and feelings they are likely to encounter when writing a letter home from the frontline. This can be a meaningful exercise that promotes empathy while generating a sense of appreciation for all that brave men and women endured during this tumultuous time.

They will also gain an even greater understanding of why writing letters home provided much needed solace for soldiers who had been through so much and had to leave behind loved ones – even if the letters never arrived due to censorship measures. By reflecting on some of these wartime stories, feelings of sympathy and admiration can be cultivated within your classroom as your students discover our shared human history.

The Cunning History Teacher lesson plan offers guidance on how to effectively approach this topic with your class, developing their understanding by prompting them think more deeply about life in the trenches. It encourages creative thinking while teaching appropriate language when talking about war, enabling them to have powerful conversations around difficult topics which could later help shape their wider views on current conflicts still being fought today.

Ultimately, this activity is an invaluable addition to any modern history curriculum as it allows students explore topics with sensitivity while focusing on one of history’s most iconic wars: World War One!

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• WW1 Trench Assignment: A Clear and Personal Letter from the Front Lines

Discover the raw and unfiltered emotions of soldiers in World War I with this easy-to-read letter from the trenches assignment. Gain a unique insight into the daily struggles and triumphs of those on the front lines, as they express their hopes, fears, and experiences in their own words. This powerful assignment offers a glimpse into the humanity and resilience of those who lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in history. Dive into this compelling piece of history and let the voices of the past speak to you directly.

What are some examples of letters from the trenches in World War 1?

During World War 1, soldiers wrote letters to their loved ones from the trenches, describing the harsh conditions they faced. One soldier wrote, "Dear Mother, the trenches are filthy, brutal, cold and uncomfortable. Well, at least I'm alive, although the trenches are boring me to death. Everybody is so lifeless and gloomy." This heartfelt letter captures the grim reality of life in the trenches, where soldiers endured unimaginable hardships.

Another soldier wrote, "My dearest wife, the trenches are a living hell. The constant fear of enemy attacks, the stench of death, and the never-ending mud are taking a toll on my spirit. I miss you and our children more than words can express. I pray for the day when this war will be over, and I can hold you in my arms again." This emotional letter reflects the deep longing and despair experienced by soldiers as they fought in the trenches.

In yet another letter, a soldier wrote, "Dear Father, the trenches are a place of unrelenting misery. The cold seeps into my bones, and the constant shelling leaves me on edge. But I find solace in the camaraderie of my fellow soldiers, who keep me going through the darkest of times. I hope and pray for a swift end to this war, so I can return home to you and Mother." These letters from the trenches provide a poignant glimpse into the experiences of soldiers during World War 1, showcasing their resilience and unwavering hope amidst unimaginable suffering.

What was read by soldiers in the trenches?

Soldiers in the trenches were not just reading sensational fiction, but also delving into poetry, handicrafts, and even railway timetables, as noted by Theodore Wesley Koch in his 1917 book. The demand for Hundred Best Poems anthologies and books on various subjects suggests that soldiers sought a diverse range of reading material to occupy their time and minds during wartime.

What was written in letters by soldiers during WW1?

During World War 1, soldiers wrote letters detailing their experiences in the trenches, discussing injuries sustained in battle, and recounting their active service in various regions such as the Dardanelles and India. These letters provided a personal and raw insight into the realities of war, giving loved ones a glimpse into the day-to-day struggles faced by soldiers on the front lines. Additionally, some soldiers wrote about the advancements in technology, the movement of troops, and the harsh conditions at the railheads in France, providing a comprehensive view of the war effort.

Soldiers also used their letters to convey the challenges they faced during training before being deployed overseas. The letters served as a means to share the physical and mental preparation required for combat, giving recipients a better understanding of the rigorous process soldiers underwent before entering the battlefield. Furthermore, the correspondence touched on the logistical aspects of war, such as the movement of troops and the conditions at railheads in France, shedding light on the infrastructure and support systems essential for military operations during WW1.

In their letters, soldiers painted a vivid picture of their wartime experiences, giving insight into the harsh realities of combat and the emotional toll it took on them. These letters provided a personal connection to the war, giving readers a deeper understanding of the sacrifices made by soldiers and the challenges they faced on a daily basis. From the trenches to the training grounds, the letters conveyed the multifaceted nature of war and the diverse experiences of those who served during WW1.

A Soldier's Perspective: Life in the Trenches

Life in the trenches was grueling, yet it forged an unbreakable bond among soldiers. The constant threat of enemy attacks, the harsh living conditions, and the ever-present fear took a toll on one's physical and mental well-being. Despite the adversities, camaraderie and loyalty flourished in the trenches, as soldiers relied on each other for survival. The daily struggle for survival and the shared experiences created a profound sense of brotherhood that transcended the horrors of war.

From the soldier's perspective, life in the trenches was a relentless battle against the elements and the enemy. The never-ending cycle of trench warfare brought about a sense of hopelessness and despair, yet it also instilled a deep sense of resilience and determination. Soldiers endured long hours of monotony, interspersed with moments of intense combat. The relentless bombardment and the constant threat of gas attacks created a constant state of alertness and vigilance. Despite the hardships, the soldiers found solace in the bonds they formed with their comrades, as they stood together in the face of unimaginable danger.

The Harsh Realities of War: A Firsthand Account

As a soldier on the front lines, I witnessed the brutal and unforgiving nature of war firsthand. The deafening sounds of gunfire, the sight of comrades falling, and the constant fear of death were the harsh realities that defined my experience. The emotional and physical toll of war is something that cannot be fully comprehended unless experienced firsthand, and it is a reality that stays with me long after the battle has ended.

Surviving the Front Lines: A Letter Home from WW1

Dear family,

I write to you from the front lines of the Great War, a place of unimaginable horror and suffering. The constant bombardment, the stench of death, and the ever-present fear are a heavy burden to bear. Yet, amidst the chaos and destruction, I find solace in the camaraderie of my fellow soldiers and the hope for a better future.

Every day is a struggle for survival, as we face the relentless onslaught of enemy forces. The trenches provide little respite, and the harsh conditions take a toll on both body and mind. But I am determined to endure, to fight for our freedom and for a world where such atrocities will never be repeated. I cling to the memories of home and the love of my family, knowing that they are my anchor in this sea of turmoil.

Although I am thousands of miles away, your love and support sustain me in the darkest of times. I long for the day when I can return to you, to embrace you once more and to share the stories of our triumphs and hardships. Until then, know that I am fighting with every ounce of strength within me, and that your unwavering faith in me gives me the courage to carry on. Together, we will survive this war, and build a better future for generations to come.

With all my love,

[Your Name]

In conclusion, the letters from the trenches of WWI offer a poignant and personal insight into the harsh realities of war. The soldiers' accounts are not only a valuable historical resource, but also a reminder of the human cost of conflict. Through their vivid descriptions and heartfelt sentiments, these letters convey the courage, resilience, and sacrifice of those who endured the unimaginable hardships of the battlefield. It is important to continue to preserve and share these invaluable firsthand accounts to ensure that the experiences of those who fought in the trenches are never forgotten.

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Letters from the trenches

Scottish History and Archaeology 11 min watch

Find out about life in the trenches from a selection of letters from the First World War by Captain William Bennet-Clark of the Royal Scots, brought to life in a digital story.

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Trenches: ‘a most awful time’

This is one of many letters sent by staff of the Great Western Railway Audit office at Paddington who had enlisted to fight in the First World War. (RAIL 253/516)

Richard Frederick, Hull, 19 June 1915, France.  Born: 4 June 1892, Joined GWR: 25 July 1908, Regiment: 1/6 Seaforth Highlanders, 1st Highland Infantry Brigade, Regiment number : 2161, Rank: Lance Corporal, Died: 1974

Dear Gerald

Many thanks for letter which was somewhat a surprise to me. No the news was quite fresh as I do not hear from anybody in the office.

We have just come from the trenches where we were for seven days and had a most awful time. We were three days in the Reserve and put in the firing line where we took part in an attack and were also under a very heavy bombardment.

I am sorry to say we had many casualties thirty five killed and one hundred and thirty eight wounded and I can assure you it was an experience I shall never forget. Anyhow Williams, Kemball and myself came out quite safely.

I have seen Frost out here, of course his battalion (8 th Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders) are in the same brigade also, as a matter of fact, they were in the firing line the night we came out. I received a letter while I was in the trenches from Mr Slater. Yes, I heard about Chamberlain, jolly sad was it not, if you do hear from Dick James you might pass any news on to me…

Shall be glad to hear from you. I could write more, only am a wee bit tired after seven days in trenches.

I am yours sincerely, Fred Hull.

P.S. Of course you know my address. Remember me to all I know.

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World War One Trenches

Students will use Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, and letters written home by American soldiers to compare the experiences of different participants in World War I.  Remarque describes life in the trenches from a German perspective, the losing side; Barbusse’s book approaches the same time and place from the French viewpoint, the winning side.  The letters, as primary source material, will provide an experience from the outlook of the American soldiers, coming fresh to the fighting, not as weary and worn as their European counterparts.  This lesson plan can be done as a group or individual project, and certainly can serve as a cross-curricular activity with the Language Arts department.  It makes use of primary sources, literary sources, and provides the students with the opportunity to analyze and synthesize information.

Students can often use literature contemporary to an era to determine facts about a specific time or event.  World War I lends itself readily to this exercise since a great deal of classic literature came out of the war. 

Through this activity, students will learn to analyze primary source materials such as letters and diary entries, and literature contemporary to the period.  It exercises reading, analyzing, and writing skills, and allows the students to visualize the war experiences of the soldiers of World War I.

• Read and analyze literature contemporary to World War I.
• Find specific examples in their readings to support a comparison/contrast chart of the three perspectives
• Write a 3-5 paragraph essay explaining what they discovered through their analysis and what they think constituted or created the differences in viewpoints.

SHOW ME STANDARDS

2. Continuity and change in the history of Missouri, the United States and the world

6. Relationships of the individual and groups to institutions and cultural traditions

7. The use of tools of social science inquiry (such as surveys, statistics, maps, documents)

KANSAS STANDARDS (High School-US History)

Benchmark 1: The student uses a working knowledge and understanding of individuals, groups, ideas, developments, and turning points in the era of the emergence of the modern United States (1890-1930).

6. (A) analyzes the reasons for and impact of the United States’ entrance into World War I.

7. (A) analyzes how the home front was influenced by United States involvement in World War I (e.g., Food Administration, Espionage Act, Red Scare, influenza, Creel Committee).

Benchmark 5: The student engages in historical thinking skills.

1. (A) analyzes a theme in United States history to explain patterns of continuity and change over time.

2. (A) develops historical questions on a specific topic in United States history and analyzes the evidence in primary source documents to speculate on the answers.

3. (A) uses primary and secondary sources about an event in U.S. history to develop a credible interpretation of the event, evaluating on its meaning (e.g., uses provided primary and secondary sources to interpret a historical-based conclusion).

• Books and films selected by the teacher in reference to World War I. 
• Henri Barbusse, Under Fire
• Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
• Letters from website:  American Letters and Diary Entries

http://www.theworldwar.org/s/110/display.aspx?sid=110&gid=1&pgid=892&sparam=letters&scontid=0  

During the unit on World War I, the teacher will provide the Remarque and Barbusse books to the students to read as homework.  Both books are relatively short, and should be easy for the students to read.  It would be advisable to divide the class in half, with each group reading one of the two books.  As an alternative, the teacher may provide certain chapters for students to read, for example, in Remarque, Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 10 are very useful.  Give the students about a week to read their book.  The night before this exercise takes place, provide the students with copies of the letters from the Liberty Memorial Website to read.  Have students bring all materials to class on the day of the lesson.

The teacher will place the students into small groups, making sure that each group has representatives who have read both books.  Each student will fill in their own chart (see attached) comparing each documents descriptions of life in the trenches and hospitals of World War I.  At the end of class, have each group share their findings with the class, allowing students to make additional notes on their charts

For homework, have each student, individually,  write a three to five paragraph essay detailing their findings and providing their own explanation as to the reason for differences in perspective between the three sources.

SCORING RUBRIC FOR Life in the Trenches

A 5 paper presents a well-developed story and demonstrates good control of the elements of effective writing.  A typical paper in this category

• clearly identifies important features of the analysis and develops them in a generally thoughtful way.
• develops ideas clearly, organizes them logically, and connects them with appropriate transitions
• sensibly supports the main points of the analysis
• demonstrates control of the language, demonstrating ability to use the conventions of standard written English but may have occasional flaws.

A 4 paper presents a competent analysis and demonstrates adequate control of the elements of writing. A typical paper in this category

• identifies and analyzes important features of the analysis
• develops and organizes ideas satisfactorily but may not connect them with transitions
• supports the main points of the analysis
• demonstrates sufficient control of language to convey ideas with reasonable clarity generally follows the conventions of standard written English but may have some flaws. 

A 3 paper demonstrates some competence in analytical writing skills and in its control of the elements of writing but is plainly flawed. A typical paper in this category exhibits one or more of the following characteristics:

• does not identify or analyze most if the important features of the discussion, although some analysis is present
• devotes most of its time to analyzing irrelevant issues
• is limited in the logical development and organization of ideas
• offers support of little relevance and value for points of the analysis
• does not convey meaning clearly, or contains occasional major errors or frequent minor errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics

A 2 paper demonstrates serious weaknesses in analytical writing skills. A typical paper in this category exhibits one or more of the following characteristics:

• does not present a critique based on logical analysis, but may instead present the writer’s own views on the subject
• does not develop ideas or is disorganized
• provides little, if any, relevant or reasonable support
• has serious and frequent problems in the use of language and in sentence structure, containing numerous errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics that interfere with meaning.

A 1 paper demonstrates fundamental deficiencies in analytical writing skills. A typical paper in this category exhibits more than one of the following characteristics:

• provides little evidence of the ability to understand and analyze
• provides little evidence of the ability to develop an organized response
• has severe and persistent errors in language and sentence structure, containing a pervasive pattern or errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics that results in incoherence

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Letters from the trenches in WW1

September, 1914.

It has been over one month since I have been fighting in this war and it is appalling. I have seen men with no arms or legs. Breathless bodies are all over the place. I miss my family so much. I hope Momma, Poppa, and Little Sarah are okay. Oh yeah, and my girlfriend Louise. She says that she is working in a factory now. I miss her so much.

It is very chilly outside. My limbs are weak and it is painful to walk. The living conditions here are very poor. There are enormous rats the size of cats that fed upon the corpses. Besides the constant loud firearms and bombs, the rain is the worst thing. It collects in our trenches and we must remove it using buckets and pots. Also, the mud! It is so deep and ruins everything.

The sounds of exploding bombs and the screams of agony do not give me any hope. I just keep thinking “am I next”? You can feel death in the air.

Every single hour, someone I know is dead. This is truly not the experience I thought it would be.

-Jeremiah Watts

Christmas Day, 1914

This is a preview of the whole essay

It was Christmas yesterday! The events that took place yesterday seemed so unreal. It was unbelievable! When I awoke there were no rifles firing from the Germans and it was very quiet. I kept waiting for the Germans to secretly attack but there was nothing. I was hoping for the best because it was Christmas and I wanted to enjoy the holiday, however, I was expecting the worst. During the afternoon our captain announced that the Germans agreed not to attack for the rest of the day. I was so surprised but I was even more surprised when I saw some of the Germans holding hands with our soldiers and singing Christmas carols around a bonfire. It was shocking to think that we had just been trying to kill each other a few hours before.

-  Jeremiah Watts

Just when I thought this war couldn’t get any worse, it got worse! This last week was one of the worst experiences in my life. My best friend William was injured in a battle a few days ago. It all started when the Germans released a green poisonous gas. Not one but twice! It was dreadful! I saw some of my fellow soldiers lying on the ground breathless and there was nothing I could do about it. I saw hundreds of soldiers lying in a ditch, gasping for air. This green gas turned their buttons green and their bodies were “boursouflé”. I was very scared but I knew I had to be strong for my fellow soldiers, my country, my family and myself. We tried our best. We really did. Despite our efforts thousands of our soldiers died.  

Document Details

• Author Type Student
• Word Count 478
• Page Count 3
• Subject History
• Type of work Homework assignment

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