More Extracts from an Officer's Diary

Tuesday 23rd March 1915: The following extracts from the diary of an officer of the 1st Bedfords gives us some idea of the conditions under which our front line troops have been fighting.

“We’re up in the rottenest trench I’ve ever been into. It’s full up with thin mud and there is a spring running into it. This trench was originally German; no wonder they let us have it; it isn’t the sort of place you’d invite your best friend to. The water in parts is over one’s chest. Heaven help a bantam battalion holding this place! They’d be drowned before they got here(1)”.

“Fortunately we have fires and there is coal in a farm at the back, so that we can warm our rations up. But it’s risky going there. We have to go, however, to get water”.

“In my platoon – we’ll call it that, but it’s the remnant of a company – there are two brothers who have been out since the beginning. They have always been together and neither has been sick or wounded. When they think they’ve hit a German they scratch a mark on their rifle butt. One had hit thirty nine and the other forty two and the rivalry is very keen”.

“The rifles in the trenches look more like chunks of mud than anything else. The sights get clogged up, but that isn’t of much importance here for the firing is practically point blank, our trench being about, on an average, twenty yards yards from the German one; but we rarely see anything of them except their shovels. Their trench is evidently in the same condition as ours”.

“Today, while walking (swimming would describe it better) down the trench, I found two men cooking chickens by holding them on a French bayonet over a coal fire. They were thin, of course, and what little meat there was on them wasn’t improved in flavour by the deposit of thick soot with which they were soon covered”.

“I’m having a chicken tomorrow; it will be an improvement on bully. Let’s hope the rain and water don’t put the fires out. That would be the greatest catastrophe I can imagine at the present time; we have a hard enough job to keep them alight as it is, perching them up on old bully beef tins to keep them off the ground”.

“Occasionally one falls over, and then you see how hard a Tommy can work – in his efforts to relight the fire from wet wood and burning fragments from other fires. Matches are no good here. There’s not a dry one in the trench. There are some tinder lighters but they’re no good for pipes. There are no cigarettes or cigarette papers, so we have to light our pipes from the fire, which, owing to the lack of dry combustibles, is not easy”.

“Had an exciting night. We sapped close to their ration trenches by 10 o’clock, and heard their ration party go for their rations. When they had gone we broke through in two places. We got terribly cold waiting for they didn’t come back for about two hours. But when they did come we got them all, for they were quite trapped. There were twenty altogether, but, of course, we didn’t stop to investigate the exact amount of the damage”.

“About six yards from our trenches there is a German lying face upwards with a bayonet through him. The rifle and bayonet are vertical and by the German’s side lies a Frenchman. One can guess what happened with those two”.

Source: Bedfordshire Times, 26th March 1915

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(1) Bantam battalions were made up of men below the minimum height for a soldier before the war – 5 feet 3 inches. The minimum height for such a battalion varied but could be as little as 4 feet 10 inches.