Twelve and a half million letters were sent to the the French trenches every week. In 1914 the Postal Service involved in the army had a staff of just over 200 men. By 1918 the Army Postal Service employed 4,000 soldiers. Letters only took two or three days to arrive to the trenches. Soldiers serving in the front line could expect to receive daily deliveries of letters.
Soldiers were also encouraged to write letters to friends and family in Britain. The army decided it would be better to conceal the horrors of the war. 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.
Soldiers were also encouraged to write letters to friends and family in Britain. The army decided it would be better to conceal the horrors of the war. 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.
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.
Rudolf Binding, from France back to England
April, 1915
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.
Rudolf Binding, from France back to England
April, 1915
Wilfred Owen was a soldier in the First World War. He wasn’t an officer, a general or didn’t have an important rank; he was just an ordinary soldier, which is why he should be remembered. Owen was also a poet, and while in the trenches he would spend time writing poems that expressed the hardships of the war. His most famous poems included Dulce Et Decorum Est and Anthem For Doomed Youth. In 1915, Owen enlisted in the army into the Manchester Regiment. By 1917, when his one year of training was over, Owen was sent to fight on the western front. After experiencing very heavy fighting he was diagnosed with shellshock and evacuated back to England. Shellshock is a reaction to the intensity of fighting that produced helplessness among soldiers. Victims appeared drastically scared, or would always seem to panic, have an inability to reason, sleep, walk or talk.
He returned to France in August 1918 and in October was awarded the Military Cross for bravery. On 4 November 1918 he was killed while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre canal at Ors, northern France. The news only reached Britain by Armistice Day.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen
This poem was written by Wilfred Owen and Describes a Real Event that took place in the Trenches.