their pasts, of their hopes and joys, their fears and frustrations, their friends and families. Aware of the gravity of the times, we see them searching for ways to be a part of history and to contribute to their nation in its time of need. Finally, we watch them navigate the perennial human struggle: the fight to find voices of their own, to free themselves from others’ constraints, to live and define themselves on their own terms.
In many ways, they are our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers. Their struggles in wartime were unique as well as universal. Their insights, their triumphs and their defeats reach far beyond the global conflict of the 1940s.
This is the story of life and war through their eyes.
Introduction
1 Brian Braithwaite, Noelle Walsh and Glyn Davies, eds, The Home Front: The Best of Good Housekeeping 1939–1945 (London: Ebury Press, 1987), p. 78.
2 With the exception of Nella Last, whose diaries have been published under her real name, the names in this book are pseudonyms to protect the identities of the women and their families.
CHAPTER ONE
THE LAST WAR
Helen Mitchell looked at the newborn baby boy cradled in her arms and sighed. Lonely and worn-out from the birth, the only thought she could muster was ‘future cannon fodder’. It was 5 November 1917, Guy Fawkes’ Day, but few celebrations were planned that autumn. More than three desperately sad years into the Great War, the nation, and indeed the entire Continent, languished in a deep state of weariness. That day, The Times published a short article assuring the reading public that there was ‘cheerfulness at the front’, yet even this sentiment was shot through with a far from comforting reality.
The ‘cheerfulness’ of which the article spoke was of those who lay wounded and dying on the Western Front, not knowing when death would free them from their pain, but supremely confident in the ‘ultimate result’: British victory. The soldiers’ heroism was all the more poignant in the conditions they endured, the author explained, as Tommies fought in: ‘a country sodden with water where they frequently sank, not only up to the knees or the waist, but quite often up to the neck or beyond it’. 1 Though literally devouredby the mud of Flanders, they could not be thwarted in their duty.
If Helen had opened The Times , which she read often, on that day, she may have seen this article, and perhaps flipped through the pages until her eyes rested upon the paper’s daily requiem for the dead, the ‘Roll of Honour’. Day after day throughout the war, the paper published a list of casualties, highlighting the officers lost and naming the privates who had fallen; the vast blackand-white monotony of those lists still has the power to strike one with an intense feeling of loss. Living in Newcastle at the time, Helen may have anxiously searched the names of the Northumberland Fusiliers for anyone she or her husband knew. That day, The Times reported twenty-six Northumberland privates who had died in recent action, a small paragraph in a sea of losses comprising over three tightly printed columns of dead.
She may have been relieved that only one officer had been lost from the Gloucester Regiment, the county where she had grown up. Or she may have wept bitterly if she recognized the name. Though she could not have known it then, the battle that had produced such devastating carnage over the past three months was to end the day after her son was born, when British and Canadian forces finally took the village of Passchendaele. The Third Baffle of Ypres, more commonly known as Passchendaele, sacrificed more than 310,000 British soldiers to the gods of a war many believed futile – and interminable.
When Helen Mitchell looked at her newborn son, all she saw were the lists and lists of dead and wounded. Between 1914 and 1918, hundreds of thousands of young men lost their lives, and many more were mutilated or psychologically scarred
In many ways, they are our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers. Their struggles in wartime were unique as well as universal. Their insights, their triumphs and their defeats reach far beyond the global conflict of the 1940s.
This is the story of life and war through their eyes.
Introduction
1 Brian Braithwaite, Noelle Walsh and Glyn Davies, eds, The Home Front: The Best of Good Housekeeping 1939–1945 (London: Ebury Press, 1987), p. 78.
2 With the exception of Nella Last, whose diaries have been published under her real name, the names in this book are pseudonyms to protect the identities of the women and their families.
CHAPTER ONE
THE LAST WAR
Helen Mitchell looked at the newborn baby boy cradled in her arms and sighed. Lonely and worn-out from the birth, the only thought she could muster was ‘future cannon fodder’. It was 5 November 1917, Guy Fawkes’ Day, but few celebrations were planned that autumn. More than three desperately sad years into the Great War, the nation, and indeed the entire Continent, languished in a deep state of weariness. That day, The Times published a short article assuring the reading public that there was ‘cheerfulness at the front’, yet even this sentiment was shot through with a far from comforting reality.
The ‘cheerfulness’ of which the article spoke was of those who lay wounded and dying on the Western Front, not knowing when death would free them from their pain, but supremely confident in the ‘ultimate result’: British victory. The soldiers’ heroism was all the more poignant in the conditions they endured, the author explained, as Tommies fought in: ‘a country sodden with water where they frequently sank, not only up to the knees or the waist, but quite often up to the neck or beyond it’. 1 Though literally devouredby the mud of Flanders, they could not be thwarted in their duty.
If Helen had opened The Times , which she read often, on that day, she may have seen this article, and perhaps flipped through the pages until her eyes rested upon the paper’s daily requiem for the dead, the ‘Roll of Honour’. Day after day throughout the war, the paper published a list of casualties, highlighting the officers lost and naming the privates who had fallen; the vast blackand-white monotony of those lists still has the power to strike one with an intense feeling of loss. Living in Newcastle at the time, Helen may have anxiously searched the names of the Northumberland Fusiliers for anyone she or her husband knew. That day, The Times reported twenty-six Northumberland privates who had died in recent action, a small paragraph in a sea of losses comprising over three tightly printed columns of dead.
She may have been relieved that only one officer had been lost from the Gloucester Regiment, the county where she had grown up. Or she may have wept bitterly if she recognized the name. Though she could not have known it then, the battle that had produced such devastating carnage over the past three months was to end the day after her son was born, when British and Canadian forces finally took the village of Passchendaele. The Third Baffle of Ypres, more commonly known as Passchendaele, sacrificed more than 310,000 British soldiers to the gods of a war many believed futile – and interminable.
When Helen Mitchell looked at her newborn son, all she saw were the lists and lists of dead and wounded. Between 1914 and 1918, hundreds of thousands of young men lost their lives, and many more were mutilated or psychologically scarred