Tommy Read Free

people thought at the time. And in the case of the First World War there is really no excuse for not doing so. Both the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum and the Liddle Collection in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds are bursting with letters, diaries and an assortment of ephemera. And when I say bursting, I mean just that: new material is arriving faster than a single diligent historian can keep up with. However gloomy I get about being an historian, I am always excited by opening one of those big brown archive boxes, and tipping out letters on YMCA notepaper from the infantry base depots at Etaples, a leather-bound Jermyn Street diary, or a field message book with its flimsy, carboned paper and waterproofed cover. There is something unutterably poignant about a diary entry written by somebody who didn’t know whether he would be alive to eat his supper that day. I am not suggesting that we ought not to read Sassoon and Graves, Campbell and Carrington, all published after the war, but the closer we get to events the better our chance of finding out how people really felt.
    The army of 1918, warts and all, represented the greatest collective endeavour of the whole of British history: over 4 million men went to France and nearly three quarters of a million stayed there forever. As the war went on they drifted apart from the land that had raised them, and lived in a world with its own rules, values, beliefs and language. They celebrated the armistice in silence, not with wild rejoicing. And then they went back to pick up their lives. For most of them the war was not,
pace
Paul Fussell, a break, a sundering. It was, as Private David Jones termed it, in parenthesis, bracketed into a busy life. 6 It soon became evident that they had won the war but lost the peace, and the corrosive effect of this sense of collective betrayal can hardly be over-emphasised. The positive diaries become bitter memoirs as Military Crosses and Military Medals went to the pawnshop. And so
we
remember the war not as we might, through the eyes of 1918, as a remarkable victory so very dearly won, but through the eyes of 1928 as a sham which had wasted men’s lives and squandered their courage.
    A brief word about terminology. When describing battalions in the British army I have followed the example of the Official Historian, Sir James Edmonds, and generally render 2nd Battalion The Queen’s Regiment as 2/Queen’s, and 2nd/7th Battalion The London Regiment as 2/7th London. Terms generally abbreviated, such as RFA for Royal Field Artillery or RMO for Regimental Medical Officer, are spelt out in full when they first appear, and a brief glossary at the end of the book should mitigate confusion. When an individual is identified by rank in the text, the rank given is that he held at the time of his mention: Harry Ogle, for instance, is variously private, corporal and captain.
    Money features in these pages from time to time, usually mentioned because of its scarcity. It was reckoned in pounds, shillings and pence, with twelve pence (d) to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. A guinea, more common in Jermyn Street than the Gorbals, was twenty-one shillings. Prices rose in Britain throughout the war, with an almost regular ascent of 27 percent from its outbreak to January 1918. Food prices rose rather more swiftly, with a rise of around 133 percent from 1914 to 1920. Bread that sold for 4d a loaf in 1914 was 11½d at the end of 1917, and the price of a quart of milk over the same period rose from an average of 3½d to 7½d. A working man’s overcoat, 27s 4d in 1914, was 46s 8d in 1918, and a good shirt rose in price from 4s 6d to 8s 2½d. A woman’s hat, 8s in 1914, was 15s 11d four years later, and a corset, still an essential item of female dress, rose from 4s to 13s 8d.
    There were sharp regional variations in working-class income: a bricklayer in Glasgow earned 10d an hour in 1914 and a