This book brings to light the previously unpublished diaries of five participants in the First World War and restores to publication much of the diary of a sixth that has long been out of print. The six diarists are a diverse group with varied experiences. John French was a Cornish tin miner who served as a sapper in the British Army, tunneling underground toward German lines in Belgium and northern France to place explosives from January 1916 onward. Philip T. Cate was an idealistic American volunteer who went abroad not to fight but to heal, driving ambulances in the mountainous Vosges sector of eastern France in 1915–16. Willy Wolff, a German-born cotton broker in the Manchester office of a Rhenish textile firm, was arrested in October 1914 by the British and interned as an enemy alien until his release in 1919. New Zealand artilleryman James Douglas Hutchison, having volunteered in the first week of the war only to be rejected as too young, reapplied and formed part of the famous ANZAC contingent dispatched to Gallipoli in 1915. Invalided home, he returned to active service in 1918 on the western front. Henri Desagneaux, whose diary appeared briefly in print after his death in 1969, was a French infantry officer frequently in the thick of the bloodiest fighting whose experiences spanned the rush to the colors of August 1914 to eventual demobilization in 1919. Felix Kaufmann, who served as a machine-gunner in a German infantry unit, was captured in 1917 and endured confinement as a French prisoner of war until 1920.
The diaries that these six men found the opportunity, the will, and the necessary materials to write illuminate what might be called the “intimate history” of the war. Initially, it was the great collections of diplomatic documents, reports of stirring speeches, and the partisan memoirs of the leading participants that shaped analysis of the conflict.1 As early as 1916, however, the noted British art writer and collector Cecil Reginald Grundy urged local authorities to waste no time in locating and preserving the varied artifacts that could best express to future generations the experience of the war, and to recognize that “little things often throw a more intimate light on the period than the great ones.” Indeed, he suggested, “illiterate letters from privates at the front giving insight into their experiences in fifty years time may be rated as more interesting than official dispatches.”2 Grundy’s prediction was apt, even if it has taken somewhat longer than he anticipated for the social and cultural history of the conflict to displace scholars’ initial focus upon the war’s diplomatic and strategic outlines. Yet now, a century later, shedding a “more intimate light” on 1914–18 by emphasizing the experiences of ordinary individuals is at the forefront of historians’ approaches to the Great War.
Intimate histories of the war have taken several forms. First, there are the broad overviews. Svetlana Palmer’s and Sarah Willis’s Intimate Voices from the First World War, a 2003 by-product of a British television series on the war, blends commentary and brief extracts from twenty-eight published and unpublished diaries to provide personal views of the events.3 In his justly acclaimed The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War, Peter Englund adopts the same approach, mining twenty published accounts in an effort to recapture what the war “was like” rather than simply “what it was.”4 To an extent, these moving and meticulously edited diary extracts may be viewed as complementing the equally carefully edited volumes of letters by fallen soldiers, for whom the collections of their correspondence serve as epistolary headstones.5 The authors’ desire to achieve comprehensive coverage, however, necessitates a reliance on brief quotations and frequent, rapid shifts from one source to another. In achieving breadth, they almost inevitably sacrifice depth.
A second approach is to focus on single combatants, reproducing either their diaries or their correspondence from the front. These sorts of publications are staggering in quantity, though highly variable in quality. Perhaps the most remarkable recent addition to this individual-soldier genre is Martha Hanna’s sensitive exploration of the voluminous correspondence (perhaps 2,000 letters over four years) between a French soldier, Paul Pireaud, and his wife, Marie, who sought to cope with the demands of an infant son and the family farm in the Dordogne. She illustrates, as few historians have, the importance of regular correspondence in sustaining personal relationships under the severe wartime strain of enforced separation and omnipresent danger. The written word, Hanna reminds us, underwrote the French war effort, as the nation’s perhaps first fully literate generation produced some 4 million letters per day and several billion over the course of the conflict.6 If, as the Duke of Wellington is alleged to have intimated, the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the aristocratic playing fields of Eton, then a case might be made that Verdun and the Marne (twice) had been won (or those campaigns sustained) in the republican classrooms of French primary schools.
Nonetheless, collections of wartime letters, however revealing, raise issues as historical sources. In many cases it may be difficult to ascertain how complete a run of correspondence might be. Not only are individual letters easily weeded from a collection, but the sheer difficulty involved in delivering so much mail, from soldiers often on the move or in precarious circumstances, suggests that what correspondence survives is often fragmentary. More significantly, the military authorities—and not just in France—imposed censorship on military correspondence. Postal censors were employed to comb selected samples to ensure that soldiers did not unwittingly divulge military secrets (such as their location, operational plans, or casualties) or openly prejudice the war effort (by relating criticisms of officers, instances of defeatism, poor morale, or sympathy with the enemy). Soldiers knew that their letters home might be intercepted and read, so it is not unlikely that on occasion correspondents exercised self-censorship, avoiding either the specific details or controversial opinions that might run afoul of the censors.7
Diaries, on the other hand, present their own potential rewards and pitfalls. Officially, soldiers were discouraged from keeping diaries, or even prohibited from doing so, on the assumption that if they were killed or captured, their diaries might yield information of value to the enemy.8 This supposition immediately distinguishes diaries from letters. It assumes that a personal diary would be a rich source. The diary would remain intimate and private, its secrets (barring capture or death) the sole preserve of the keeper who confided them to its pages. Censorship, beyond official discouragement or prohibition of the practice, was thus impractical or impossible. Moreover, the fact that diary-keeping had been extolled as an aid to both personal self-evaluation and improvement, as well as a means of recording remarkable experiences and circumstances, meant that it was a difficult habit for the military authorities to eradicate. Officers frequently turned a blind eye to the practice, and sometimes engaged in it themselves.
Jean Norton Cru, a pioneer in the analysis of wartime testimony, argued that the habit of making daily entries imposed a certain structural rigor upon diarists and ensured that “diaries [exhibited] an average honesty which surpasses that of the reminiscences and novels.”9 Cru’s purpose was “to give a picture of the war according to those who have seen it at close range,” which meant, in his view, excluding the views of anyone who had not served extensively in the trenches.10 Witnesses of the war could only be trusted if their testimony was based on what veteran and literature professor Samuel Hynes has called “the authority of direct experience.”11 Yet did such “direct experience” guarantee accuracy? Norton Cru abhorred the exaggerations that produced such literary conventions as mountains of corpses and rivers of blood. Cyril Falls, who reviewed many wartime memoirs for the Times Literary Supplement, lamented this tendency in which “every sector becomes a bad one, every working-party is shot to pieces; if a man is killed or wounded his brains or his entrails always protrude from his body. …”12 It was not so easy, however, to write a good war book. Soldiers struggled to find the language appropriate to express their growing disillusion with a horrific situation in which death was so pervasive, random, and anonymous, and their own contribution, their ability to make an individual difference, so constrained.13 Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran and accomplished author, has suggested that writing war stories that are “true” to that experience might involve contradictory truths that could not be believed.14 Norton Cru, the son of a Protestant minister who was imbued with a devout sense of the sanctity of the written word, held himself to a very different standard. He prized the judicial witness, the only one, in his view, whose personal experience and stenographic veracity would disclose the unimpeachable truths about the war.15 Today, historians are more charitable. They accept that gifted civilians who have never seen combat are capable of evoking the experience of battle in all its fury and complexity, and they recognize that witnesses who seek to craft a narrative inevitably raise issues of representation that cannot be separated from their very personal role (or struggle) as narrator.16 Diaries are somewhat more problematic than Norton Cru assumed, so it is best to begin with the circumstances under which they were composed.
If a soldier was in action at the front lines, of course, keeping a diary (or writing letters, for that matter) was extremely difficult. John French, Doug Hutchison, and Henri Desagneaux sometimes had to wait several days until they had an opportunity to record their experiences, occasionally supplementing their memories with notes they had hastily scrawled. As an officer, Desagneaux could exploit the time he set aside for writing reports to compose diary entries as well (this may be one reason why his entries are often especially detailed). But apart from time, all the diarists faced periodic difficulties in finding pencils, paper, or blank journals to continue their work.17 John French, for example, made do with tiny pocket diaries about the size of a modern credit card that were small enough to be easily carried or concealed. Fortunately, his minuscule handwriting was sufficiently legible to make maximum use of such modest materials.
At their best, diary entries manifest a raw immediacy that memoirs, recalled at a distance, composed after the fact, perhaps edited or amended as prevailing attitudes then dictated, simply cannot match. There is no evidence to suggest that any of the six diaries in this collection were ever written for anyone other than the diarist himself (although their contents might perhaps be shared within the family). Writing regular entries afforded the diarists opportunities for reflection or consolation. Keeping a diary played a significant psychological role, by enabling these men to vent their frustrations, celebrate small triumphs of daily life, fend off boredom, and, ultimately, preserve some sense of remaining a literate human being under circumstances all too inhuman. Certainly there was no indication that when these diaries were written they were ever intended for eventual publication. John French’s diaries came to light when the three surviving volumes were discovered among his sister’s possessions after her death at age ninety-nine. Not until their later years, and long after they had emigrated to the United States to begin new lives, did Willy Wolff and Felix Kaufmann decide to donate their manuscripts to archives in New Orleans and New York. A surviving sister gave Hutchison’s diaries to New Zealand’s Turnbull Library after he died. Desagneaux’s diary, the sole manuscript to be published, appeared in print only after his death. It is also the only one to show occasional traces of having been amended after initial composition.18
By reproducing the vast majority of six diaries, we seek to provide the depth of coverage that allows readers to comprehend how the war’s impact registered, not in abstract generalities, but on specific individuals over the course of several years. Those long runs of diary entries enable us to eavesdrop, so to speak, on their intimate reactions to whatever the war threw at them, ranging from acute physical danger and the loss (in cases, obliteration) of trusted comrades to exhaustion, hunger, sickness, and boredom. By reproducing six diaries, we also intend to provide the breadth of coverage that almost inevitably is compromised by the focus on a single author or correspondent. Of course, no collection of six diaries can be declared as representative of the war as a whole, and our selection is no exception.19 Nevertheless, these men—and their diaries—bore witness to many of the iconic episodes of the First World War: the patriotic surge of mobilization; the battles of Verdun, the Somme, and the Chemin des Dames; the invasion at Gallipoli; the 1917 mutinies in the French army, as well as the last desperate campaigns and the Spanish flu of 1918. They also provide rare glimpses behind the lines, at the “other ordeal” endured by internees and prisoners of war.20 Together, they add new and distinctive voices to the chorus of testimony regarding life during the Great War.
What do these voices tell us? The first broad theme illuminated in these diaries might be loosely labeled as the education of young men, albeit under very particular circumstances. Education pertains here in a dual sense. First, with the exception of Henri Desagneaux, the diarists were in their early twenties, having concluded all, or at least most, of their formal schooling. They had just begun to embrace—or anticipate—their likely careers. Ordinarily, in peacetime, the next few years would have seen them settle into young adulthood, establishing their livelihoods and family households. Second, because their situation was anything but ordinary, they had to learn how to adapt to, and survive under, wartime conditions (and in five of six cases, under fire). They literally came of age in World War I.
For men like Hutchison and Cate who had never been far from home, volunteering for service overseas meant that their war began as a voyage of discovery. Hutchison’s diary, for example, reflects his initial status as a sort of military tourist and records in considerable detail his lengthy seaborne voyage to the Suez Canal. Once in Egypt, however, he was forced to confront difference; his more telling diary entries are as much about adjusting to a very different cultural environment as to adjusting to life in uniform. It was not long before he wished for his homeland’s “absence of noises and smells.”21 After mingling with Frenchmen from various regions, Desagneaux confirmed his distaste for his compatriots from the south.
The second way in which the diarists portrayed the war as a learning experience involved the acquisition of the requisite skills that would enable them to function and survive in a military setting. Hutchison learned how to transport, load, aim, and fire artillery. French learned how to tunnel quietly, listen for enemy activity, recognize deteriorating air quality, and, in an emergency, to rescue endangered comrades. Anyone serving on the front lines had to learn to recognize incoming shells by their characteristic sounds and to gauge, quickly and correctly, where and when they might explode. The likely fate of students who continued to perform poorly in this particular lesson was all too apparent. Cate’s diary, for example, relates the difference between the rookie and the veteran; the American ambulance driver, in the unfamiliar position of visiting a trench at the front, ducked for cover unnecessarily while the experienced soldiers around him coolly ignored an incoming round that they recognized posed no threat.22 He also had to become familiar with the medical terminology he would require to accurately relay diagnoses and conditions, terms that clearly challenged him upon his arrival in France.
Desagneaux and French mastered the vocabulary essential to identify the various elements of the enemy’s arsenal, such as “whizzbangs” or “Jack Johnsons,” and to take the appropriate action. French’s diary also reveals his growing concern with the weather. His frequent meteorological references, however, do not indicate a desire to chronicle the mundane or anodyne no matter what; rather, the state of the weather was crucial to his new career. Temperature and precipitation affected the soil, and hence his tunneling. Fair skies meant German planes would be overhead, and that meant trouble, for they might either strafe his trenches or (as “artillery spotters”) observe the fall of shell for more accurate enemy bombardment. It is tempting to attribute French’s constant scanning of the skies to the fascination of someone so anonymously and frequently mired underground with the strikingly individual fliers soaring above, effortlessly enjoying their panoramic views, but there were very practical reasons for his vigilance.
This learning curve was also reflected in the overall increase in the depth and richness of the diary entries as the war progressed. Especially evident in the cases of French and Hutchison, it appears that as these young recruits matured as men, and as veterans, they also evolved as diarists. It is equally likely that as the war dragged on, its apparent lack of resolution encouraged a degree of personal introspection that seemed unnecessary if victory was but a few months away. Desagneaux noted early on how an officer predicting a war of three years’ duration was thought mad, whereas Hutchison anticipated that the battle for Gallipoli would be decided in a matter of days. Indeed, one of the foremost challenges facing these men was how to deal with the unfamiliar and unsettling ways in which they now experienced the passage of time.
It is a commonplace that trench warfare disoriented soldiers and disrupted the rhythms of activity/relaxation and day/night to which they had been accustomed.23 Flares illuminated the dark, and nocturnal bombardments or working parties kept the troops busy. When an offensive was imminent, the apprehensive soldiers could feel, in Desagneaux’s words, “separated from the world.”24 When the inevitable casualties poured in, the medical personnel, as Cate noted, found their schedules overwhelmed. Desagneaux registered not knowing whether he would be alive in an hour, and during one especially intense episode, he likened excavating a hole for shelter to digging his own grave. Death itself could strike capriciously, at any moment, as a grizzled veteran sat down for a snack.25 Shortly after arriving at the front, French was struck by the conjunction of the evocative peals of Sunday-morning church bells with the thunder of cannon fire. In this instance, the accustomed distinctiveness of the Sabbath was yet another casualty at the front.26 The landscape was simultaneously tilled by farmers plowing their fields and torn apart by artillery shells, while the soil was contaminated by chemical warfare.
Although internees and prisoners may not have been endangered by shellfire or poison gas, they too faced issues with the passage of time. Felix Kaufmann, though he moved frequently among French prisoner-of-war camps, nonetheless found that the monotony of his daily routine dulled his senses to the point that one day simply resembled the next. He sought refuge, perhaps, in the agricultural labor that permitted him more time outdoors and access to French civilians. Willy Wolff, interned on the rainy and windswept Isle of Man, voiced similar complaints and immersed himself in the daily progress of the war as reported in the few newspapers he was permitted to read. Another German internee, Paul Cohen-Portheim, titled his memoirs When Time Stood Still, to express the acute discomfort he felt in confinement. He had relinquished his self-defining sense of autonomy, as personal privacy or even his daily schedule slipped from his control. Time, to him, grew odious, something “to be killed.”27
This feeling of being dehumanized, either periodically or progressively, was recorded by many of the diarists. Upon emerging from the inferno of Verdun, Desagneaux noted that he and what remained of his unit were so dirty and unshaven as to be virtually unrecognizable (recalling the common description of French soldiers as poilus, the “hairy ones”). At such times he no longer felt part of the civilized world. Prolonged bombardment was disempowering, after which “our faces have nothing human about them.”28 Felix Kaufmann recalled calmly eating in the presence of dead comrades, a matter-of-factness reminiscent of the desire of Paul Bäumer’s squad not to let the boots of their dead mate go to waste in Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Willy Wolff described his internment experience as “inhumane” and his Knockaloe Camp as “a stable for men.”29 Yet the reach of civilization was not beyond recall; the mere availability of soap and the opportunity to wash reminded Kaufmann of what he had forgone in captivity. For Wolff, the trigger was a warm fire and a leather chair. He felt not just his humanity under siege but (as the two were interwoven) his German identity as well. Wolff scorned the dietary changes on camp menus that brought herring and rice. It was not just a matter of hunger or diminished nutrition that he resented, but also the fact that he and the internees were being treated as Russians and Chinese.
These experiences point toward a second broad theme, that of endurance. An English infantryman, C. C. May, cut to the heart of the matter when he confided to his diary in February 1916 that “This war is a war of endurance, of human bodies against machines and against the elements.”30 With that characteristic stoicism so prized by proponents of Victorian masculinity, he emphasized “the stolid, uncomplaining endurance of the men under the utter discomforts they are called upon to put up with, their sober pluck and quiet good-heartedness” that enabled them to make “something grand and inspiring” of their service. The static, constrictive, and physically uncomfortable nature of trench warfare, the persistence of attrition and stalemate, and the seemingly purposeless nature of military operations all challenged the participants’ resilience, their ability to preserve their physical and mental health and somehow make it through the war.31
The defense of homes and families, the socialization of military training to promote loyalty to comrades, even the deterrent influence of military discipline—all played a role in motivating men to fight. So, too, did the quality of leadership at the junior level and the ability of the soldiers themselves to assess risk.32 The diarists all confronted the challenge of endurance, one which they successfully surmounted and which they addressed in their diaries.
The first prerequisite for enduring the conflict, indeed just surviving it, was luck. Each diarist who served under fire recorded “near misses” where he might easily have been hit or where a nearby comrade was not so fortunate. Sapper French had “a narrow squeak myself … [when] a big shell dropped a few yards away in a ditch,” wounding the man beside him. This incident capped an eventful week, for six days earlier three comrades nearby were killed by shellfire, and French himself “had a rather narrow escape.” As he recounted, “a shell splinter struck me full in the left side, ripped through my tunic but was stopped by a thick leather belt I was wearing at the time. I escaped with nothing worse than a bruise.”33 On another occasion an officer next to him was hit by a sniper and died as French cradled his head.34 Desagneaux’s miraculous escape came when a heavy German 150 mm shell landed nearby with a thump. “Everyone thought that this was the end,” the French veteran noted, but because the shell failed to explode, “there’s still some hope, our turn won’t come today.”35 The capriciousness of death at the front was illustrated two months later, when the unit’s only other captain with comparable experience, “old man Trillat,” was killed by a shell as he sat by the roadside just “having a bite to eat.”36
Doug Hutchison had been ashore at Gallipoli for only two days when he had the first of “some very narrow escapes.”37 A companion beside him was hit by shrapnel, but Hutchison himself emerged unscathed. Three months later to the day, his overcoat, set aside nearby, was perforated in twelve places by shrapnel, and one month after that (again to the day) a shell penetrated the roof of his dugout shelter but failed to explode.38 While Hutchison was moving guns into position in October 1918, a shell burst within several yards of him. Having escaped again without a scratch, he briefly remarked on having been “very lucky” and then laconically concluded that he reset his watch to wintertime.39 Philip Cate, though he drove an ambulance rather than fighting on the lines, and whose service was limited to six months, was not immune, either. Taking shelter from a German bombardment, Cate was “blown off” his seat by a near miss.40 Felix Kaufmann narrowly avoided shell fragments when bringing soup back to his dugout, being hit instead with clumps of earth displaced by the explosion. A comrade had not been so lucky, killed as he sat quietly reading at the shelter’s entrance.41
The ability to cope emotionally with the prospect of imminent and anonymous death, and to gain access to the accumulated experience and advice that might improve one’s odds of survival, were facilitated by primary group membership. It is now widely accepted that whatever pride soldiers may have taken in their parent unit’s military traditions (often on the regimental level), or however they may have identified on an ideological level with justifications for war, what sustained them on a daily basis were the friendship and support of the men within their particular micro-unit (often a squad). In combat, they fought not just to protect their families at home; they fought for each other as well.42 Within these diaries there are frequent references to the health (or otherwise) of valued comrades and to the disruptive impact of transferring and accommodating to new units.
Primary group loyalty was no less crucial, however, to internees or prisoners than to frontline soldiers. Willy Wolff, whose life in Knockaloe was more static and sedentary than that of men in uniform, depended on the companionship of his fellow hut residents to survive the monotony of internment. The internees nurtured a degree of cohesion as they waged a cat-and-mouse war with the camp administration over conditions and privileges, appealing periodically to Swiss or American authorities (as long as the United States remained neutral) to validate their grievances and seek redress. Felix Kaufmann observed a similar struggle at play in the prison camps. The French, he complained, subjected the prisoners to a series of “pinpricks” to retaliate for German military successes.43 Moreover, he suspected, the French engaged in a tit-for-tat policy of meting out punishments that corresponded to the mistreatment (mere rumors, Kaufmann thought) suffered by French prisoners at the hands of their German captors.44 The German prisoners waged their own retaliatory campaigns (such as the strike of May 2, 1918) and sought to enlist Swiss support. After these communal efforts, Kaufmann enjoyed a “firm feeling of comradeship.”45
Nonetheless, however beneficial the varied primary groups may have been, they were not immune to the stresses of war. One major divide, for internees and prisoners alike, was over the issue of work. Willy Wolff could not understand why anyone would aid the enemy in any way, and excoriated those internees who did civilian labor for the British (usually agricultural work). On the other hand, Felix Kaufmann welcomed the diversion (and pocket change) that unloading cargoes or harvesting crops entailed. Gambling was another issue that threatened group solidarity, so much so that it was prohibited in Knockaloe in 1916. So were attempts to escape, a flurry of which prompted the British authorities to crack down and impose martial law in the camp in October 1916. A year later, the compound’s active theater group dissolved due to “disunity.”46 Felix Kaufmann noted how an influx of new arrivals disrupted the cooperative order that had prevailed, with unpleasant consequences, including the recurrence of lice.47
A third element that sustained these diarists during the war, obvious enough in retrospect, was recreation. Both French and Hutchison took frequent advantage of opportunities to swim (Hutchison in the Mediterranean when at Gallipoli, and both in local canals when in Belgium or northern France). On rare occasions, Desagneaux did as well. Rugby and soccer matches between units not only released stress but also reaffirmed group loyalties. The most extensive array of leisure activities, not surprisingly, could be found in the internment camps. Wolff’s diaries detail a remarkable range of such efforts, from gardening and theater clubs to tennis and soccer tournaments. The theater groups, in particular, provided both a diversion from the monotony of camp life and a way to reinforce and maintain a sense of Germanic culture (and of home) under disorienting circumstances.
The primary means of retaining contact with home was through mail, parcels, and newspapers. Doug Hutchison meticulously noted letters received and continued to follow local sporting events through clippings or enclosures from the New Zealand press. He complained when notes home were censored (in one case his letter was returned because he indicated it was written at the Suez Canal) and plotted how to slip a longer and more detailed account through when censorship eased. Interestingly, he often distinguished between letters to or from his mother or his father. When, for example, he wrote home to explain that he had transferred to the artillery (to a more “masculine” assignment), he directed it to his father.48 A full epistolary cycle, with a letter sent and a reply received, could take up to four months, requiring considerable patience. The newly embarked John French was impatient, or perhaps he had not yet developed realistic expectations of wartime postal delivery. His first six diary entries each concluded by anxiously noting the absence of mail, only to be supplanted by relief when the post from home finally arrived. Nonetheless, even as a veteran, he continued to remark on disconcerting interruptions in correspondence when they occurred.
Felix Kaufmann had made a habit of surreptitiously recording notebook entries and then shipping the pages home to be read in the event of his death, yet he also valued regular correspondence. After his capture on April 30, 1917, his first challenge was to dispose of his diary while in military custody (he would resume making entries once he settled behind the lines and was no longer discussing anything of operational significance), but he endured a wait until August 3, when his mail finally caught up to him. Given how frequently Kaufmann moved as a prisoner, it is worth reflecting on the fact that the more remarkable aspect of his postal experience was not that it took so long for him to receive mail but that the letters were delivered to him at all. Yet it was not unusual for his mail to arrive so heavily censored, lines excised with scissors, as to be illegible. For Willy Wolff, mail delivery was one of the contentious subjects at issue between internees and camp administrators. He was especially irritated by the inconsistencies in deliveries; after all, unlike Kaufmann or the frontline soldiers, he remained in the same place. Letters or parcels from Germany might arrive as quickly as six weeks or lag for two to three months. Once received, the contents of packages (and of letters) would be shared with hut-mates, thus reinforcing the primary group loyalties and sustaining the links with home.
Finally, one might ask whether these diarists found it easier to persevere by cultivating a hatred of the enemy. The answer might prove surprising, for the frontline soldiers actually had very little face-to-face contact with their opponents.49 French’s unit had several fierce engagements underground with German sappers, but his closest encounter was with disheveled German prisoners stained with mud and blood. On another occasion, marked by “shouting and laughing,” men from his unit conversed for some thirty minutes with their counterparts in the German lines about seventy-five yards away. Three days later, his unit was reminded that Germans were to be shot on sight and that Englishmen found talking instead of shooting were to be arrested.50 Hutchison described a one-day armistice during which each side could bury its dead. Quiet sectors were noted for a “live and let live” system, in which offensive action was carefully regulated (artillery fire at specified times, for example) to minimize casualties.51
Desagneaux briefly experienced this respite after Verdun, transferring to a sector that had been manned for eighteen months by the same reservists. Stability on both sides was a prerequisite for any durable tacit mutual commitment to keep the peace, which in this case apparently extended to passing cigarettes and singing songs together. Desagneaux’s unit arrived with “orders to stop all this and to harass the Boches.”52 Having suffered so from German artillery fire the past month, the newly arrived French gunners were clearly in the mood to shell the enemy and puncture the relative calm that had prevailed. Yet the only specific instances of Franco-German enmity he cited do not concern the respective armies in the trenches. Instead, he remarked upon the animosity of Rottweiler’s inhabitants toward their postwar French occupiers, which in turn elicited his personal revulsion at the behavior of German occupation forces in northern France since 1914.53
The clearest and most frequent references to antagonism can be found in the diaries of the two men who actually did encounter the enemy (though not in combat) on a daily basis, Willy Wolff and Felix Kaufmann. In both cases, the German diarists chose not to express any particular personal animosity toward their captors; they recognized acts of kindness. Wolff generally regarded the English as manipulative and duplicitous rather than evil, though he bitterly criticized the reductions in rations that sapped internees of their energy and spirit. He noted receiving a positive reception upon arrival on the Isle of Man, but also being denounced by local housewives as a “baby-killer” or being provided virtually inedible marmalade that was nonetheless “fine for Huns.”54 Wolff retaliated, so to speak, by poring over his newspapers for evidence of German successes. Victories in Serbia, the fall of ministries in France, advances in Russia, the death of Lord Kitchener—all prompted approving entries from this resolutely patriotic German. For much of his internment the passage of time did not quell his ardor for German victory. At the outbreak of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, for example, he wished that the “enemies will bleed to death.” Only in 1918 did his optimism wane and his diary-keeping deteriorate.
Felix Kaufmann recorded examples of French officials who had been “rabid” or “violent” German-haters and he encountered similar sentiments from some French civilians. Nonetheless, he professed to fully understand such feelings near the front lines and his nuanced account differentiated between harsh and sympathetic treatment from his guards. His experience provided “a lesson how different men behave.”55 Kaufmann was not blind to the same diversity of behavior among his fellow prisoners. “Two of my co-workers couldn’t suppress their hate of everything French,” he observed when loading a cargo ship,” and they “dropped quite a few cases of champagne in the hold.”56 Like Wolff, Kaufmann was an ardent patriot who sought to refute allegations of German atrocities, but he admitted to being unable to justify the violation of Belgian neutrality. Moreover, when he witnessed the devastation in Reims (including the damage to the historic cathedral from German shelling), he lamented that the “work and genius of generations lay in ruins.”57 Quite simply, Kaufmann was not an implacable foe of France sustained by wartime hatred. Indeed, as a German Jew well aware of the persistent anti-Semitism within the German officer corps, Kaufmann in his more reflective moments admitted to feeling ambivalent over his wartime service.58
Evidence of war weariness runs like a persistent thread woven through the diaries. Soldiers yearned for minor wounds, and even the resolute Desagneaux admitted that because it seemed impossible to escape unharmed, the “only wish is to leave as little of yourself behind on the battlefield.”59 After heavy fighting in August 1918 he reported that “the men can’t take any more; there have been cases of men breaking down in tears and rolling on the ground crying.”60 Some men surpassed the absolute limit of their endurance and committed suicide, both on the battlefield and in an internment camp. These six diarists, however, all held up under the strain and did not stumble into the postwar world as broken men. With the exception of John French, who was plagued by medical issues related to his prewar employment and wartime service, these men went on to enjoy long and productive lives after the war.
So, apart from good luck, the influence of the cohesive and supportive small groups to which they belonged, the opportunities to release stress through recreational and leisure activities, and the beneficial impact of periodic contacts with home through letters or parcels, what else sustained them through the conflict?
The final significant factor, so pervasive it was left unspoken, was a sense of duty. Three of the diarists—Cate, French, and Hutchison—were volunteers who never wavered in their conviction that they were doing the right thing. Hutchison returned to combat when he could have remained in New Zealand. French and Desagneaux condemned the shirkers who not only failed to pull their own weight but also effectively repudiated the notions of duty and sacrifice that underlay military service.61 Away from the fighting, Willy Wolff and Felix Kaufmann sought to remain true in their loyalties whatever the hardships. Both retained their confidence in the validity of Germany’s cause and the inevitability of its triumph until nearly the end. Kaufmann, still expecting a German victory in 1917 after his extensive service, only began to harbor doubts when he saw increasing numbers of American troops in France. Collectively, these diaries illuminate the sacrifices of war, whether willingly volunteered or stoically endured, and document these sacrifices across six lifetimes.
1 Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7–15.
2 C. R. Grundy, Local War Museums: A Suggestion (London: W. Claude Johnson, 1917), 5–8.
3 Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Willis, eds., Intimate Voices from the First World War (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
4 Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (New York: Knopf, 2011), xi.
5 The two classic titles are Philipp Witkop, ed., German Students’ War Letters (London: Methuen, 1929), and Laurence Housman, ed., War Letters of Fallen Englishmen (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1930).
6 Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 19. See also two works by Martyn Lyons: “French Soldiers and Their Correspondence: Towards a History of Writing Practices in the First World War,” French History 17 (2003): 79–95, and The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 71–90. Jay Winter suggests a figure of 2 billion letters in his “Families” in Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), vol. 3: Civil Society, 52.
7 There are insightful discussions of this issue in David Omissi, ed., Indian Voices of the Great War (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), and Bernd Ulrich, Die Augenzeugen: deutsche Feldpostbriefe in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit 1914-1933 (Essen: Klartext, 1997).
8 An example of what could happen was the case of Joseph Bédier, a famous French philologist, whose use of captured soldiers’ diaries lent credence to his influential 1915 pamphlets condemning German atrocities in Belgium and France. John Horne and Alan Kramer, “German ‘Atrocities’ and Franco-German Opinion, 1914: The Evidence of German Soldiers’ Diaries,” Journal of Modern History 66 (1994): 1–33. See also their magisterial summation, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
9 Jean Norton Cru, War Books, trans. Stanley F. Pincetl Jr. (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1988), 37. Norton Cru, himself a veteran and French literature professor at Williams College, undertook a massive project during the later 1920s to read and evaluate some 300 French memoirs, diaries, and letter collections on the war by those who had served. After its publication in 1929 as Témoins (“Witnesses”), he prepared something of an abridged version that drew upon the original introduction but added several new chapters and illustrative extracts from works he considered representative. This second book, Du Témoignage (Paris: Gallimard, 1930), is the basis for the 1988 English translation by Stanley Pincetl Jr. cited above.
10 Cru, War Books, 7. On this basis, the testimony of any officer above the rank of captain would be excluded for he had not “seen” what those more consistently in the front lines had the opportunity to witness. Also failing to make the grade would be prisoners after capture or internees, whose experiences are central to this book. Norton Cru’s professed restrictions should be regarded as an attempt to reassert who was entitled to define a particular view of the conflict at a particular historical moment.
11 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), 158–59.
12 Cyril Falls, War Books: An Annotated Bibliography of the Books about the Great War (London: Peter Davies, 1930), xvii.
13 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). The “high diction” and emphasis on irony that Fussell documents on the basis of a number of articulate, highly educated British soldiers finds fewer echoes among the diarists represented here.
14 Tim O’Brien, “How to Tell a True War Story” in his The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 64–81.
15 See Jay Winter’s introduction to Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003; originally published in 1916); Leonard V. Smith, “Jean Norton Cru and Combatants’ Literature of the First World War,” Modern & Contemporary France 9 (2001): 161–69.
16 The first issue was confronted directly by John Keegan in his remarkable The Face of Battle (New York: Viking, 1976), 13–15; the second is best approached through Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
17 Hutchison, entries of June 29 and August 8, 1915.
18 See his entries of July 6, 1917, and August 14, 1918. The first could have been revised within two days, but the second definitely was updated well after the events it describes. Hutchison, who used blank printed diaries, added longer descriptions of certain sites at the end of his 1914 volume, though it is not clear whether he did so because it was the only point at which he had time to reflect or whether it was the only section with sufficient space. Kaufmann most likely added an introductory section when he had the opportunity, but the remainder of his diary betrays no evidence of obvious gaps in composition or retrospective rewriting.
19 In a perfect world we would have liked to include a diary dealing with the eastern front, as well as one written by a woman. The first alternative is complicated by issues of access and language, the second by the fact that the comparative rarity of women’s diaries has meant that those that have turned up invariably have been published. A good example is Elfriede “Piete” Kuhr’s There We’ll Meet Again: A Young German Girl’s Diary of the First World War (Gloucester, UK: private printing, 1998), an almost obligatory reprint that has found its way into both of the “intimate history” collections by Palmer and Willis and by Englund. The war at sea is another candidate for inclusion; for these, see the superb account in Daniel Horn, ed., War, Mutiny, and Revolution in the German Navy: The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967).
20 See Georges Connes, A POW’s Memoir of the First World War: The Other Ordeal (Oxford: Berg, 2004).
21 Hutchison, supplementary entry at end of 1914.
22 Robert Pellissier, an elite French infantryman who served near Cate in the Vosges, highlighted this acquisition of knowledge, linking it to his masculinity. “I have now received the ‘baptism of fire,’ and feel quite like a man,” he wrote. “I know the noise of bullets and shells. I can tell from the report whether the gun is French or German.” Joshua Brown, ed., A Good Idea of Hell: Letters from a Chasseur à Pied (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2003), 35.
23 Mary Habeck, “Technology in the First World War: The View from Below,” in The Great War and the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary Habeck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 99–131.
24 Desagneaux, entry of May 20, 1918.
25 Desagneaux, entry of August 11, 1918.
26 French, entries of February 27 and March 2, 1916. The Army sought to maintain the practices of church parades, outdoor religious services attended by the troops spruced up for the occasion.
27 Paul Cohen-Portheim, Time Stood Still: My Internment in England, 1914-1918 (London: Duckworth, 1931).Tammy Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918 (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 205, aptly describes the impact on men of military age as the “purgatory of internment.”
28 Desagneaux, entry of June 30, 1916. After heavy combat in the Vosges, Robert Pellissier confessed to “leading a perfectly animal life.” Brown, Good Idea of Hell, 59.
29 Wolff, entries of October 26, 1916, and October 26, 1917.
30 Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 62.
31 There is an excellent discussion of these issues in Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Alexander Watson, “Morale,” in Cambridge History of First World War, vol. 2: The State, 174–95.
32 Watson argues that a degree of self-deception in evaluating risk (such as exaggerating how soon the war might end or underestimating the tenacity of the enemy) helped the men to endure. There is some evidence for this in Desagneaux’s diaries, especially the entry of June 11, 1918.
33 French, entries of August 16 and 22, 1917. A comrade was struck in the chest but survived with barely a scratch because the bullet’s progress was impeded by a pocket Bible and a change purse.
34 French, entry of April 9, 1917.
35 Desagneaux, entry of June 11, 1918.
36 Desagneaux, entry of August 11, 1918.
37 Hutchison, entry of April 28, 1915.
38 Hutchison, entries of July 28, 1915, and August 28, 1915. He also witnessed an unexploded shell in the hospital on May 1, 1915.
39 Hutchison, entry of October 6, 1918. Keeping accurate time was essential for artillery barrages coordinated with infantry assaults.
40 Cate, entry of January 10, 1916.
41 Kaufmann, initial entry. He attributed his survival to a presentiment of danger, a sensation also observed in others by Sapper French, as in his entry of November 15, 1917.
42 The classic exposition of this argument, drawn from the experience of German troops during the Second World War, remains Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948): 280–315. See also the discussion in Hew Strachan, “Training, Morale and Modern War,” Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006): 211–27.
43 Kaufmann, entry of September 12, 1917.
44 Kaufmann, entry of December 23, 1918.
45 Kaufmann, entry of September 19, 1918.
46 Wolff, entry of October 17, 1917.
47 Kaufmann, entry of January 15, 1919.
48 Michael Roper notes these distinctions in his The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 58–63. See also Meyer, Men of War, 14–46.
49 This was not unusual. Fussell, Great War, 75–77.
50 French, entries of August 10 and 13, 1916.
51 Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980).
52 Desagneaux, entry of July 25, 1916.
53 Desagneaux, entry of December 6, 1918. In fact, some of the harshest criticism he reported was reserved for English troops who supposedly lacked the fighting spirit of the Australians, Canadians, and Indians.
54 Wolff, entry of June 10, 1917.
55 Kaufmann, initial entry.
56 Kaufmann, entry of October 21, 1917.
57 Kaufmann, entry of January 26, 1919.
58 Recent work has tended to downplay the pervasiveness of overt anti-Semitism among ordinary German soldiers. Thomas Weber, Hitler’s First War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); David J. Fine, Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012); Gregory Caplan, Wicked Sons, German Heroes: Jewish Soldiers, Veterans and Memories of World War I in Germany (Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag, 2008); Tim Grady, German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). On the so-called Jewish Census, however, which some senior officers mistakenly anticipated would expose a pattern of Jewish shirking behind the lines, see Werner Angress, “The German Army’s Judenzãhlung of 1916: Genesis, Consequences, Significance,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1978): 117–37; Jacob Rosenthal, Die Ehre des jűdischen Soldaten: Die Judenzählung im Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre Folgen (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2007).
59 Desagneaux, entry of May 5, 1918.
60 Desagneaux, entry of August 31, 1918.
61 French, entry of November 24, 1917; Desagneaux, entry of June 5, 1917.