When I left home in 1915 to join the 29th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, there was an album in the house nearly full of postcards. They had been sent to me, my brother or sister, or my parents by schoolfriends, relations, or sometimes by chance acquaintances met on seaside holidays. Nobody flew to Corfu those days. More than forty years later I read a novel of Graham Greene’s, Our Man In Havana, in which a character observes: ‘A picture-postcard is a symbol of loneliness.’ Looking through this quite remarkable collection of cards of nations at war I can only conclude, if Graham Greene’s character was right, there were an awful lot of lonely people in the world during 1914-1918. There were, of course. We were lonely in the trenches. Comradeship that arrived with dirt, danger and death, helped enormously, but it was the post from home that made such a degraded form of life endurable. There are many postcards in this book, so energetically collected and so brilliantly presented by Tonie and Valmai Holt, that I recognise. Some, especially the Austrian artist, Raphael Kirchner’s, I remember seeing on the damp walls of dugouts, wartime pin-ups that brought with their La Vie Parisienne near-nudity a moment or two of relief from the rat-infested, water-logged, mud-filled holes that sheltered men from the mad, death-dealing outside world of Nomansland. We, on the other hand, could send back only those printed, monosyllabic Field Postcards (I am well, I am in receipt of your letter, I am wounded’ – or words like that) except when, out of the Front Line, in some small, shell-shocked village, it was still possible to buy, for a few centimes, some sentimental postcard printed in Paris. Such shy-making cards have, inevitably, been corraled in this volume by the Holts. The card-sending habit died, in the main, when the Great War ended and stamps for cards went up from a halfpenny to a penny. Now there will be no time for sending such blatantly propagandist, heart-stirring, comic messages in any future war. Nuclear fission will not allow leisure enough for loving messages.
Such a thought helps to make this book the treasure house it is. There can never be another like it. It represents an innocent industry that was buried along with most of the recipients of the postcard pictured here.
ERIC HISCOCK