MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

Photo1: detail from the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner (by Charles Sargeant Jagger).
Photo2: Artillery in action.

• Infantry/Artillery Context: Worthwhile bearing in mind the following (from Geoff Dyer’s book ‘The Missing of the Somme’): “Sixty per cent of casualties on the Western Front were from shell-fire, against which shelter was the infantryman’s only defence. Artillery fire transformed the foot soldier from an active participant in conflict to an almost passive victim of a force unleashed randomly around him. ‘Being shelled’, Louis Simpson claimed later, ‘is actually the main work of an infantry soldier’”.



• Horses (another quote from Geoff Dyer’s book ‘The Missing of the Somme’): “In footage and photographs of the war there are horses everywhere. So many of them it is easy to think you are watching an early Western, set in an especially dismal period of the American Civil War. In St Jude’s Church, Hampstead, there is a memorial to the 375,000 horses killed in the war”.



• Ypres: In his novel ‘Fields of Glory’, Jean Rouaud gives a terrifying description of life in the kind of ‘sullen swamp’ that is the ‘enduring truth’ of the Ypres battlefield:
  “Little by little, abandoned corpses sank into the clay, slid to the bottom of a hollow and were soon buried under a wall of earth. During an attack you stumbled over a half-exposed arm or leg. Falling face to face on a corpse, you swore between your teeth – yours or the corpse’s. Nasty the way these sly corpses would trip you up. But you took the opportunity to tear their identification tags off their necks, so as to save those anonymous lumps of flesh from a future without memory, to restore them to official existence, as though the tragedy of the unknown soldier were to have lost not so much his life as his name”.



• "Old Contemptibles": was the title adopted by the men of the BEF who saw service before or on 22 November 1914. They were the originals, and most were regular soldiers or reservists. They derive their honourable title from the famous "Order of the Day" given by Kaiser Wilhelm II at his headquarters in Aix-la-Chapelle on 19 August 1914: "It is my Royal and Imperial Command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English; walk over General French's contemptible little Army."



• War Diaries: were produced by each unit, recording day-to-day activities in some detail (note: Steve checked these out at The National Archives, summer 2008). They represent an amazing documentation of the unit’s war involvement. The early (numbered) separate pages of the diary were fairly crude (very thin paper and glued into files for The National Archives’ records; after a few weeks, these were replaced by individual diary sheets (still on thin paper) with the following heading: “War Diary or Intelligence Summary (erase heading not required)”. Locations are carefully recorded in capital letters (although some spellings may be incorrect as Steve hasn't been able to trace all locations).