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The Gunner's Diary

Picture
‘Joe’s Autograph Album’ was redolent of life among the young working-class in Hull a hundred years ago. Now we have the privilege of access to the diary of a young soldier, Gunner Harry Weldon, in the trenches around Arras, throughout the whole of 1918.

Rebecca and Kevin, croft holders on the Isle of Skye, passed the diary on to us, having received it in turn from a friend who had copied the diary by hand into a readable format, without changing a single character. It covers life in the trenches near Arras for 51 weeks, from the first of January until the fifteenth of December 1918.

​Click here to read the diary, with an introduction by its transcriber.

​The diary evokes the contrasting frontline worlds of boredom and terror, freedom among mates and the discipline of the army, ever-present death and injury, with a constant search for something to eat! The Germans are reduced to ‘Fritz’, then ‘Jerry’ and then just ‘He’. An ever-threatening personalised presence almost within reach.

Not least fascinating is the way that the Armistice (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918) passed almost unnoticed, as if it was just another day to be borne like any other while little actually changed!

Towards the end of the diary looms the onset of the next big killer: influenza. Perhaps we should start counting our blessings, even if they do not include Brexit. We can’t end without pointing out that Schengen rules, due to get even more severe later next year, already literally prevent us from entering the European continent for half the year. Banned from all the countries that we fought and died to liberate from the Germans, and then defend against the Russians!


 










Gunner Weldon’s Leather-bound Diary

For a link to the present era in words and music, try Pink Floyd's  The Gunner’s Dream.

Comments

​Among the appreciative comments we have received so far are the following:

Joe McNally, a published author living on the Isle of Bute: “Brilliant, poignant and apposite. Thanks very much for sending it.”
 
Martin Jeffes, founder, owner and manager of the Sakar Hills campsite in Bulgaria near the border with Greece and Turkey: “Many thanks for sending me 'The Gunner's Diary'.  What an interesting archive, and insight into conditions in the trenches in the First World War.  Imagine having chips and sardines, can't think of anything worse.  Our hero was, obviously, part of a team of what today we would call logistics, moving ammunition up to the front line, by horses and wagon.  I haven't read all of it, yet, but, of that which I have read, the thing that surprised me was where, in May or June, he comments on the fact that German planes had come over at night.  That would have been an exciting operation, taking off and landing one of those early planes in the dark.”
 
In reply to Martin, Margaret wrote that her “father (born 1899), lying about his age as many a lad did, joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1914. He was in a plane that was shot down over France two years later and suffered ‘with his nerves’ (today it would be called PTSD) for the rest of his life.”

Pat Holroyd, Margaret’s Fleetwood Grammar School and Girl Guiding friend, now living in Enfield: “I've only read so far the start of the War Diary you sent. There are references to e.g. Bruay, which my Dad mentions in his war diary of 1916 - he was in the area around Arras before being sent down to the Somme at the end of August 1916, then badly wounded in early September.   I'll leave reading the rest until later, I will  then compare the two diaries.”
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