'No Words Will Ever Describe the Horror'

“I endured the most awful agony in that shell hole, what with the pain in my leg and the thoughts, sad some of them were, that flashed through my brain, and the groaning of the wounded Germans at the top and the screech and explosions of the shells, it was awful. No words will ever describe the horror of it all. I wondered what my dear wife would do when I was gone, for I never expected to get out of that hole alive and many other thoughts crossed my mind.” 

Those are the closing words in a hand-written journal kept by an unknown English soldier on the Western Front. The document was donated to the Bodleian Library in 2005 and published the following year as A Month at the Front. Only twenty-seven of the book’s fifty-six pages are the journal. The other half consists of photographs and a useful introduction.

 

The editors tell us the journal’s author was a private in D Company of the 12^th Battalion, East Surrey Regiment. Detective work narrowed the author’s identity to one of twelve names. The journal begins in late July 1917 at a place in Flanders called La Roukloshille. The author and his comrades didn’t know it but they were taking part in the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele). When the battle concluded in November, with the Armistice still a year away, British casualties were estimated at 300,000. The Germans lost some 400,000.

 

Between July 24 and August 7, 324 men in D Company were reported killed, wounded, missing or sick (“largely as a result of the terrible conditions in the trenches”). The journal-keeper writes of the trenches:

 

“It was very wet, however, and it soon became so muddy that we were kept employed in chucking it out. At my end it was so soft, that we sank in nearly to our knees and as we could not keep it cleared we had to make the best of it. We got into a pretty state altogether, mud all over our equipment, mud all over our rifles and mud over everything.”

 

The description sounds familiar. I’ve read it before in Great War work by Ford Madox Ford, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Robert Graves. Half a century later, R.L. Barth experienced it in Vietnam as a young Marine, and he wrote “A Letter to the Dead” (Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone, 2021):

 

“The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight.

Cold with the mountain winds and two weeks’ rain,

I watch the concertina. The starlight-

Scope hums, and rats assault the bunkers again.

 

“You watch with me: Owen, Blunden, Sassoon.

Through sentry duty, everything you meant

Thickens to fear of nights without a moon.

War’s war. We are, my friends, no different.”

 

[If you live anywhere near the greater Cincinnati region, you can hear Bob Barth give a reading today at his alma mater, Northern Kentucky University, in Highland Heights, Ky., in observance of Veterans Day.]