Richard Van Emden

This was First World War historian Richard van Emden's first book, originally published in 1990 and reissued in 2013 for the centenary. The author had interviewed and pieced together the war time experiences of Private Ben Clouting of the 4th Dragoon Guards, a survivor of the regiment that saw the first shots of the war fired by the British Expeditionary Force on 22 August 1914. Ben was a very ordinary soldier, who joined the army in peacetime in summer 1913, lying about his age, claiming to be 18 when he was in fact not even 16. He spent some of the war in the trenches and some of it behind the lines looking after officers' horses. But his experiences are those of a very ordinary man in what he does and what happens to him, reacting unemotionally and with British phlegm. Overall Ben could be said to have been lucky in being away from the front line much of the time, though he was wounded twice, slightly gassed and nearly died of pleurisy. His account is remarkable for being unremarkable. Van Emden's editorial interpolations at times I thought were too long and unnecessarily dry and sometimes detracted from Ben's account, though on other occasions they helped with contextualising Ben's subjective experiences. Worth a read.… (mehr)

Not the blood and guts fest of some memoirs as this guy is definitely a product of his generation; brave, modest, gentlemanly... All those qualities we appear to have lost unfortunately.
At 16 he was barely old enough to leave school, but he defied his regiment (who wanted to leave him at home) and set off for war, being present at both the first shot of the Great War, and the last great cavalry charge of the British Army.
Legend.
I think this memory sums it all up; Ben relays to the interviewer that each cavalry battalion had a member of the pioneer corps attached to them, there to dig latrines x 4 each time they made camp and fill in the holes when they moved again. And what did Ben and his friends name these lucky fellows?
...the rear admiral.
Priceless.
The world is a poorer place without these old contemptibles.… (mehr)

Historians can give us a big-picture view of major battles, but big-picture views don't necessarily reveal what that battle was really like for those on the battlefield. For that you need to hear from the soldiers themselves. And that is what makes Richard Van Emden's “The Somme: The Epic Battle in the Soldiers' Own Words and Photographs” (2016) something special.

By the time the Somme offensive against the German lines began early in July of 1917 (it continued almost until the end of the year), British soldiers were forbidden to have cameras, probably because the military did not want people back in England to see just how bad conditions were on the front lines. Still a number of soldiers, especially officers, did take cameras with them, and the photographs that survive are often stunning. Van Emden also includes photos taken by German soldiers.

Between the photographs, Van Emden shows us the progress of the battle (not that there was much actual progress) via excerpts from letters, diaries and memoirs written by soldiers on both sides.

British soldiers, being British, enjoyed their tea time even with a battle going on. "Oh, what should we do without our tea here!" one man writes. Officers often refer to their servants, whose service included doing their masters' bidding with bullets flying.

The men write about their chances of surviving the next attack (slim in the case of those ordered to advance against German machine guns), about the terrible wounds inflicted upon their fellows, about the constant noise, about the mud and the rats, and about the stink of decaying bodies (something war movies never seem to mention).

Deadly combat actually seems to have been viewed as fun by a couple of the writers. One of them says, "I say that this feeling of joy and lightheartedness does not come from any pleasure in killing — that's the rotten part — but in the risk of being killed. My days in the trenches were days of utter content; I cannot explain why, even to myself." Yet another soldier writes, "War is indescribably disgusting. Any man who has seen it and praises it is degenerate."

One man tells of being hugged by a German prisoner relieved to still be alive. Another tells of trying to take pictures of some of the men. "The snaps are not very good as I could not ask the troops to stand still and look pleasant!"

In the snaps Van Emden has collected, few of the troops look very pleasant. Still, like the written commentary by the soldiers, they are quite good on the whole, making the book something that should interest anyone with an interest in World War I in general or the battle of Somme in particular.… (mehr)