Letters From The First World War 1916 1918

'Our family has had to pay the penalty of war that so many thousands of families have done, for I am now the only one out here.'These few words, written by Frederick Ernest Andrews on 16 October 1917 from France, come from this collection of letters from staff at the Audit office for the Great Western Railway (GWR) based at Paddington, London.What makes this collection of soldiers' letters so different from all others is the fact that it reveals the stories of a particular group of men who varied in class and education, who were writing back to their colleagues and bosses in the office while on active service during in the First World War. Many men enlisted from the GWR to fight, but these letters come exclusively from those worked at its Audit office. Staff at Paddington covered a range of different roles in insurance, accounting or ticketing for the Great Western Railway.There are 30 letters and 11 photographs in this resource and all the letters have been transcribed.

A history of World War I—told through the letters exchanged by ordinary soldiers and their families. Letters from the Trenches reveals how people really thought and felt during the Great War, and covers all social classes and groups from officers to conscripts to women at home to conscientious objectors. Voices within the book include Sgt. John Adams, 9th Royal Irish Fusiliers, who wrote in May 1917: “For the day we get our letter from home is a red letter day in the history of the soldier out here. It is the only way we can hear what is going on. The slender thread between us and the homeland.” Pvt. Stanley Goodhead, who served with one of the Manchester Pals battalion, wrote home in 1916: “I came out of the trenches last night after being in four days. You have no idea what four days in the trenches means . . . The whole time I was in I had only about two hours sleep and that was in snatches on the firing step. What dugouts there are, are flooded with mud and water up to the knees and the rats hold swimming galas in them . . . We are literally caked with brown mud and it is in all our food, tea etc.” Jacqueline Wadsworth skillfully uses these letters to tell the human story of the First World War: what mattered to Britain’s servicemen and their feelings about the war; how the conflict changed people; and how life continued on the home front.

Includes the First World War Illustrations Pack - 73 battle plans and diagrams and 198 photos. Lieutenant-Colonel Rowland Feilding began his military career as a front line soldier in World War I and a leader of men, preferring to volunteer for a dangerous duty rather than order a subordinate to do so in his place. With a narrative broken only by the months he spent recuperating from wounds, Feilding was blessed with an extraordinary luck: his survival was a mystery even to his comrades. Vivid yet unexaggerated in its depiction of life at the front, Feilding’s letters to his wife, Edith Stapleton-Bretherton, are driven by his thoughts, emotions and experiences of the war, and of home. Written with the events still fresh in his mind—and often while still on the battlefield or in the trenches—, these letters form one of the most compelling accounts of the Western Front during the First World War. Compelling reading.-Print ed.

Selection of more than 300 letters published by The Times newspaper between 1914 and 1918, as its readers and the nation alike endured the ordeal of the First World War.

A collection of sixty one letters written by and representing the lives of soldiers during the Great War. The book is divided into five sections, covering Gallipoli, the French campaigns of 1916, 1917 and 1918, and the Egypt-Palestine battles. Glyn has written a scene-setting introduction to the book, and provides a brief outline of the military situation relevant to each section. The main feature of the book is the letters written home to parents, siblings, lovers, wives and children. These letters describe what it's like to be at war, including the nervous anticipation, the noise, the dirt, the lice, the stench of dead and rotting bodies decaying in the sun and the relative sanctuary of a hospital. Many of the letter-writers never returned to New Zealand;in some cases, a letter from their commanding officer or a friend is included, which describes the dead man's heroic end, or final resting place.

From the worst horrors of modern trench warfare a small handful of soldiers and nurses created a body of poetry that is so vivid and intense that one hundred years later it has engraved itself on our national consciousness. This anthology focuses on those poets who were on the front line, from the famous Sassoon, Owens and Graves, to nurses like Vera Brittain. The poems are accompanied by a brief and accessible introduction, which sets the context for a reader new to the poems, as well as short biographical profiles of the poets.