The British obsession with the centennial of World War I, the war that did not end all wars, heightened earlier this week as the National Archives announced that it was putting diaries from British soldiers in the conflict online.
The diaries record life in the trenches for all British military units, which were required to keep official journals daily. The archives hold about 1.5 million pages of these accounts, and about 20 per cent of them have been digitised so far.
The first group of diaries describes the experiences of three cavalry divisions and seven infantry divisions, including the Fourth Dragoon Guards, which fought in the Battle of Mons, the first major action for the British, in August 1914.
Captain James Patterson described the opening of the war: "Poor fellows shot dead are lying in all directions," he wrote. "Trenches, bits of equipment, clothing (probably blood-stained), ammunition, tools, caps, etc, etc, everywhere. Everywhere the same hard, grim, pitiless sign of battle and war. I have had a belly full of it."
Patterson, of the First Battalion South Wales Borderers, took part in the First Battles of the Marne and the Aisne. He was killed in battle on November 1, 1914, six weeks after an entry admitting that what he had seen was "beyond description."
Volunteers have been scanning the diaries, which have been available for public view at the National Archives in Kew since the late 1960s. They can contain details that were not allowed to be sent in letters home.
Culture Secretary Maria Miller told the BBC that "the National Archives' digitised World War I unit diaries will allow us to hear the voices of those that sacrificed their lives," and that they are "even more poignant now there are no living veterans."
The last known British veteran of the war, Harry Patch, died in 2009, at the age of 111.
Other diaries have also emerged. Toby Helm wrote in The Observer about the World War I diaries kept in pencil by his grandfather Cyril Helm, a doctor who served with the Second Battalion of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. And the Imperial War Museum is working on a larger project to gather diaries from anyone who lived during the war, to be called Lives of the First World War, which is to begin next month.
In late October 1914, Dr Helm wrote: "Many fell in our frontline trenches, causing awful casualties. Men were buried alive whilst others were just dug out in time and brought to, unable to stand, with their backs half-broken. My cellar was soon packed, but I could not put any wounded upstairs as any minute I expected the place to be blown up."
He kept his mind on the injured, but at one point wrote, "There is nothing I know of more trying to the nerves than to sit listening to shells and wondering how long there is before one comes and finds your hiding place."
Even the Royal Mint is issuing a new two-pound coin featuring Lord Kitchener's mustachioed face and pointing finger, with the famous inscription: "Your country needs you!" The coin is only the first of special issues that will follow the years of the war. The Labour shadow culture minister, Helen Goodman, immediately criticised the coin as indicative of "an unnecessarily jingoistic approach" to the war's commemorations.
There has also been a political squabble over remarks from the Conservative education minister, Michael Gove, who criticised British satirical shows, plays and films like Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War for promoting "left-wing myths that belittle Britain" by portraying the British command as fools who thoughtlessly sent young men to needless death.
There have also been a spate of books on the outbreak and causes of the war, followed by opinion pieces in the newspapers. The three most prominent books so far have been by Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, which was quoted at a summit meeting by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany; Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914; and Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War. But this is just an early skirmish: Publishers plan many more, including novels and the reissuing of classics like Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.
Other countries, especially those that had so much combat on their soil, will have their own commemorations; the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will perform in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on the anniversary of the assassination there of Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian crown prince, which set off the war.
And in the journalistic tradition of finding odd connections to current obsessions, the Edinburgh Evening News wrote that a rare fungus discovered in Scotland, on the grounds of an old military hospital, "may have been carried from Flanders Fields on the boots of First World War soldiers."
©2014 The New York Times
The diaries record life in the trenches for all British military units, which were required to keep official journals daily. The archives hold about 1.5 million pages of these accounts, and about 20 per cent of them have been digitised so far.
The first group of diaries describes the experiences of three cavalry divisions and seven infantry divisions, including the Fourth Dragoon Guards, which fought in the Battle of Mons, the first major action for the British, in August 1914.
Captain James Patterson described the opening of the war: "Poor fellows shot dead are lying in all directions," he wrote. "Trenches, bits of equipment, clothing (probably blood-stained), ammunition, tools, caps, etc, etc, everywhere. Everywhere the same hard, grim, pitiless sign of battle and war. I have had a belly full of it."
Patterson, of the First Battalion South Wales Borderers, took part in the First Battles of the Marne and the Aisne. He was killed in battle on November 1, 1914, six weeks after an entry admitting that what he had seen was "beyond description."
Volunteers have been scanning the diaries, which have been available for public view at the National Archives in Kew since the late 1960s. They can contain details that were not allowed to be sent in letters home.
Culture Secretary Maria Miller told the BBC that "the National Archives' digitised World War I unit diaries will allow us to hear the voices of those that sacrificed their lives," and that they are "even more poignant now there are no living veterans."
The last known British veteran of the war, Harry Patch, died in 2009, at the age of 111.
Other diaries have also emerged. Toby Helm wrote in The Observer about the World War I diaries kept in pencil by his grandfather Cyril Helm, a doctor who served with the Second Battalion of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. And the Imperial War Museum is working on a larger project to gather diaries from anyone who lived during the war, to be called Lives of the First World War, which is to begin next month.
In late October 1914, Dr Helm wrote: "Many fell in our frontline trenches, causing awful casualties. Men were buried alive whilst others were just dug out in time and brought to, unable to stand, with their backs half-broken. My cellar was soon packed, but I could not put any wounded upstairs as any minute I expected the place to be blown up."
He kept his mind on the injured, but at one point wrote, "There is nothing I know of more trying to the nerves than to sit listening to shells and wondering how long there is before one comes and finds your hiding place."
Even the Royal Mint is issuing a new two-pound coin featuring Lord Kitchener's mustachioed face and pointing finger, with the famous inscription: "Your country needs you!" The coin is only the first of special issues that will follow the years of the war. The Labour shadow culture minister, Helen Goodman, immediately criticised the coin as indicative of "an unnecessarily jingoistic approach" to the war's commemorations.
There has also been a political squabble over remarks from the Conservative education minister, Michael Gove, who criticised British satirical shows, plays and films like Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War for promoting "left-wing myths that belittle Britain" by portraying the British command as fools who thoughtlessly sent young men to needless death.
There have also been a spate of books on the outbreak and causes of the war, followed by opinion pieces in the newspapers. The three most prominent books so far have been by Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, which was quoted at a summit meeting by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany; Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914; and Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War. But this is just an early skirmish: Publishers plan many more, including novels and the reissuing of classics like Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.
Other countries, especially those that had so much combat on their soil, will have their own commemorations; the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will perform in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on the anniversary of the assassination there of Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian crown prince, which set off the war.
And in the journalistic tradition of finding odd connections to current obsessions, the Edinburgh Evening News wrote that a rare fungus discovered in Scotland, on the grounds of an old military hospital, "may have been carried from Flanders Fields on the boots of First World War soldiers."
©2014 The New York Times