WWI Officer's Recently Published Memoirs Offer Moments of Humor Amongst the Horrors of Trench Warfare

It written by Captain Alexander Stewart, who served in the 3rd Scottish Rifles, its called The Experiences of a Very Unimportant Officer.  He served until he was injured in 1917  The article gives a few highlights,

"After my third or fourth shot, I found that the bowl of my pipe and the smoke from it was obscuring my line of vision as I was firing slightly downwards all the time. Much to my annoyance, I had to put my pipe in my pocket alight as it was; it was lucky that it did not burn my jacket.

"Just as I got my rifle working I saw a man in the trench calmly kneeling down and taking an aim at me. At the moment I saw him he fired. But in a miraculous way he missed."

This is good too.

In them, he details his annoyance at being woken up by pointless edicts from headquarters asking him how many socks his men have.

"I reply 141 and a half. I then go to sleep; back comes a memo: "please explain at once how you come to be deficient of one sock". I reply "man lost his leg". That's how we make the Huns sit up."

Describing the injury that ended his military career,

"I started to cough and brought up some blood and a bit of the shell which must have stuck in my wind pipe. My servant very kindly retrieved the bit of iron out of the mud and, handing it to me, remarked that I might like to keep it. This I did and my wife has it now."

He also complained of rodents eating the hair cream out of his hair while he was sleeping.

Stewart's grandson, who is an actor, found the memoirs, and decided to publish them. 

Captain Stewart also wrote about the horrors of war, the soldiers under his command suffering under shell shock brought on by a heavy night of shelling soon after the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, and the horror of seeing hundreds of men laying dead.

Stewart was haunted by his experiences long after the war, Stewart's son, now in his eighties, recalls that his father would wake up in the middle of the night screaming.  Stewart rarely spoke about his time in combat.

I might have to try and track down a copy of this book, it offers a unique perspective on war in that era, and you don't see that published often.

Posted by: doubleplusundead at 11:00 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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