Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War Read Online Free

which would have been quite an expensive item for a private soldier. On first seeing the photograph I wondered
whether the building with the stained-glass window in the background might still exist, but a quick look at satellite images on the Internet showed that today, there is hardly a trace of the
original camp at Rugeley left. A recent newspaper article described how a replica of an original wooden hut had just been installed there as a museum piece.
    Harry would not have been at the camp for much more than a month when, on Wednesday, 7 February 1917, he wrote the first of his war letters to have survived, to his sister Kate.
    37/74, M Coy, 15 Hut, 10th Training Reserves, Rugeley, Staffs
    February 7th 1917
    Dear Kate
    I was very pleased to receive your letter. The weather here is very cold and we don’t get much fire. We have been vaccinated this week well last Monday but we have to
do all drills just the same. Ethel says Annie’s cold is much better. I can’t get a shut of mine but I am lucky to keep as well as I do. We have four blankets a piece and a bag of straw
about 6in. from the floor on three planks to lie on. There are 29 in our hut and there only suppose to have twenty. I think it will be another five or six weeks before I get a pass I am ready for
one anytime. Ethel says Connie and Willie are alright he will soon be a year old now and have two letters from Jack he seems to be getting on all right. We don’t get too much to eat, bread
and jam dripping we have to do the cleaning in turns but the cooking is done at the cookhouse. I have not got any fatter yet I don’t suppose I shall do
    Will write soon
    With Love from
    Harry

    The letter to Kate, with its envelope, which is franked ‘Rugeley Camp’.
    Interior of a training-camp hut, c . 1917. The ‘bag of straw . . . on three planks’ on which the men slept can be seen at right; the stove and its chimney are
    at left.
    A recent drawing showing the construction of the type of hut only too familiar to Harry.
    The letter tells us a great deal. The troops lived in wooden huts. Each hut was about 60 feet (18 metres) long by 16 feet (5 metres) wide, with a cast-iron stove in the middle which would have
    provided the only heating. The straw palliasse on planks would have been a poor substitute for Harry’s bed at home, and he would certainly have needed the four blankets to keep warm, for
    the winter of 1917 was bitterly cold, and the huts draughty and lacking insulation.
    In time, the Army would replace many of its wooden huts with the corrugated-steel prefabricated Nissen hut, invented by a Canadian officer in 1916 and used in the First World War and,
extensively, in the Second. At Rugeley in 1917, however, twenty-nine men in a hut designed for twenty illustrates the pressure to turn out replacement soldiers for the front line.
    Vaccinations – soldiers were inoculated against typhoid and paratyphoid on joining up. Whatever the controversy today over the use of vaccines, the insanitary conditions and poor hygiene
of the trenches made such protection not just reasonable, but essential. Also available at the time was an anti-tetanus injection. However, this was generally administered after injury rather than
as a preventive measure.
    The ‘pass’ Harry refers to would have allowed him a short leave at the end of the training period, prior to joining his unit on active service, probably across the Channel in France
or Belgium.
    ‘Dripping’ is the residue of fat and juices that is left after meat has been roasted, poured into a bowl and allowed to cool and set, to be used again for frying or roasting. Before
cholesterol and salt were identified as mainly harmful, ‘bread and dripping’ was a common snack, or even meal, in the industrial Midlands of England and elsewhere. I can remember
enjoying it in the 1950s. The fat from the Sunday joint, with the wonderful brown jelly underneath it, was spread on to bread with a liberal amount of salt, and