Low life | 14 February 2019

My sister’s boyfriend is a solitary man and easily overwhelmed by another’s presence. On his rare visits he flits in and flits out again. On this occasion he was making his usual dash for the door when he saw me, remembered something, and handed me two battered old pocket diaries in that offhand, embarrassed way of his. ‘You’re interested in the first world war. I thought you might want to have these,’ he said. ‘If you can make any sense of them, good luck.’ I opened one and saw his surname, Smith, inscribed between the words ‘Gunner’ and ‘248 Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery’. The diary was for 1917. The other one was for 1918. ‘Your grandfather?’ He nodded. I expressed surprise that he would want to give away his grandfather’s war diaries. A wave of the hand dismissed the idea of family sentiment as an absurdity and he was gone.

The 1918 diary still has the little metal-tipped pencil stub in the spine sleeve. Both diaries are completed. The pencil handwriting is tiny, faded, often wild. A few days later, I found an old magnifying glass and began the task of transcribing them into my own barely decipherable hand.

New Year’s Day 1917 finds Gunner Smith at Codford camp on Salisbury Plain. He has the measles and is confined in isolation in the harness room. Through January he limits himself to a single daily word or phrase such as ‘fatigues’, ‘snowing’, ‘firing’, ‘route march’, ‘shocking weather’ and ‘fed up’. On Friday, 15 February, his 248 Battery sails from Southampton to Le Havre and after that there isn’t enough space on the page for everything he wants to say.

On the 22 March, he marches 15 miles in full kit, then another three miles through trenches with mud up to his thighs to the battery position at St Eloi, south of Ypres.