Diaries and Letters as Testimonies of War

Kate Hunter

Separation was the almost universal experience for those involved in the Great War. Separation from loved ones and homes was common for mobilised men and women, for those who moved voluntarily and those who were displaced, and for families on home fronts as close to the war as France and as remote as New Zealand. Consequently, soldiers of the Great War kept diaries and they and their families were prolific letter-writers. In October 1914 the British Army postal service handled 650,000 letters and 58,000 parcels per week. By April 1915 that number had increased to three million letters and 230,000 parcels, and in 1916 the weekly average number of letters was 11 million along with 875,000 parcels [1]. During the same period, the French postal service went from handling on average 2.7 million items of mail per day in 1913 to more than four million each day during the war; over the course of the entire war, the French postal service handled more than 10 billion items [2]. It is no surprise that historian Martha Hanna has concluded that "letter-writing was a principal pre-occupation of French troops and their families throughout the war." [3] The same could be said of other Allied troops.

Letters and diaries have become invaluable sources for historians of the Great War; rarely is a book written that does not use personal papers to some extent. However, the use of letters as a source revealing the war has not gone uncontested. Scholars have argued that censorship and sensibilities resulted in soldiers’ letters being bland and formulaic, containing little real information about the war. Military historians argued that letters were useless because soldiers’ views of manoeuvres and combat were necessarily limited [4]. However, as part of the expansion of the social history movement, historians began to use soldiers’ personal writings as evidence of wartime experience. Bill Gammage, whose book The Broken Years (based on the diaries and letters of 1,000 Australian soldiers) first appeared in 1974, wrote most emphatically that his was "not a military history of the First AIF [Australian Imperial Force]." [5] Instead, as the cover of a later edition proclaimed, it was a "portrayal of men at war, based on their own accounts." [6] The rise of social history brought soldiers’ letters into the frame as evidence, and the shift to cultural history made letters important for what they revealed of "representations, feelings, emotions of men and women." [7] Many factors influenced the production of diaries and letters, however, and researchers must treat personal papers with some caution. We must also be aware that while letters and diaries are rich and vivid sources, as evidence of the war they present a very particular picture: one that is heavily dominated by soldiers, by English-language sources in English publications and by the Western Front. Personal papers exist in their thousands in French, German and Belgian archives but those from the millions of lesser educated labour corps and from civilians do not survive in any significant numbers. It is only recently that historians publishing in English have illuminated personal papers from French and German soliders [8].