[The following was written by Sir Stewart Gore-Browne during his time as an officer in the First World War.]
The Front Line, Arras,
Good Friday 1916
Dearest
I’m writing this when other folk are going to bed just as I used to in Africa; only then it was by a roaring fire out in the limitless silence and peace of the forest, with the great big starlit sky showing through the tree-tops. Here is a grubby little dugout with a smoky paraffin lamp and a tiny speck of warmth from a dreary iron stove, while outside there’s rain and the ceaseless sniper fire in the infantry trenches, with about every half hour big guns going off. There, that very moment, four shells rumbled and echoed as they burst over the hill.
Alongside me there’s a lad, a subaltern in the battery, reading over and over again the casualty list that’s got his brother’s name in it, killed, almost the first time that he was out here. I think that a quite certain death hangs over one here – shells have dropped all round this shanty, the ground is ploughed up with them, and any time the German batteries want to turn onto us they could, and yet one lives on and jokes and tells stories and we’ve just eaten a quite excellent pheasant (slain in the woods by a Frenchman).
We’re not heroes, far from it, though I think the Infantry are, only very ordinary people trying all of us to do our best. Every night before I go to sleep, I say ‘Lighten our darkness, o Lord (but not with bursting shells) and by Thy Great Mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night for the love of thine only son, our Saviour Jesus Christ’, then I get quite comfortably off to sleep if there’s no toothache or chilblains or rats, and when I wake up in the morning and see it’s daylight and I am still alive, I say, ‘that’s another night gone, thank you Oh Lord, now there’s the day to get through.’ And so on…
Source:
Lamb, Christina. “Part One: 1914-1927, Chapter 4.” The Africa House: The True Story of An English Gentleman and His African Dream. Harper Collins Publishers, 2004. 43-4. Print.
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