Just Finished Reading: Twelves Days on the Somme – A Memoir of the Trenches, 1916 by Sidney Rogerson (FP: 1933) [194pp] 

I’m always looking out for first-hand accounts of historical events (or travels), so snapped this up when I saw it in my fave Indie bookshop some time ago. Although I’d never heard of the author before apparently he was quite famous in the 1930’s and not only for his books of WW1 (I have his other one stacked in a separate pile) but for his cricket biographies and tales of farming between the wars.  

The author was a fresh lieutenant when his regiment (the West Yorkshires) was assigned to a section of the Somme. Interestingly, as he stated in his introduction, this was not a tale of fighting and heroism in the face of the enemy. This was a tale of everyday life in the trenches told with a quite brutal honesty. It was a tale of mud, not only sticky and smelly but deadly. It was a tale of trying to keep warm and especially dry. It was a tale of ‘sleeping’ if it could be called that for a few hours at a time in-between orders arriving and the odd crisis. It was a tale of senior officers trying to do the best for their men and even more senior officers having zero idea either of what the men had to deal with, nor of what was being asked of them. It was a tale of random death – one of the things that struck me on several occasions was when the author focused on a fellow officer or common soldier and then mentioning the fact that he died at such and such a place by sniper bullet or shell impact. One weird thing was when people simply disappeared – they went out on patrol and simply didn’t come back. No one saw them hit, no one saw them fall. No capture report ever came back from the enemy and no POW ever returned. One moment they were there and then – vanished. Bizarre. 

Of course, there were funny stories too as we would expect in the circumstances. Jokes made at the expense of orders received that made no sense and of the ‘characters’ that have no doubt been sprinkled through every military unit throughout time. My favourites were the trooper who seemed to be able to light a fire in any conditions no matter the circumstance – and then proceed to brew a decent cup of tea. I also liked the soldier who requested permission to ‘survey’ No-Mans Land – AKA loot the German dead of anything of value. Aware that he couldn’t give such permission but also aware that the trooper was going to do it anyway suggested that if he did find himself outside the wire that the soldier should bring back any identification of British dead he found so that they could be taken off the missing list and allow their families to properly mourn – being in the days before ‘dog-tags’. 

In other words, this was an account of the mundane reality of trench warfare. This was talk of the weather, food, the lack of information, random death, watching attacks further down the line and thinking about the enemy who they almost never saw. All in all, this was honestly fascinating and an interesting change to tales of carnage, horror and death we’re usually given when trench warfare is discussed. Definitely recommended and more memoirs to come. 

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