The Middy, September 2 1999

Thoughts from France, 1917

Before the outbreak of the First World War, Frank Mansfield Dudeney of Burgess Hill, worked as a journalist on the Brighton and Hove Herald and later on the South African Gazette.

He joined up in 1914, serving in Italy before being transferred to France. Here, published for the first time, is a letter he wrote in 1917 to his cousin, Emily, in Canada, describing life in the trenches,. Frank survived the war and lived until 1935.

SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE - SUNDAY 9, 1917

My dear Emily, thank you very much for your letter. It was very kind of you to write it and you must give your two little people a kiss from me for helping to post it. Letters from friends mean tremendous lot to us out here, for they are about our only link with civilisation and help to take our minds off the Richard business we are engaged in.

I called it a wretched business and so it is, but it is nonetheless terribly necessary and no man worthy of the name would want to shirk doing his share in it.

Also, although the business is a wretched one, don't imagine that the men engage in it are wretched.

Among all the millions in our army out here it is rare to meet a man who whines about it.

The men are wonderfully cheery, and the worst things are the more they laugh and joke. At the present moment I am alone in charge of a camp in what remains of a village in a pretty little valley. There is not a single house standing, but just heaps and heaps of bricks with jagged walls and bits of furniture sticking out of the heaps.

One end of the church remains, but the graves in the churchyard have all been broken open and the bodies removed by the Huns, though one end of the village is a little cemetery of German soldiers graves.

It is the only bit of the valley which the brutes did not desecrate and spoil before we drove them out of it.

This is a Sunday evening, and as I write the guns are booming away over the hill, and my men, who are getting a brief rest after being continuously in action ever since the beginning of the Somme battle last year, and will be back in the firing line before next Sunday, are singing away as though they were out for a bean feast.

They sing anything that comes into their heads. One of them started just now with "if you were the only girl in the world” and all the rest joined in. Then they sang the hymn "Abide with me", then they had "my old Kentucky home", "the long, long trail, "and "who killed Cock Robin ", and so they go on through a very mixed programme.

Some of the men in my battery have not seen woman or child for over 12 months and when two nurses machine going along a road half a mile away a few days ago the excitement was enormous, it all turned out and watch these two women till they were out of sight. It was like a glimpse of Home for most of the men. It is a queer state of things, and, as you say, we did not dream that such things could be possible in the old days at home. I expect you are sick of hearing about the war without having letters full of it, yet I have nothing else to write about, for I see and hear nothing else to write about,, so I must chance boring you. 

I have been in the army sixteen months, and I've only been home twice in all that time. Baby only knows my photo, and I doubt if I would know her if I saw her in the street. That is the hardest part – missing all the fun of seeing the children growing and developing their little ways and tricks. Just imagine having a baby, and never seeing it during the first two years of its life! You feel that you have lost something that can never be brought back. It is lost for good.

When I had leave before coming out here Baby was very friendly, but she did not know me well enough to let me nurse her if she was tired. That sort of thing hurts, although one knows it can't be helped. I feel sometimes as though I would do anything or give anything to see Ethel and the little once again, and I suppose there are thousands of men out here who feel the same.

Would you like to hear as much as I am allowed to tell you of my doings out here? I arrived in France just six months ago, and joined my battery just when it was following up the Boches during their big retreat to the Hindenburg line. We had a pretty rough time getting the gun through the snow and such, and lots of the horses died from exhaustion and were left where they lay. It was worthwhile, though, for we kept up with the infantry, and my battery was the first to get a shell into the actual Hindenburg line. Since then we have had a long summer of trench warfare, hammering the Boche and sometimes getting hammered in return. There are signs now that the reward for all this hard fighting is coming, and don't think you will have to wait long to hear that Fritz has made the biggest retreat he will have made since the war began.

Meanwhile, if the fighting is hard at life in other respects it's not so bad.

The food is wonderfully good and plentiful, and clothing for the men is served out with a very freehand. Of course, sleeping accommodation is not so easy to provide.

We gunners usually dig holes in the side of a bank, and lay sheets of galvanised iron on top of for a roof. We sleep one or two in each hole, just rolled up in a couple of blankets in the ground, and if it rains we get washed out. There have been times when I have been wet to the skin for weeks together, without the chance of getting anything dry, and the remarkable thing is that you never hardly see anyone with a cold. Talking of sleeping accommodation, I am extra well off just now, but I have got a little hut made of corrugated iron. It is the first I have had made for me since I came to France which has not been blown to bits before I could have one night in it.

I have had quite a reputation for luck since one awful week when I had a narrow escape at least once in every 24 hours. We had moved forward into a new position, and the first day I had to go up to a piece of trench which overlooked the German lines, and do duty as forward observation officer for the guns. The observation post was shelled nearly all day without being hit, but within a little while of my leaving it at night, a shell went right into it and killed the officer who had relieved me....