Novelist commissioned into the Rifle Brigade,3rd Battalion wounded on the Somme,, returned to France with the 12th Battalion and Killed at Arras.

Letters to his wife, published by his wife in August 1917

Interesting comparison between the regular and service battalions.

http://oldpoetry.com/authors/Robert%20Ernest%20Vernede

Here is a photo and a little bit more about him.
Marina

Here's a find - it's an article about soldiers' letters home and includes extracts from Vernede's correspondence, also Raymond Asquith and other names. The Asquith extract is a classic!

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...514192#continue
Marina

Hi Marina,
Many thanks for the links.

Andy

Thank you - it was your post got me searching! Aren't those extracts good?
Marina

Not arf!
In all seriousness ... the idea of the young lad keeping to his letter writing formula grabbed me even more than Asquith's stuff. And it was good.
Cheers
Des

Marina,
Great extracts, Must admit that since I have got hold of this book I have found it very difficult to put down,

Andy

What are the publishing details, Andy? I wouldn't mind reading this one myself.
Marina

Hi Marina,
I think that you might have difficulty finding it as I believe it is quite rare. It was published in 1917 for his wife by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.
I managed to obtain this and several other books from the library of an ex Rifle Brigade Officer and author who has recently passed away unfortunately.

Andy

Marina,
I will post some of them here, so will post his 14th May letter tomorrow.

Andy

Oh, excellent!
Marina

14th May 1916
The Country here has changed extraordinarily in the last month - all the leaves out and the trees flourishing again. The day before yesterday I rode into the big town near here thro a village about the size of Puckeridge that is mostly ruined by shells. It was strange to see babies rolling about among the fallen bricks and mortar, and old women sitting out in the sun beside the remains of their cottages. How these old people must hate the Germans, whom they have seen twice bringing desolation upon them. This morning I started at 9.30am with two others to inspect a place the Batt. might have to go in an emergency. We went by muddy lanes and tracks (it rained nearly twenty four hours yesterday) and emerged on the place, which is a field full of Orchids and froget-me-nots in deep wet grass - rather pleasant and peaceful - though it wouldn't be if we had to go there as a Batt., for the Boches would probably do some shelling. Then we came back by the main road through rather a pretty little country town that had also been terribly shelled. There was a bog girl's school at one end of it - half in ruins. I don't know when that happened - whether it was at the start of the war or not, and whether the demoiseles had to free hurriedly along the roads as did so many other folk round here.
All the small shops in this sort of place have been turned into small grocery shops for the Tommies - and you see announcements like "Coffee and Chipps," or "Egs-Milk-Buter-Chipps." Chipps are, I suppose, potatoes, and always seem to be purchasable. You see Tommies sitting with their legs dangling out of top floor windows as once was - and guns nosing out of barns, and an armoured car, perhaps, half sunk in a flower bed, waiting for the push.
Fine weather makes the country far pleasanter - its stiffly laid out in avenues of trees like the maps they use at Hythe, and it certainly makes war seem more fantastic and unreal.
Got back, had lunch, and then a hot shower bath. The shower bath consists of a place quite as small as the billygoats house, in which there is just room for two people to stand together, and you generally have to wait half an hour to get in.
The old soldiers whose time is up are rather annoyed at being compelled to serve on - not unaturally, perhaps, but it is obviuos that they cannot be spared, being each worth several recruits.
I can't write interesting letters. The sort of enforced slackness plus the idea that you must not say anything the censor might object to, rather dulls me.

Thanks, Andy. Funny how he says he can't write 'interesting letters'! I thought his description of the village was very vivid indeed with the Tommies dangling their legs out of windows! And the bath house.
Ah, me - orchids and shelled houses - what a contrast.
If you have the time, maybe another little extract or two!

Marina

Marina,
Letter to his mother on 14/5/16
This is my wedding day. I went for a longish walk through muddy lanes and shelled villages. The weather has turned wet again, otherwise the country would look rather pretty - all the trees in leaf, and orchids and Kingcups and forget me nots blooming in the meadows. In fact, it is looking pretty - in a formal way and where it isn't ruined. Some of the hedges, for instance, have autumn tints instead of spring ones, caused by the gas passing through them.
Yesterday I went for a ride to the largest town in the neighbourhood - again through shelled villages where babies still sprawl among the ruins. The Company gee has taken to stumbling lately, bother him, otherwise he is a fine powerful beast and jumps well. Of course on pave especially stumbling is a great nuisance.
Are you keeping fit? My sister will want to collect a Red Cross fund for herself if she does much more severe work.

Andy

I'm always fascinated by the way so many of them liked to look at the flowers - always described in detail, as if they were hungry for something fresh and new after the squalor of the front line. My favourite one ever was a description of the Somme the summer after the war ended. An officer was back there and was stunned to find new growth beginning aready and he couldn't take his eyes of a great cloud of butterflies that hovered over the field. I always find that very touching.

I was interested in the changes in the colour of the foliage due to gas - I've never seen that described before. It does give an idea of the volume used if it caused that effect.
His wedding anniversary too - so sad.
Thanks, Andy,
Marina

16th May 1916
Just going up - A beautiful Day

17th May 1916
Its a perfect day and I'm seated outside my dug-out in shorts made from breeches cut down, shirt and gum boots, not to mention tin hat and tie. My servant is really very good - quiet but most useful and attentive. He has just baled out about ten buckets of ater out of my dug-out (below the floor) and he does this about twice a day. Just as he finished, two Riflemen came up and were disappointed to find none left as they wanted to make tea with it!. Apparently the bottom of my dug-out is also a drinking water reservoir.
This is quite a good dry trench. I was up from the time of arrival till 4am this morning but have the rest of the day to sleep in. Have already seen this morning the Brigadier, I.D., a new padre attached to the Battalion, who is the brother of A.B., and several other people who have been up through the trenches. Very quiet, I'm glad to say - only aeroplanes being strafed overhead. T. said he went to the trench exibition in London when he was home on leave, and found he had never seen anything like it before. Some old soldiers apparently show people around, and while he - T. in mufti - was explaining the workings of a Lewis gun to a friend, an old gentleman said crushingly, "If you'll kindly allow this soldier (pointing to an attendant0 to explain the gun, we shall all benefit from it.


Andy

[quote=stiletto_33853,May 16 2005, 10:12 PM]
17th May 1916
'Its a perfect day and I'm seated outside my dug-out in shorts made from breeches cut down, shirt and gum boots, not to mention tin hat and tie.'

What a picture! The tin hat is the finishing touch!

'Apparently the bottom of my dug-out is also a drinking water reservoir.'

Grief - I was just reading to day about the cholera outbreak at Gallipoli and that this was caused by water contaminated by corpses

'T. said he went to the trench exibition in London when he was home on leave, and found he had never seen anything like it before. '

Well, quite...

This is really enjoyable, Andy
Marina

Marina,
The pictue of him sitting outside his dug-out in such attire did make me chortle just a bit.

Andy

Only just a bit? I was in KNOTS, bless him!
marina

I think this is May 20th. It's still beautiful weather, and if the boches would cease whizz-banging it would not be unpleasant sitting in the trenches. At the moment I've retired to my dug-out, which, I think, is whizz-bang proof, and two martens are trying to flutter in at the door. I don't know if they've inspected it in my absence and decided they would like to build there. The frogs - green ones - are yulling from a rather stagnant pond just behind, and birds are cheeping around.
Cpl A. has just gone by carrying some timber for a gas proof dug-out he and I are constructing by the aid of our united brains. This is a few minutes later, and the boches have left off whizz-banging. Since lunch time I have been listening to I., chatting about "Intelligence", in the Company dug-out, and falling asleep at intervals. When he got up to go off, I pulled myself together and came over here to write. Not that I have very much to tell you. Oh dear, I've got to shoot off to censor the men's letters. You needn't picture strafes at present.


Andy

He 'll have to get together with the Corporal and build a strafe proof dugout.
I wonder if the gas proof and whizz bang proof ideas are just ironic jokes, or a way of passing the time. Hard to believe that the frogs and martens would continue to haunt the land where the battles were, isn't it?
Thanks, Andy,
Marina

Hi Marina,
Its interesting that in quite a few of the memorial books and letters home that I have from cetrtain officers that most make reference to the wildlife in and around the trenches.

Andy

Yes, it is - as if their eyes were hungry for somehting fresh and natural - flowers and animals. I always find it very touching.
marina

Andy,
i have just been reading this and have enjoyed his remarks, i can picture the scene, the lads sitting on the window sill with legs dangling and hearing their mothers shouting for them to get down before they fall down!.
thanks for letters.
Mandy

Hi Mandy,
Glad that you are enjoying his letters, I will post them as the dates on the letters.

Andy

Monday, May 22nd
I am still rather sleepy from a seventeen hour day, started by being on duty from 2.30am - 7.30am. In the course of it we got a few whizz-bangs over - only a very few slight hits - and in the evening the unfortunate M. tried to blow himself and two other men up with a rifle grenade - none of them serious, however, luckily. It was a case in which I might almost be accused of the evil eye, for at the moment I was standing with Sergeant B. about 50 yards away, saying, "I dislike rifle grenades. I always expect them to blow up everybody round and I never expect them to blow up the boches." Which happened the next instant. But, as I say, it was a lucky business on the whole.
Having started at 2.30 on Sunday morning I came off at 3.30am this morning and slept till 12, when some bumping on the next line woke me. Still beautifully warm, and I go about with bare legs and shorts, which isn't bad in May, is it?. On the whole, this is a very nice trench and simply doesn't bear comparison with Hooge, so far as I've seen it. I am very fit - and the eyes fairly good.
Here in the early morning one sees jays and Pheasants and lots of smaller birds, and green frogs, and heaps of rats, and a semi wild cat occasionally. I imagine wild life is on the increase, because the No Mans Land is becoming rather jungly, and except for the shells, of course, very peaceful. Si is the country immediately behind the trenches.
One of my platoon, who was always writing home to say he was in the thick of it (when he wasn't), has been hit slightly and will be enormously happy, I think, to go home with tales of the peril.


Andy

LOL - I liked the story of the man delighted to have evidence of 'being in the thick'! Robert is so DRY sometimes, isn't he?
I can hardly belive that the wild life is increasing out there - somehow I always imagined a moon landscape with nothing alive at all. You live and learn!
Marina

Marina,
I have to agree he can be very dry but do love his descriptions.

Andy

Defintely - they are excellent. But I love that dryness too - it's classic stuff! That description of the wannabe hero was BRILLIANT.
Marina

Here we have another officers letter, its very interesting that they both devote time for the flowers and wildlife.

Rifle Brigade, B.E.F. May 13th 1916.
Dear D.,
We are back in billets after a week or so in the trenches. We had lovely weather and no trouble, and put a lot of good work getting the trenches into order and fairly inhabitable after the winter. It gets light now at 3 o'clock in the morning, so that we have to be up before, and we see some beautiful sunrises. I get some sleep between 11 or 12 at night and 2.30am, and again from 4 to 8.30, when I have breakfast. The most coveted sleep is between 4 and 8.30 in the morning.
The village we are billeted in is very pretty, with fruit tree's in blossom and some flowers in the gardens. The old lady who keeps the farm we are in supplies us with milk and butter and eggs, occasionally leeks, and tomorrow (Sunday) with four pigeons.
The men are very strong and well after their long rest back at the Army school.
I got your parcel containing Martin Chuzzlewit and sweets. The toffee was particularly good and much sught after.......... I am glad to see that the news in England is a bit better: it was rather depressing for a bit.

Love to all from
Geoff.

And Martin Chuzzlewit too! I've heard before about the demands for books and reading material from men at the front.
A bit ironic to be saying the news from England was less depressing considering where he is... wonder if he was just keeping up a front for the people at home?
Marina

I find it very moving to read these letters. In the case of the letter above from Geoffrey Watkins Smith, he had less than two months left of his short life before being killed on July 10th 1916.

Andy

How old was he? Do you know anything about what happened to him?
Have you read Plamer and Waton's A War In Words? It's a compilation of letters and diaries from the Great War - some of them very moving indeed. There is even one where a soldier wrote his last entry and was killed - someone else wrote what happened at the bottom of the page. If you haven't seen it, I think you might well like it.
Marina

Marina,
He was 35 years old when he died and an eminent Zoologist having been published many times in scientific publications including a small book of verse. He was killed at about 9.30pm on July 10th 1916 by a shell which killed two other Company Commanders in a German Trench which they had just taken.
I have read "A War in Words" but these memorial books that I have recently got to the life of just the one man reprinting all his letters home just seem to make it so personal.

Andy

Vernede's next letter

May 23rd
Another scrab, but I have such long nights somehow - only three hours sleep last night - that one dozes off most of the day and is not, as you know, particularly brilliant!. S. of the Buffs- whom I met at the technical school, came up last night and spent last night with us. I had coffee with an artillery officer at 7.30am, breakfast with S., lunch with D. - all visitors to the trenches. Its a heavy, still day - very quiet, a thunderstorm due, I think.
T. has gone off (temporarily) to the Divisional Staff, but I'm afraid they'll keep him when they find out that he is good.
We shall be out by the time you get this for several days - almost double the usual.


Andy

Yes, it's good to follow the man right through, as with the John Pitt thread - you do feel as if you 'know' them in the end. Which is fine if they survive - you feel like cherring. terrible when thye gte killed, as with Robert. Ah, well...
Marina

Came across one of Vernede's poems in the war anthology Up The Line To Death:


A Listening Post

The sun's a red ball in the oak
And all the grass is grey with dew,
A while ago a blackbird spoke -
He didn't know the world's askew.

And yonder rifleman and I
Wait here behind the misty trees
To shoot the first man that goes by,
Our rifles ready at our knees.

How could we know that if we fail
The world may be in chains for years
And England be a bygone tale
And right be wrong and laughter tears?

Strange that this bird sits and sings
While we must only sit and plan -
Who are so much the higher things -
The murder of our fellow man...

But maybe God will cease to be -
Who brought forth sweetness from the strong -
Out of our discords harmony
Sweeter than that bird's song.

R.E. Vernede

Marina,
Great stuff, I will see if I can get his picture downloaded.

Andy

That would be great!
Marina

May 26th
Just a line from camp. Very damp march. Breakfasted at 11 today and post goes at 12. Nice weather again after very sloshy night.


Andy

Touching that he had no real news and so very little time, and yet sent his wife a letter anyway. Theirs seems to have been a very strong marriage, doesn't it?
Marina

Marina,
I get the impression from reading through the whole book that they had a very very strong marriage indeed. They were married in 1902.

Andy

May 28th
As I have had a whole night in bed, being the first for about ten days, I ought to be able to write more than a mere scrab. The weather is very pleasant and the Noneysckle is coming out in the wood, and yesterday I picked a bunch of yellow Irises, buttercups, and a lot of the new young red foliage of oak and sycamore. The only drawback to being out of the trenches is the quantity of working parties, which are a bore, but roll on as the riflemen say.
A.B. has been appointed to the O.C ship of C Coy in Tathams absence.
A youth in my platoon who was in the ............ wrote in a letter I had to censor that he wished he was back in the .......... as the Batt. was a wash out, all wrong. I had to send for him and ask if he thought it a polite thing to say of his Batt., and discovered, of course, that he resents the stricter disciplie. I tried to explain that it wasn't done for fun entirely, but to beat the enemy, but i'm not sure if I convinced him. Discipline is an infernal bore. There is no doubt that some of the new Batts are not particular enough about really vital matters, and the men don't of themselves seem able to distinguish what you must be strict about and what you mustn't. If only one could reduce discipline to its absolutely necessary elements and insist on those only, we should be nearer the ideal.
D. goes off on a gun course today which will leave us short again, with the corresponding extra work. I don't know why they can't keep an extra subaltern or two when there are such hundreds about.


There is a footnote stating that the A.B is Captain Andrew Buxton, The Rifle Brigade, Killed in action, June 1917.

Andy

The differing attitudes to discipline in various battalions is interesting. I had thought discipline would have been much the same everywhere. he says 'newer battialions' - does he mean newer. or is this a comment on the differnce between regular and conscipt or voulunteer soldiers, I wonder?
Marina

It is through these well written letters that you pick up on the thoughts and feelings of the men in the war, it expands the official papers and gives a better picture of the day to day lives while at war.
Thanks for sharing these with us.
Cheers
Kim

Marina,
Re the last letter and the parts on the discipline, Vernedes First served in the 3rd (Regular) Battalion until he was wounded on the Somme. Upon recovery he was then sent to the 12th Battalion. His comparisons between regular and service battalions make interesting reading indeed and quite a few are not very complimentary towards service battalions.
There are a few other books which make interesting reading re this subject one being "The Anger of the Guns" by John Nettleton. Another that springs to mind is Villiers Stuart goes to War which is covers another aspect of this. Some of his comments about regular battalions are also very interesting to read.

Andy

Tuesday, 29th or 30th May.
Rather stupid of them to send............. to the ........, but it is the sort of thing that happens. If anyone gets hit they are quite likely to be sent out again to some different Batt., which I think is a great mistake.
I didn't have a working party last night and had another good sleep instead, but there seems a fair amount doing this morning, which does not leave me very much time to write before the post gos at 2 o'clock.
Mr Faviel - a copy thereof - is being passed round the Batt. with an inscription (by the D youth, I fancy): to all officers - for information and necessary action, which is one of the Orderly Room phrases attached to reports.
I feel as if I wrote you the dullest letters and can't help it, and Frdk's statement that my letters are the most interesting reading he has at present is an unblemished lie, unless indeed he reads nothing else, which is quite likely.

There he is, being dry again!
Marina

I'll look out for those. I wonder if changing personnel around as mentioned in his letter had anything to do with poorer discipline too. I've often read about soldiers being shifted about - must have been difficult to readjust to the ethos of a differnt unit, or even just to unfamilair faces. I think it was in McCrae's Battalion that I read an account of a soldier who after being wounded and then returned to the front, 'deserted' his new unit and presented himself at his old one. he just wanted to be with the officers and men he knew.
Marina