Transcription

8th Queen’s. B.E.F. 13.10.1915. 

 My dear mother, Many thanks for your letter of the 11th received this morning. I was afraid you would get hold of that blessed Advertiser before you got my letter, & as I told you the whole thing was flummery. If I get hold of Private Lintott I’ll wring his miserable neck. Another quiet day with interludes of interest watching the aeroplanes getting it. I had a bath in a beer-tub, & very pleasant it was, & then I went to a lecture on trench mortars, only the mortar-man failed to turn up, & the whole gilded staff including the Divisional G.OC. went home as ignorant on the sub ect as when they arrivedp We had a draft of 7 Subalterns last night, only none of these who trained with us at Blackdown, which is rather a pity as we left 8 of them behind who are clamouring to come out, P they have sent us 3 who were trained with the 8th Battalion, & 4 who belong to the West Kents. Four more arrive tonight, & I hope some of our own are among them. I had a mysterious arcel last night from the Junior Army & Navy containing 6 footballs & bladders but looking from the outside like my trench boots. I wonder if they have made a mistake, & sent the wrong thing. In any case I can’t send the footballs back, as they won’t take them, & I don’t want them as we have got a number, so I don’t know what to do. My trench-coat is a great success & beautifully warm even without the lining which I have taken out for the present. Don’t worry about Snipers. NO one is more anxious to avoid them than me, & they can’t do much where we are going. Yours, Jack. 

Note: The handwritten 13 October 1915 letter sent to Peirs’s mother is not part of the collection, only this typed transcription remains. For the handwritten letter sent to Peirs’s father, see the letter from 17 October 1915,

Commentary

Peirs continues to discuss with his mother some of the details of his day to day life. This letter is typed – transcribed at some point post war – and he describes vividly some interesting images. Having bath in a beer vat, lectures on trench mortars, and new officers arriving to replace those who were wounded two weeks before. Trench mortars were becoming more and more important, in particular, as they were discovered to be a bit more effective at cutting German wire than the standard 18 pound field howitzer. And, Peirs is still relishing in his new coat, which he calls ‘a great success.’