Transcription
8th Queens
B. E. F.
17. 10. 15.
(rec’d 21 Oct 15)
My dear Father,
Many thanks for yours of the 12th recd. 15th & for the copies of the Brigadiers message. I hear that it is being printed & I daresay copies will be sent out. My object was to preserve it. I have sent a copy to Col. Morgan at the Depot, who tells me he is putting it in the Surrey Advertiser.
Many thanks for ordering the S. Advertiser for us. I am still worried about that letter of that idiot Lintott’s & the worst is that I have got to live up to it!! I have written to the S. A. to tell them that it has nothing to do with me & I don’t see what more I can do.
I am now in the trenches with about 600 yards of the line to look after. We came in on the night of the 15/16th & I have been pretty busy since. However we appear to be settling down all right & bagged a German Sniper yesterday. It is a comparatively quiet part of the line, but there is plenty of incident. The trenches are only in fair condition and want a lot of work on them to make them really safe and comfortable.
We have got a very fine dug-out at headquarters for our mess & a separate one for a bed room with a bed in it made of a wooden frame & wire netting. It is fairly comfortable & I slept well on it last night as I had not been to bed the night before. It is a trifle chilly in the early morning as it ^ (the dug-out) has no window, but the mess has a beautiful door, an arm-chair clock window & various other chairs, looted from Ypres I believe.
The place was originally made by the French of for one of their generals & they protected the good man’s head fairly effectually as the roof is made of 3 10 inch iron girders & thousands of sand bags.
I have been wearing the trench coat & now have the boots on. they are both a great success & I am very much obliged for them.
I suggested to Jo. a little tie ago that when he was able to do so he might use the pram but he will be some time I imagine before he may use it & in any case he will have to learn to drive but this is of course subject to any
of you wanting it. I thought he might like it during the week when no one else was using it.
I would like to let you know more about our life from the military side, but I suppose I ought not in case the letter went astray. We seem to have a very normal life with meals at the usual times. Everything is done by telephone, so long as the wires are intact & my job is chiefly to stay at headquarters & direct things from there. I wander round the lines daily to see what they look like & that the improvements are getting on, but each section is run by its own company officer, who knows far better than I what he wants done & he gets a free hand.
Things are much quieter here by day than night & at the moment one could not tell from the noise whether there is a war on or not. It will wake up again after lunch & then the strafing is more or less ceaseless till breakfast the day after.
Please thank Olive & Cecily for their letters of the 13th & also Mother for hers, the date of which I am not certain of as I have not got it on me. I hope Bogey is all right again
Jack.
8th Queens
B. E. F.
17 Oct. 1915.
My dear Father,
This is only a postscript to my other letter. I take it the bond you are buying is from the Peareth Coy & not the Peruvian Gold Mine. I quite agree to your suggestion, but don’t see really that it should go in my name, as the dibs are yours. However that will be as you like & very many thanks for the suggestion.
The parcel of eatables sounds as if it will be very good. It should arrive to-night The footballs will be very useful later on, at present we have some others.
Yours
Jack
Commentary
Peirs was quiet this week. The battalion was moving up into the trenches to take over a section of the line from the Royal Scots Fusiliers and Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. They arrived up the trenches at 9PM on October 15. In their first morning in the trenches, the battalion came under bombardment at 5:50AM without any casualties or significant damage done. As Peirs indicated, they were holding a section of trench line about 600 yards long. They did so with only 440 effective men in the battalion.
This letter depicts the day-to-day duties of a battalion commanding officer as well as the living conditions for an officer in the trenches. Peirs had a dug-out as a command post and a separate underground room for sleeping. He communicated back to brigade headquarters using a phone and most of his duty seems to have been to be underground receiving messages and relaying them backwards to brigade or forwards to his company commanders as necessary. Once a day he walked through lines checking in with his officers and talking to the men under his command, but life seems to be routine and somewhat domesticated, with regular meals and furniture taken from an abandoned home in Ypres. He appears to be a pragmatic commander – not interfering with his company officers, who know far better than he does what to do with their men.
In the past two weeks, Peirs has grown into his command, and we have learned much about his character from his letters home. He is not an egotistical man – he consistently downplays his actions to his family – and he is mostly concerned with the well-being of his men. He takes his role as a commander seriously, but he is not a military man in his bearing, nor is he used to life on campaign (though he is getting used to it by the day) with its hundreds of petty discomforts. Still, he does not complain about what he is going through; quite the opposite, in fact, he tries to convey nonchalance to his family back in London, a quality that one can easily imagine him affecting to the men under his command.
