We use a lot of different souces of evidence to gain more understanding of what soldiers went through during the war one of these sources is letters. Even though letters can tell us a lot they can't tell us everything this is because they would normally have been censored by a junior officer. When an officer had died the army had to inform their relatives of his death by sending them a letter. A woman called Mrs Bennett received a letter from the army telling her about the death of her husband. In the letter it didn’t say much about her husband apart from the fact that he had been killed but by reading the letter you could work out that the officer that wrote the letter didn’t acually know Mr Bennett. He wrote that the other machine gunners had thought quite well of him, he also said that he was at the time commanding a battalion of machine gunners on the front line. A lot of people received letters informing them of the death of one of their relatives and most of the letters would have been writen by someone that doesn’t actually know the victim. Usually it would have been written by an ordinary person writing out the same letter over and over but with a different name each time and then it would have been signed by a senior officer so the letters would all be very formal. Also sometimes when a soldier would write home to his family he would usually hide his real meaning and be sort of jokey in the letter. Most of the soldiers would do this so that their families wouldn’t worry about them. One soldier who sometimes wrote to one of his friends Mr and Mrs Dean worte his in a letter, "ive been sitting outside watching the fireworks." He says fireworks so they’ll think hes okay but the real meaning behind those words is that hes been sitting watching the bombing and empty shells flying everywhere. He also said in his letter that he had been watching the fireworks for a very long time, so really the bombing had been going on for ages. So in his letter to his friends it says how nice it is with fireworks and things like that but what hes really saying is that it is terrible with all the bombing thatthat’sn going on for days. So the real problems with letters if you are using them as a source of evidence is that well they will most often have been censored but even if they havent the soldiers would cover up the truth so that they wouldn’t hurt their families. Although there is a major problem with using just letters as your source of evidence they can also be quite useful and this is because all of the letters would have been written at the time and some of the soldiers would include some things like what sort of food they would get and in what sort of place they stayed." I've held one in my hand and hit the sharp corner of a brick wall and only hurt my hand." This was written by Private Pressey, this is how he described the food that they would get most regularly.This is good to know because this sort of information could give an idea of how the soldiers felt because if their food and living conditions aren't very good they most probably wouldn’t be very happy.
Some of the soldiers would keep diaries in which they recorded the different things that happened to them in the war. In the diaries soldiers wouldn’t have to censor anything because who else but them would be reading their letters. So that is a very big advantage to using letters for evidence because the soldiers could be as clear about their own feelings as possible. They can also then write about the gunfire and about death of fellow soldiers. One soldier who was called Robert Lindsay Mackay had written this in his diary on the 15th of September 1916, "Found what remained of the Battalion in a half-dug trench just South of the Western edge of Martinpuich" In this short piece he says that not much of the battalion reamained because they had all been wounded or killed by German gunfire. Though most soldiers wrote diaries they couldn’t always write ona regular basis because they would be on the front line fighting most fo the time. So they wouldn’t include everything that happened. Also if an soldier had only just joined the fighting and it was his first battle he might exaggerate because he would think it was worse than what it really is. A soldier called Jessie Spicer often wrote home and in his diary. On one account in his diary he says how he passed through a field of dead. This sounds quite terrible and it probably was for him but he probably exaggerates a bit because it might have been his first battle and he might not know how many men actually die in most battles.
James Reese Europe is jazz musician and he wrote a lot of music about the war and about his experiences in the war. Songs are good sources of evidence because they will usually describe quite clearly in the song. James Europe had been among the first African-American soldiers to enter the war and he had been part of one of the most famous black battalions of the first world war. He has also written a lot of quite famous songs related to the war one of these being "on patrol in no mans land". A couple of lines from this song goes like this "Don't start to bombing with those hand grenades (rat- a-tat-tat-tat) There's a machine gun, holy spades! Alert, gas! Put on your mask Adjust it correctly and hurry up fast" this might not give a very clear view of what happened in the war but it does describe the different sorts of weapons used like machine guns and poisoned gas.
Using memoirs as a source of evidence can be sort of useful but they wont tell us everything. War veterans that have written their memoirs might decide to leave some things out that they don’t want their relatives to find out about because it would be too painful.Also all the officers were off different ranks and they fought in different battles so they wouldn’t all have the same experiences.The officers that were higher rankings wouldn’t have much experience because they wouldn’t need to fight in the battles because they were too important and the army couldn’t risk them being hurt. Or if they were only in one battle they might exaggerate because it would be their only experience of war, so they would only include really amazing things that have happened and they would exaggerate battles so that they would sound worse than what they really were. One man wrote in his memoirs, "although the momentous events of World War Two and the passage of time gradually dimmed people's memories, there were many who still remembered the events of those awful years. " Here the writer says that after having experienced both wars he thinks that world war 1 was worse. He says that after many years people start to forget a little bit about the terrible things that happened in the second world war but no one would ever be able to forget the first. Now this seems to be a little exaggerated because firstly the death rate in the second war was larger than the first also most of the people that were alive during the first world war are by now most probably dead. Though peoples memoirs are usually quite good ebcause there is a larger range of examples and the soldiers would by now probably have a different perspective on the war than what they had whilst they were fighting.
To find out about the soldiers feelings you can also use poems. A lot of the soldiers wrote poems because it’s a very good way of expressing your feelings about something. There was a lot of different sort of poems written by different soldiers some would write about their experiences and about what happened to them personally, others would write about what happened to the people around them. One of the soldiers Wilfred Owen wrote a poem about the gas chambers. He called the poem Dulce et Decorum est, in the poem he writes that they were "coughing like hags" in other words they were beginning to choke from all the gas. Wilfred Owen had a lot of very powerful sentences that really made you think about the war and about all the deaths of millions of men. He didn’t just write that the men were dying though he also wort that they became death by shell shock because of all the shells exploding near their ears, "deaf even to the hoots of gas-shells dropping softly behind". A big advantage of poems is that the writer is usually very accurate and will use a lot of emotion in the poem and also a lot about death. An example of this is a poem written by John McCrae his poem was called "In Flanders Fields". His poem is mainly about how theres so many deaths and how he is against the war. Although he is writing about how he is against the war he also says that he wants others to join the war so that all the deaths of the soldiers will not have been in vain. John McCrae was a war surgeon. Some poems were also written to persuade other people to either join the war or not to join. One of these sorts of poems is Suicide in the Trenches. This poem was written by Siegfried Sasoon, he is writing about just a normal soldier in the army which then ends up shooting himself. He just couldn’t cope with the war and all the fighting, he no longer had any reason to live because he didn’t think it was worth it, "who grinned at life in empty joy".
I think that it is difficult to know what soldiers felt because even though we have very many different written account about what they thought during the war we don’t know whether this was their real feelings or whether it wasn’t all true. In things like diaries you would expect it to be more trutworthy than in something like letters, this is because in letters some things have been either self-censored or just censored. Diaries wouldn’t have been censored though so they are more likely to have the writers real feelings expressed quite clearly.Although the diaries might still not have a very good view of what happened because even though it would only be you that read youre diary you wouldn’t want it to have any boring things in it. So you would leave out all the boring bits off a battle like all the waiting you had to do before the fighting and you would only include the part where you were being shelled. In memoirs they would also have been able to express there real feelings but there is still some problems with them because they might not write down exactly how bad things are because they wouldn’t have wanted there families to find out how bad it had been for them in the war. Also not all soldiers had the same experiences in the war they were all on different parts of the front line. So they were all in different battles and some of those battles were worse than others. I think that if we were to piece all of the different sorts of evidence together we would get a more accurate view of how soldiers felt on the western front. I think this because if we were to use a poem about a particular battle and then use another persons diary entry about that same battle and so on we would get an overview of what their main feeling was during the war. Although the main reason its so hard to know what soldiers felt during the first world war on the western front is because most of the soldiers on the western front were killed, this was written by man called Frank E Schoonover "all gave some, some gave all" that is saying what a big loss some people did have because everyone lost something during the war but some lost everything. One of the big reasons why we can’t know what soldiers felt and thought during the war is because their feelings change. At first they were generally excited "everyone was excited, smiling waving flags." This was said by a war veteran when he was describing the start of the war on a film about the killing fields. Although at first they were excited but by almost the end of the first few days their attitudes had changed, a soldier called Walter Hare had called the generals "stupid because they had accomplished nothing" so he isn't very happy and it's all because the generals wanted the British to walk across the battlefields and not run so most of them were shot down immediately. Also some of the soldiers that weren't killed might not want to talk about the war or they might not be able to takl about it because they might have got something like shell shock, so they can't talk about it because all they would be able to remember would be the shells going off. So I don’t think it is that we have a lack of evidence its just that we need to learn how to use that evidence and also some of the pieces of evidence we cant use because the people that wrote them cant explain right now what it is they were writing because they don’t want to or because they themselves never really understood what the war was really about. I think that if people had known what sort of war this was going to be they would have made sure that their diaries were extremely exciting or that their letters were very descriptive, but they had no way of knowing so they just wrote what they wanted to include in their diaries because they didn't know that they would be writing them for us.
