}
Letters Home
‘If you hear of a nice little terrier… buy him… and I’ll get one of the men to bring him back’
Letter from 2nd Lieutenant Guthrie Watson-Williams, the Royal Field Artillery, to his mother, 1916
Despite the war, letters and postcards were sent between soldiers and their families. Whether in training or at the front, there were long periods of inaction when servicemen could write letters, read or kill the lice in their clothes.
Stanley Booker joined the 12th Battalion, the Gloucestershire regiment and later transferred to the 7th Battalion, the Worcestershire Regiment. In training and in battle, he wrote regularly to his mother and friends. Within four weeks of landing in France he was writing of soldiers killed in trench warfare: ‘it is all in a good cause and one cannot help being proud of friends who have laid down their lives.’
There were many other letters sent during the war. Official letters told parents or wives that a serviceman was wounded or killed. Officers and nurses wrote letters of sympathy. Fellow servicemen sent letters of sympathy and money to the now-widows of their brothers-in-arms.