Letters written from the English front

[Skipman]

Letters written from the English front in France between September 1914 and March 1915

By Captain Sir Edward Hamilton Westrow Hulse 2nd Bn Scots Guards

28/12/1914

My Dearest Mother,

Just returned to billets again, after the most extraordinary

Christmas in the trenches you could possibly imagine. Words fail me

completely, in trying to describe it, but here goes !

On the 23rd we took over the trenches in the ordinary manner,

relieving the Grenadiers, and during the 24th the usual firing took place,

and sniping was pretty brisk. We stood to arms as usual at 6.30 a.m.

on the 25th, and I noticed that there was not much shooting ; this

gradually died down, and by 8 a.m. there was no shooting at all, except

for a few shots on our left (Border Regt.). At 8.30 a.m. I was looking

out, and saw four Germans leave their trenches and come towards us ;

I told two of my men to go and meet them, unarmed (as the Germans

were unarmed), and to see that they did not pass the halfway line. We

were 350-400 yards apart at this point. My fellows were not very

keen, not knowing what was up, so I went out alone, and met Barry,

one of our ensigns, also coming out from another part of the line. By

the time we got to them, they were f of the way over, and much

too near our barbed wire, so I moved them back. They were three

private soldiers and a stretcher-bearer, and their spokesman started off

by saying that he thought it only right to come over and wish us a

happy Christmas, and trusted us implicitly to keep the truce. He came

from Suffolk, where he had left his best girl and a 3! h.p. motor-bike!

He told me that he could not get a letter to the girl, and wanted to send

one through me. I made him write out a postcard in front of me,

in English, and I sent it off that night. I told him that she probably

would not be a bit keen to see him again. We then entered on a long

discussion on every sort of thing. I was dressed in an old stocking-cap

and a man's overcoat, and they took me for a corporal, a thing which

I did not discourage, as I had an eye to going as near their lines as

possible ! They praised our aeroplanes up to the skies, and said that

they hated them and could not get away from them. They would not

say much about our artillery, but I gathered that it does good damage,

and they don't care for it. The little fellow I was talking to, was

an undersized, pasty-faced student type, talked four languages well, and

had a business in England, so I mistrusted him at once. I asked them

what orders they had from their officers as to coming over to us, and

they said none ; that they had just come over out of goodwill.

They protested that they had no feeling of enmity at all towards us,

but that everything lay with their authorities, and that being soldiers

they had to obey. I believe that they were speaking the truth when they

said this, and that they never wished to fire a shot again. They said

that unless directly ordered, they were not going to shoot again until

we did. They were mostly 158th Regiment and Jaegers, and were the

ones we attacked on the night of the 18th. Hence the feeling of

temporary friendship, I suppose. We talked about the ghastly wounds

made by rifle bullets, and we both agreed that neither of us used

dum-dum bullets, and that the wounds are solely inflicted by the

high-velocity bullet with the sharp nose, at short range. We both

agreed that it would be far better if we used the old South African

round-nosed bullet, which makes a clean hole.

They howled with laughter at a D.T. of the 10th which they had seen

the day before, and told me that we are being absolutely misguided by

our papers, that France is done, Russia has received a series of very big

blows, and will climb down shortly, and that the only thing which is

keeping the war going at all is England ! They firmly believe all this,

I am sure. They think that our press is to blame in working up feeling

against them by publishing false "

atrocity reports." I told them of

various sweet little cases which I have seen for myself, and they told me

of English prisoners whom they have seen with soft-nosed bullets, and

lead bullets with notches cut in the nose ; we had a heated, and at the

same time, good-natured argument, and ended by hinting to each other

that the other was lying !

Mike