Diary of an Unimportant Officer

[4thGordons]

HERE is the link to the above mentioned. I ran across it on my daily read was just about to post it when I discovered this thread.

Chris

[keggy65]

I didn't hear/see the interview so can't comment. I do know that the Telegraph web page did publish the download details including price. However, I feel that the choice here is mine, to either pay to download or not. I feel more irritated by having to pay a small fortune for so-called 'public' records (NS/Ancestry etc) and think this is much more of a rip-off.

Mabel

[Guest mruk]

It's nice to know you are as unbiased in your reading as you are impartial, John. It would be nice if you stepped out of your own backyard once in a while and told us what you really think. 'The Guardian' it is, then, but I won't be downloading for that price, despite what I believe to be a useful document.

Dave

[PBI]

Seems this "New Discovery" has been very well "Hyped" in most of the Newspapers Today and on the Telly.I certainly wont be paying £9.99 for a Download,No Matter how "Valuable",Personally i would much rather buy it in its Book Form if and when it EVER goes into Print...

[Simon Jones]

Why is everyone so angry? Is it the weather?

[John_Hartley]

It's nice to know you are as unbiased in your reading as you are impartial, John.

Cor blimey, Dave.

I can't recall anyone using those words about me before, even in jest. It stretches the imagination a bit far.

John

[Jim Clay]

Why is everyone so angry? Is it the weather?

I think you may be right, Simon. It's been gloomy these past few days here, with only isolated bursts of sunshine. And these dark evenings... There's bile and bitterness spilling out all over. Roll on Summer, I say.

Jim

(Incidentally, I think the Today team may have been more than a little remiss in not telling us this was a 'commercial' download. Or they may have been blindsided. But the Beeb, for these many years, have not shied away from interviewing authors of new publications 'for publicity purposes' Grist to the talk show mill...)

(Also, and incidentally too, attacking/lampooning/ridiculing the 'provider' of the download for his accent or accident of birth or fortune? Well, if it amuses you...)

[barrieduncan]

Can he copyright this material?

If not, do a download and print lots of copies and flog them at the cost of paper and ink.

Mind you, the title puts me off: I am only interested in important officers!

I'm not sure if he can copyright this material - but I'm pretty sure the IWM copyright theirs - nice use of one of their images from Arras on the 'front cover' of this 'unseen' diary.

[PhilB]

I know nothing about copyright. Is this chap in a different position to Churchill`s grandson who got £10m of lottery money for his grandad`s writings?

[centurion]

QUOTE (Phil_B @ Nov 9 2007, 11:45 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I know nothing about copyright. Is this chap in a different position to Churchill`s grandson who got £10m of lottery money for his grandad`s writings?

Yes in that the money was paid for the physical documents, some of the contents of which had already been published.

[George Armstrong Custer]

To digress for a moment from the debate on charging for downloads of the diaries, an interesting piece in today's 'Times' concentrates on the sardonic humour of war which the diary imparts to the reader:

From The Times

November 9, 2007

Always look on the bright side of strife

By Ben Macintyre

As a teenage soldier in the trenches at Saint Éloi in 1915, my great-uncle Tim was shot through the chest by a sniper. The bullet passed straight through his body and killed the man standing behind him. He recovered in time to rejoin his unit in 1918 and take part in an attack on the German lines near Cambrai, during which he was shot through the right thigh, left leg and across the ribs.

“Since I wasn't dead, the only thing to do was crawl back up the hill,” he wrote. At the end of the war, Tim had a body full of holes and a Military Cross, but as he remarked ruefully: “I never actually saw a live German soldier.”

I was reminded of that sardonic wartime sense of humour this week by the publication of the diary of Captain Alexander Stewart, who recorded his life in the trenches with the same combination of grim wit and astonishing bravery. When shooting at “some blighter” about to fling a stick bomb at him, he finds the smoke from his pipe getting in his eyes and obscuring his aim. “Much to my annoyance, I had to put my pipe in my pocket alight... it was lucky it did not burn my jacket.” Captain Stewart jokes about the rats that lick the brilliantine off his hair, the idiotic commands from generals who should be “taken up to the line and frozen in the mud” and being injured in the throat by a piece of shrapnel, which he coughs out and then picks up as a souvenir.

We are all familiar with the First World War of blood and mud, of lions led by donkeys, the futility, the boredom and the slaughter. Less well remembered, however, is the pitch-black humour of the trenches, the jokes and wry amusement of men laughing in the face of death. The war was never remotely fun, but it was occasionally funny, or made to be so.

Every year we remember the pity of war, but very seldom the peculiar wit of that dreadful war, which was one of its most extraordinary legacies.

Jokes were a vital defence, a way for soldiers to deal with the vile ludicrousness of the man-made hell they were in. As Wilfred Owen wrote: “Merry it was to laugh there/ Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.” The First World War left an entire generation scarred, physically and psychology, but it also bequeathed a shared sense of the grotesque, a collective desire to shrug off horror with a joke, to make light of death.

This aspect of the national character re-emerged strongly in the Second World War, when humorous propaganda was dropped over France, Lord Haw-Haw was belittled by mockery, the Ministry of War employed an official cartoonist and almost every wartime movie had a role for the chirpy cockney jokester, bantering away as the bombs and bullets fly.

British martial humour remains an odd but enduring weapon of war. In 1982, after HMS Sheffield was struck by an Exocet missile, her crew sang Always Look on the Bright Side of Life from Monty Python's Life of Brian as the vessel sank. Even today, bogged down in Helmand or Iraq, the British squaddie struggles to raise a laugh whenever a cameraman or reporter approaches: in some unstated way it is part of the uniform.

Officers in the Great War often expressed astonishment at the unshakeable, cynical and usually ribald sense of humour in the ranks. Sidney Rogerson, a survivor of the Somme, described how the average soldier, “when by every law of nature he should have been utterly weary and fed up, invariably managed to be almost truculently cheerful”. Little of First World War humour has stood the test of time (humour seldom does). Jokes about trench foot, army rations and blimpish long-forgotten majors no longer amuse; the drawings of Bruce Bairnsfather, foremost of the Great War cartoonists and a vital source of humour for men in the trenches, are now more likely to make us cry than laugh.

The Wipers Times, printed on a press salvaged at Ypres, was the Private Eye of the Western Front, offering lampoons, satire, jokes, reflections and poems: “There was a young girl from the Somme/ Who sat on a Number Five bomb...” Its authors, ordinary soldiers, mocked the senior officers, the self-inflating war correspondents and themselves. They even parodied the letters page of The Times: “Dear Sir,” wrote a reader, not long after the barrage of the Somme began with a noise so loud it could be heard in Sussex. “As I was going over the top last week I distinctly heard the call of the cuckoo. I claim to be the first to have heard it this spring and should like to know if any of your readers can assert they have heard it before me?”

As military psychologists know, humour is far more effective at binding men together than coercion or fear; laughter reduces tension in combat, offering a small affirmation of life amid the fear and bloodshed. Irony and jokes, the darker and ruder the better, offered Great War soldiers a way to reclaim individuality, when life and death was in someone else's hands. “Each joke is a small revolution,” wrote Orwell. Nowhere is this truer than on the battlefield.

In an instinctive way soldiers facing muddy death reached for humour as a lifeline, almost literally, and sometimes heartbreakingly. Corporal E.C.East, of the 2nd London Regiment, was injured in the face by shell splinters during the attack on Aubigny au Bac. Looking for an orderly to dress the wound, he came across a young soldier of his platoon, mortally wounded. As East leaned over to give him a drink, the wounded man looked up at East's blood-streaked face and remarked: “Crikey, your barber was ruddy clumsy this morning.” A few moments later, he was dead.

[DMcNay]

"unseen" my foot.

[wainfleet]

I'm staying out of this...

[DaveBrigg]

I really enjoyed the free extracts. I wouldn't pay for a download, just for the practical difficulties involved with reading and storing it. The website did mention that a printed version would be available for £14, but I couldn't find anywhere online that had it for sale, so maybe this will come later.

The interview did omit to mention that the download would be charged, but certainly didn't say it would be free, so maybe it's just our expectation of getting something for nothing online. When Jonathan Ross starts a celebrity interview with 'I see you've got a new book out...' there is rarely any mention that it will need to be paid for either.

As a diarist, IMHO Stewart compares favourably with most of the others I've read.

[chaz]

scanned through the report in the Western Daily Press this week, they mentioned being able to download from the web site but I cant remember seeing anything about having to pay for the rest, I assumed it would be complete and free!!

seems like they are doing the same thing everywhere.

[SiegeGunner]

Shouldn't we be marvelling at the incredible amount of information that is freely available on-line, rather than moaning about individual works that are not ...? Plugging printed books on TV (even the BBC) is commonplace, and no-one expects them to be free. Those who expected this book to be free and are disappointed that it isn't should spare a thought for pals who spent upwards of £100 of their hard-earned money on the 'Great War' series, only to see it almost given away by a daily newspaper.

Personally, I'm not going to grieve too much about not being able to read 'The Diary of an Unimportant Officer' for free when I can read the diary of a very important officer (Sir Ian Hamilton, 'Gallipoli Diary') completely free as a Gutenberg e-book (2 vols):

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19317 (Vol 1)

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/22021 (Vol 2)

[J Banning]

Now that the anger appears to have died down somewhat I wondered if anyone had actually paid £9.95 and downloaded this e-book?

You see, I am actually rather keen to read this officer's account of his war and certainly do not begrudge paying this fee. I will be downloading it at some point (probably when I have time to read it) but was interested in hearing people's views of the diary itself. After all, surely that is what we should all be interested in?

Is there anyone who can comment on the diary content?

With thanks

Jeremy

[MelPack]

Now that the anger appears to have died down somewhat

Jeremy

There was no anger on my part. In fact the only comment that I have found irksome was from a poster who clearly had not bothered to listen to the interview when afforded the opportunity to do so and failed to recognise that the pulpit is the appropriate place for a sermon.

I stand by my original comments.

regards

Mel