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Bullets and Billets
The Shelf2Life WWI Memoirs Collection is an engaging set of pre-1923 materials that describe life during the Great War through memoirs, letters and diaries. Poignant personal narratives from soldiers, doctors and nurses on the front lines to munitions workers and land girls on the home front, offer invaluable insight into the sacrifices men and women made for their country. Photographs and illustrations intensify stories of struggle and survival from the trenches, hospitals, prison camps and battlefields. The WWI Memoirs Collection captures the pride and fear of the war as experienced by combatants and non-combatants alike and provides historians, researchers and students extensive perspective on individual emotional responses to the war.
- GenresWorld War I
308 pages, Paperback
Published March 11, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 14, 2024
An excellent early Great War memoir by Bruce Bairnsfather, famous for his Old Bill cartoons. Not perhaps a natural soldier, he endured the privations of the first winter and took part in the famous Christmas Truce. Locations are well described and can still be tracked down and his descriptions of life in the early trenches brings home the hardships of merely existing, without the dangers of being shot at. A short book, he was evacuated with shell shock and deafness after a near miss.
His cartoons brought him huge fame and original Fragments from France collections can still be obtained at reasonable prices and his characters appeared on a wide variety of plates mugs postcards etc.
An original first edition which can still be found fairly easily it contains a number of his cartoons and personally I’d always chose one over the more modern reprints.
His cartoons brought him huge fame and original Fragments from France collections can still be obtained at reasonable prices and his characters appeared on a wide variety of plates mugs postcards etc.
An original first edition which can still be found fairly easily it contains a number of his cartoons and personally I’d always chose one over the more modern reprints.
February 17, 2021
Well, that was quite a story. Told as a first-hand, on the spot account of WWII France by an English officer named Bruce Bairnsfather. It was my first of any type of war related writing, and I found it pretty amazing. Not only was he was matter of fact about everything that he was seeing and doing, but also saying that trench warfare was enjoyable. There seemed to be no fear reported in his journal, by him or anyone else; it was all just something that a regular soldier either thrives on, or makes the best of. I was amused when he tells about receiving leave to go home for 30 days and packing up all his "souvenirs" he had collected up to that point: shell casings and the like. It puzzled me that he would want those reminders, especially at the moment. But want them he did. In fact, as he was taking his leave, he had two rucksacks going back with him. When he couldn't quite manage, he gave one to a friend on the train, and kept one under his own watch. His clothes and personal belongings became lost when he and his friend became separated. Fortunately, for him, his bag full of war prizes was safe, since that was the bag he had chosen to protect! His final showdown was in Ypres. He didn't have time to get scared, and he made his way back to England, but you'll have to read yourself to find out how. Some good humor, a bit of history, and a lot of interesting details that most people are not privy to when reading a stale classroom textbook. This is a quick read and entirely appropriate for younger, interested readers.
May 4, 2023
The book is a memoir of the Great War experiences of the author, famous for creating the character of Old Bill in his cartoons for the magazine
The Bystander
and later collected in various
Fragments from France
booklets, from late 1914 till he is wounded during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.
In this early stage of the war the trenches were rudimentary to say the least, with men waist deep in water, and what dugouts there were also sodden. Not far behind the front line a few farm buildings not yet destroyed by shellfire gave some cover from the Germans provided no movement whatever could be seen in them.
Bairnsfather was in charge of a machine gun company but seems to have had a lot of time to be able to wander about just behind the line exploring the local area. I assume his sergeant looked after things in his absences. His company was also rotated in and out of the line on a regular basis.
He describes these early days of the war as “delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life,” which he says to his mind gave the war what it sadly needed – a touch of romance. Later, though, “much of the romance had left the trenches.” He says he “wouldn’t have missed that time for anything” and claims “our soldiers” even though living “in a vast bog without being able to utilize modern contrivances for making the fight against adverse circumstances anything like an equal contest” wouldn’t have either.
It was during this time he began his artistic career, drawing on the farmhouse walls and making sketches for fellow officers and then deciding to sending off his first cartoon to The Bystander. The book has some of the author’s sketches scattered throughout and also photographic plates of cartoons which appeared in The Bystander bound in and counting towards the pagination.
As an insight into how a British officer felt in that first year of the war this is probably as good as it gets.
Sensitivity warning: contains the word “gollywog.”
In this early stage of the war the trenches were rudimentary to say the least, with men waist deep in water, and what dugouts there were also sodden. Not far behind the front line a few farm buildings not yet destroyed by shellfire gave some cover from the Germans provided no movement whatever could be seen in them.
Bairnsfather was in charge of a machine gun company but seems to have had a lot of time to be able to wander about just behind the line exploring the local area. I assume his sergeant looked after things in his absences. His company was also rotated in and out of the line on a regular basis.
He describes these early days of the war as “delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life,” which he says to his mind gave the war what it sadly needed – a touch of romance. Later, though, “much of the romance had left the trenches.” He says he “wouldn’t have missed that time for anything” and claims “our soldiers” even though living “in a vast bog without being able to utilize modern contrivances for making the fight against adverse circumstances anything like an equal contest” wouldn’t have either.
It was during this time he began his artistic career, drawing on the farmhouse walls and making sketches for fellow officers and then deciding to sending off his first cartoon to The Bystander. The book has some of the author’s sketches scattered throughout and also photographic plates of cartoons which appeared in The Bystander bound in and counting towards the pagination.
As an insight into how a British officer felt in that first year of the war this is probably as good as it gets.
Sensitivity warning: contains the word “gollywog.”
February 3, 2023
A surprisingly good book. I read it because I was interested in Bairnsfather's war drawings, but he turns out to be a really good writer was well. He provides a pretty straightforward account of his daily life for 6 months in the trenches early in the Great War, which gives, I think, a lot of insight into what so many men went through. His account is not all gloom and doom as you might expect, but he doesn't avoid death and misery either, especially when he is sent to participate in the second battle of Ypres. I especially appreciated his firsthand account of the Christmas Truce of 1914, and how he wound up drawing and publishing his first cartoons of trench life.
May 27, 2017
I love this book, Bruce Bairnsfather is a famous satirist artist of WWI creating the character ol' Bill.
This is a memoir of his time in WWI working on the front with his machine gunners.
You can feel both his struggle and his humor on the entire situation.
I recommend reading this as well as reading his collection of drawings, Fragments of France.
This is a memoir of his time in WWI working on the front with his machine gunners.
You can feel both his struggle and his humor on the entire situation.
I recommend reading this as well as reading his collection of drawings, Fragments of France.
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July 23, 2020Brilliant typical understated Englishmans view on the horrific 1st world war in France.
July 3, 2021
Bruce Bairnsfather successfully managed to balance humor and introspection with the horrific realities of the war in this marvelous memoir.
October 24, 2016
Quite different than any other firsthand account of WWI. It's funny (I know!) and it was just a real delight (I know!) to read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews