Mitigating the Ennui of Trench Life

Romance from the trenches. Below is a story relating to one unknown member of the 18th Battalion who, with his first Christmas in the trenches in 1915, used a unique method to assuage and address his boredom and loneliness. This is related by Lieutenant Harry Anderson Secord during an interview for the CBC Radio broadcast of “Flander’s Fields” which interviewed Canadian World War 1 veterans and related their stories for this series.

Below is a wonderful paragraph detailing the lengths a soldier may go to “…to mitigate the ennui of trench life…”

Narrator:

The strength of the human race rests in its capacily to adapt itself to any condition and find a way to survive.

And human ingenuity will triumph over even the most abject boredom. Here is one way —-

Secord, Harry: 18th

One of the chaps got a copy of this TP’s Weekly. this little English weekly publication and there was something in here about any soldier who wished to get correspondents in England would have an advertisement published free of charge in this paper — sort of a Lonely Hearts Club. So these two lads wrote out an ad, “Two young refined Canadian soldiers wish to mitigate the ennui of trench life by corresponding with nice British girls.” The ad went in and the letters came from all over Scotland and England and Wales. And one of those lads worked it all out scientifically. He had a little diary, all in alphabetical order, and if a girl were eighteen years of age, he was twenty and if she was thirty, he was thirty-five, and so on, and he fitted his civilian occupation to correspond with their standing in live. So Christmas came around and the signal section, of which I was a member, got as many parcels as the rest of the Battalion put together. We all wrote to a few of them. Well then, after Christmas, he go rather fed up and he was wondering hot to get rid of these girls, because he’d proposed to a few of them, so he got an Irishman in the unit to write a letter to all these persistent ladies and say that poor Jimmy had paid the supreme sacrifice and, in fact, he’d just come back from putting some flowers on his grave, so that the correspondence then petered out.

Source: “Flanders’ Fields” – #6 – “A World of Stealth.”; CBC radio broadcast transcript. Page 19.