This sensitive, outspoken diary begins during the dark last days of the ‘dead little, red little army’, the British Expeditionary Force which bolstered the French left flank in Flanders from mid-August 1914. With the desperate defence of Ypres, through Hallowe’en into December, when the Germans were repeatedly beaten off, began the stalemate of trench warfare. The war was expected to be over by Christmas, but all that was over was any movement.
The diarist, the redoubtable Sir Morgan Crofton Bt., was a regular soldier from a line of military forebears. Wounded in South Africa, he had retired at 35, as a captain in the Second Life Guards, early in 1914, only to rejoin when war broke out. Immediately flung into the battle, Crofton felt the world he had known was gone for ever in that hellish slaughter, but his descriptions of excellent breakfasts and the occasional bottle of champagne and his comments, which in much of the diary are detached, almost academic, show an astonishing coolness; nobody in the Ypres Salient was ever out of danger, and even generals lost their lives, despite conventional myth which has dubbed them cowards. His duties took him constantly within close range of the enemy ‘whizz-bangs’, bringing sudden death, and ‘Jack Johnsons’, erupting brutally with black smoke and murderous splinters.
What makes his observations of particular interest is that Crofton, a keen student of military history, had a wider grasp than most soldiers of the war as a whole. The Russian front loomed as important to him as the battles in which he was involved; and he despised Britain’s insistent clinging to the mediaeval city of Ypres, exposing her troops on three sides to German gunfire and huge casualties. He dismissed the view that Ypres was sacred ground, symbol of our will to endure:
Why keep Ypres up to impress people? We need not give it to the Germans, it can lie between the two lines, and be made untenable by our guns.
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