A Very Unimportant Officer by Cameron Stewart
Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99
THE great conflict which ravaged the world in the second decade of the 20th century was once known, simply, as the Great War (it only came to be called the First World War after there had been a Second global conflagration). Great, indeed, in terms of the monumental number of casualties and shattered lives callously squandered at the behest of red-tabbed generals and frock-coated politicians who didn’t seem to know, or care, what they were doing.
The years 1914-1918 witnessed the “glorious dead” being piled high in the trenches as time and again young lives were sacrificed to capture a bit of devastated terrain no longer than the length of a football pitch.
War is hideous and its effects on those at the sharp end are manifest. Its legacy is there to see in the rolls of honour in every town, village and hamlet. Today, when coffins are flown home the politicians look more whey-faced than usual: when the enormity of what young men and women are called upon to do on the battlefield finally appears to dawn on them.
The officer in this remarkable account of life and death on the Western Front is Captain Alexander Stewart who joined the Cameronians, a Scottish regiment, in 1915 at the age of 33. His diaries were unearthed by his grandson after gathering dust for 80 years. Cameron Stewart deserves praise for his scrupulous editing of a saga which makes his forebear anything other than unimportant. It also helps to remind us of the legions of men who underwent the traumas of battle in the muddy bloodbaths of Ypres, Passchendaele and the Somme.
Captain Stewart won the Military Cross. He lived through the carnage and horror of trench warfare and reflected with compassion on the fears and bravery of his men. Under relentless shellfire and living in a world dominated by glutinous mud, these lions faced devastating machine-gun fire whenever the donkeys who were their generals ordered an attack.
There was also mind-numbing admin which has a long shelf life. As company commander, Stewart was bidden to account for the number of socks his men wore. He replied: “144 and a half.” Urged to account for the deficiency, he explained “Man lost leg.”
A letter he wrote home sums up the conditions endured by troops in the Great War. “I have lost 12 good men owing to a shell exploding in the trench. Saw two blown 30 feet in the air, one coming down entire. We made an attack this morning and expect a counter-attack tonight.” Conditions in the trenches opposite were much the same. The futility of war persists – even intensifies. It falls, perhaps, to those who see themselves as unimportant to lift the curtain on a truth people in high places seem unwilling to face.
Tony Heath
