Edwin Campion Vaughan (1897–1931)

SOME DESPERATE GLORY, Edwin Campion Vaughn's diary of his baptism by fire in the muddy trenches of France between January and August of 1917 is a largely unsung classic of WWI. Just 19 when he arrived in France, the young British lieutenant is startlingly frank in telling of his training and then of his experiences in combat, mostly by shelling, and the horrible, inhumane conditions in the trenches. He is brutally honest about how afraid he is much of the time, and also how he often felt lost and without guidance or any clear orders or instructions. While he got on well with his men, he was often called out and admonished by his superiors as he struggled to adjust to the chaotic conditions of the front lines. He gives a very vivid accounting of his unit's movements back and forth between the front and rear elements as the wartime front stagnated and surged.

I was surprised to learn there was so much drinking among the officers, even at the front, and it seemed to be accepted and even condoned. And the officers each were attended by a personal 'servant' too, who prepared their meals and saw to their uniforms and quartering, cleaning and polishing, and even preparing them baths and laying out their pyjamas!

It isn't all fear and horror, because Vaughn also offers some very funny stories of high jinks and practical jokes during the company's downtime in the rear.

The famous 'mud' of trench warfare is often center stage, particularly in the heat of combat and forward advances as Vaughn more than once finds himself waist deep in the slime. And, in the final section of his narrative, during the infamous Passchendaele offensive, he is horrified to witness scores of wounded men drowning in rain drenched shell holes, screaming in fear and pain as they slipped below the surface.

As his narrative ends, Vaughn notes that of his original company of ninety men, only fifteen are left, and he has become the company commander through attrition. Because this is a real war diary, there is no real ending or conclusion. But the introduction tells us Vaughn did become a fine soldier, also serving on the Italian front. And that after the war he married and had four children. He never wrote anything else about the war, and this diary was discovered nearly forty years later, after Vaughn died, in 1931, from a 'medical accident,' when he was injected with cocaine instead of novocaine.

This is, most of the time, a riveting read, especially considering Vaughn was not a professional writer. Very highly recommended. War lit buffs take note.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (mais)

Edwin Campion Vaughan's own desperate glory came when he left the cloistering life of his middle class family and volunteered for service in the trenches of the First World War. Educated in a Jesuit College in London, the type of environment that believed the classical untruth of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, he entered the Artist’s Rifles Officer Training class. He was posted to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment where, after many bumps and difficulties, he was made Captain. The book is the record of a personal diary, a soldier’s journal, detailing the often mundane, but equally often horrific events of trench warfare.

As a personal journal then, it is brutally honest and includes the terrific ‘rip-offs’ he got from his superiors and the interpersonal clashes with fellow officers. He truthfully – as he is only writing for himself - admits his foul-ups and his periods of "dreadful wind-ups”.

But when you read the events of this typical experience you can not believe that those serving could be as brave as they were. Vaughan offers us many views of war’s horrors, but adds the humor and humanity of his fellow soldiers. He holds back nothing from his account of having to listen to the gradually receding screams and groans of the wounded trapped in the shell holes of no-mans land. These cries and pitiful pleas grow silent as the near continual rain of the French trenches gradually fill up and drown the entrapped, immobile victims.

Vaughan went on, after serving and surviving Ypres and Pashessdal, to find he could not settle back into 'normal' civilian life, so in 1928 he enlisted again, became a Pilot Officer in the early RAF and then, after surviving all the horrors of that Great War, was killed, in West Ham, London, by a being given the wrong drugs in 1931.

This is one of those books you can not get out of your head, but can not put away. I was sorry to finish it, it seems a significant book of the truths of that horrific period it now joins my favorites along with the all the 1914-18 poets, and grand works like Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Goodbye To All That and All Quite On the Western Front.… (mais)