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A trench-eye view of the First World War

‘Bullets occasionally whistled by … curious feeling of elation as was my first time under fire’. This is the entry George Oswald Mitchell (G.O.M.) made in his trench diary as he entered the front line for the first time on 22 April 1915. A pre-war ‘Saturday night soldier’ in the territorials in Bradford, G.O.M. had been mobilised on the first day of the war, 5 August 1914, in the 1/6th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment. The initial feeling of elation during his baptism of fire soon disappeared as G.O.M. was for the next three months involved in fierce front line infantry fighting in the Neuve Chapelle and Ypres sectors of the Western Front.

In July 1915, G.O.M. was transferred from the infantry to become one of the first members of the Royal Engineers ‘Special Companies’, engaged in preparing a massive gas-based assault against the German army. His trench diary provides a vivid record of what it was like to be launching a gas attack from the front line on 25 September 1915, the first day of the Battle of Loos –  ‘I got a big mouthful of gas with the first cylinder … The rotten apparatus they had given us was leaking all over the place and we were working in a cloud of gas. We sweated ourselves to death…’ G.O.M emerged unscathed from the Battle of Loos and took part in many other gas assaults during the remaining years of the war – Cambrin, Hill 70, Vimy Ridge and ‘Plug Street’ all feature in his notes. He was fortunate to survive nearly four years of intensive fighting with only minor wounds and was demobilised in 1919.

Published on the 90th anniversary of the Armistice that brought the First World War to an end, Shrapnel and Whizzbangs, is written by G.O.M.’s son, Jeremy Mitchell. It is based on the handwritten trench diary and notes that G.O.M. kept at the time, crouched in a dugout or lying on a pile of straw in a barn behind the lines. It brings to life the extraordinary mixture of hardship, fear, excitement, boredom and – occasionally – humour – experienced by one of the millions of soldiers who made the abrupt transition from civilian life to the mud and blood of the Western Front.