The Dark Black Days of War

Honor Elwes (1889 – 1959) was brought up at Little Congham in Norfolk in a country household typical of the era with attendant cook, parlour-maid and footman but none the less was able to turn her hand to almost anything. However, she suffered from a muscular disorder and unlike her younger sister Win—who becomes the heroine of this tale—or her cousins, Honor could not sign up for nursing or drive an ambulance in France, so stayed at home in Norfolk looking after her widowed mother all through the First World War.

With friends and neighbours Honor and her mother took an active part in women’s war work in the cluster of west Norfolk villages of Congham, Hillington and Westacre. They organised bandage-rolling sessions and tended wounded allied soldiers billeted in the larger country houses. Hers is a diary of daily news of the war as it filtered through, starting from the day war broke out on 5th August 1914.

Honor’s diary is also a tale of family, friends, neighbours and local boys who went to the front and what befalls them all. Honor includes copies of letters from her sister Win who drove a motor ambulance in France—and won the Military Medal for bravery. She records daily local hearsay about the war, the rumours and the counter rumours, whether spies have been seen and where Zeppelins drop bombs locally. The whole diary is interspersed with a powerful account of events of the war as she reads about them in the newspapers—censored as they were at the time. The daily snippets Honor chooses to record make it possible for the reader to follow the war on all fronts, whether at sea, in France, in Poland, the Balkans, the Dardanelles or in Africa: as well as to grasp the politics of home and overseas.

This is also a unique commentary on life in England during a time of dramatic events and great social change, written in an informed and eloquent style. Without flinching, Honor takes the reader through the latest casualty figures and the agony of waiting for news of those she loved against a very accurate historical background described with great skill and insight. Her reports include bulletins on the deteriorating health of the Kaiser and on King George V’s accident in France, when he had to be returned to England in the very hospital ship that a fortnight later was sunk by a mine in the Channel. There are also amusing anecdotes such as the aunt who was frightened of aeroplanes and a report of a cow straying between the trenches being milked by a Bavarian soldier—with never a shot being fired by the astonished Frenchmen peeping over the parapet.

Clippings of maps, victories and defeats, poetry and cartoons are all included. Reading Honor’s diary we are pushed along through gripping pages of history interwoven with short dashes of family occurrences against a back drop of war time Norfolk life. The diary ends the day Armistice is signed and includes a dedication of the village war memorial.

This is a two-volume set, totalling 708 pages, transcribed and edited by Juliet Webster with a foreword by Lady Darnatt MBE, Lord-Lieutenant for Norfolk.  Juliet Webster is also the author of The Yellow Caravan which is also based on Honor Elwes’s diaries and is a chronicle of Honor and Win’s camping trip around Norfolk in a horse-drawn caravan in 1912.