Harry Lamin

  
Harry Lemin was a soldier in the World War 1 era.  The battles were very intense and were hard to get through as a unit.  Many troops were lost in the battles and the number was very high when the war ended.  The blog about Harry started in July of 2007, but Harry's writings didn't occur until August 1917.  The blogger wanted to present his letters 90 years after they had been wrote by Harry.  Harry left behind a one year old son named Willie nicknamed Bill as he got older.  Just imagine how hard it would have been to leave a one year old at home, and still how hard it is for people going into the army today. Harry went to training in February of 1917.  The war was going on at this moment and the English army was trying to hurry their foot soldiers through the camp to get them to the front lines as fast as they could.  In training camp, the soldiers had to get vaccines to protect them from diseases that they could obtain from training and from being on the front lines.  Harry talks about how the English soldiers don’t have much to eat, they eat bread and jam dripping, excess grease.  These soldiers that went through training were trained to battle, but not survive the trenches that they were thrown into.  Information that Harry obtained he sent to his family, some of that information was about the Arcadian.  The Arcadian was a huge ship that transported military ammunition.  It was sunk by a German submarine on April 15, 1917.  When Harry finally gets to the front lines he is thrown into the trenches to fight.  He says that in the tranches that mud is one of the main things people need to watch out for, except all of the opposition’s troops and shelling coming your way.  Mud would slow down the people and cause them to be easily targeted by any opposing’s troops. Mud didn’t only stop troops, it slowed down the medics from getting to wounded soldiers as shown in the picture below.

Harry was in the battle of Passchendaele and said it was a horrific battle.  One day that they were battling they rain was so bad that the mud became so hard to get through that these 6 people above with the stretcher had a hard time getting the wounded to a medic.  Harry talks about all the battles he was in and said that they were all bad.  He feared for his life everytime he went over the boundary of the trench.

Works Cited

"WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier." WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.

"9th Btn Y & L War Diaries.": September 1917. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.