Postcards, letters and parcels were important means of communication between soldiers and their families and friends. According to the BBC News Magazine, "up to 12 million letters a week were delivered to soldiers, many on the front line.” Most of the mail was censored, but some soldiers found ways to circumvent the censors. Many, like Siegfried Sassoon (a British infantry officer with a German first name), were disillusioned after years of fighting.
Find Sassoon's poem "Dreamers" in 2.2 Task 1: Material.
Sassoon tries to make his readers understand what it feels like to be a soldier in "death's grey land" and what he and his comrades missed the most:
"when the guns begin / They think of ...",
"Dreaming of things they did...",
"longing to regain...".
2.2 Task 1: After having read the poem, write a postcard in your own words, which might have been sent by a WWI soldier to his family or friends.
Illustration:
Maurice George Delpratt, Field Service Postcard from Maurice George Delpratt to his sister Mrs F.L. White (Elinor). State Library of Queensland (http://hdl.handle.net/10462/eadarc/8217). Diese Datei ist unter der Creative-Commons-Lizenz „Namensnennung 2.5 Australien“ lizenziert.