Les lettres du front 1914 - 1918

I found these letters inside a wooden 'buffet' in a barn in Limousin, France - a whole bundle of letters tracing the voyage of a man from the village of Négrelat, Haute Vienne from 1914 to 1918 in the First World War trenches.

This man spent 5 years at war, before finally being demobbed in 1919 to return to his farm in the Limousin countryside, where so many didn't return.

The letters are quite banal, there are no stories of bravado nor hatred - just everyday life. He remarks on the beautiful countryside as they arrive to di-in in the trenches then the change as the shells, mud, raid and snow churn it into a morass.

There are stories where he meets friends from his old regiment as regiments get decimated and reformed as they lose huge numbers of men.
In one letter he recounts how miserable and cruel the war is as he sees so many dead, dying and wounded all around him... it really is quite poignant.

In one letter his regiment are making an assault on German trenches - he tells of the horror of hand-to-hand fighting and ends with a story of a nagging toothache that he had all day, until one of his comrades removed his tooth in the evening after the attack with a pair of pliers used to remove nails from horseshoes by a blacksmith.