Cameron Stewart On … His Grandfather’s War Diary

My Grandfather’s Great War opened at the Tristan Bates Theatre on 3 November (previews from 2 November) where it continues until 20 November 2010. Stewart tells us about reading his grandfather’s diary.

Times change; values don’t. Well, that’s not strictly true. Human character, with all its permutations of good and bad, doesn’t seem to change very much. However, the values a society either tacitly or overtly chooses to adopt as its guiding principles do alter from generation to generation. Society’s moral framework at the start of the First World War was different from that of today. Some aspects were better, some worse, but without doubt my grandfather and his peers inhabited a very different moral universe from ours, and a comparison between then and now is really the driving force behind the stage play of My Grandfather’s Great War.

My grandfather’s memoirs, A Very Unimportant Officer, edited by myself and published by Hodder in 2008, is a graphic account of his time in the trenches between July 1915 and September 1917, when he was eventually wounded. His diary is an intensely personal record, delivered with a dark humour which some have likened to the Blackadder WWI episodes, lending it an immediacy which – to me at any rate – makes the intervening years fall away and brings the whole era vividly to life.

It is not a history book detailing dates of battles and numbers of casualties; it is the story, in his own words, of an ordinary lieutenant – a “very unimportant officer” – caught up in the most influential and gruesome event of the 20th century, the effects of which still resound today. Our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers bore the responsibility of risking their lives in service to their country in both that war and the subsequent one. Those of us born in the late 50’s and since have generally been extraordinarily fortunate. To most of us war, while never vanishing from the global picture, has become something that is only experienced first-hand by professional servicemen and women; the rest of us just live in a sort of perpetual low-grade tension punctuated by terrorist outrages.

When I read the diaries I feel almost as if I am there with him. I hope – and am thankfully often told it is the case – that those who come to see the show or read the book feel the same. The experiences of these people who perished in the mud of the Somme, Passchendaele and other battles really must not be just consigned to some dusty shelf in the library of history.

We need to remember this not in the context of dry figures of numbers of casualties which we refer to with a mournful expression, but as real flesh and blood experience. The First World War was supposed to be “the war to end all wars”, and has of course, proved not to have been so. It is my dream, however, that we can selectively revisit the values of that era, dismissing those no longer constructive – blind obedience, strict class stratification – and appropriating those which would give us direction – loyalty, responsibility, respect for self and others. I hope that those who see the show might agree.

My Grandfather’s Great War and War Notes opened on 3 November 2010 (previews from 2 November) where it continues until 20 November 2010.