A British woman laments the loss of 'poor John' who has been called up. A postcard by D. Tempest, postmarked October 12, 1915.
"E', I shall have to get one of them long brushes now poor John's been called up."D Tempest
"'Conditions . . . certainly seem very bad,' I wrote to my family on January 10th [1918]; 'from everyone's people come exactly the same sort of letters I get from you. Everyone is servantless, no one visits anyone else or goes away, and the food seems as hard to get hold of in other places as in London now. But do if you can,' I implored, 'try to carry on without being too despondent and make other people do the same . . . for the great fear in the Army and all its appurtenances out here is not that it will ever give up itself, but that the civil population at home will fail us by losing heart—just at the most critical time. The most critical time is of course now, before America can really come in and the hardships of winter are not yet over. It wouldn't be so bad if the discomfort and inconvenience and trouble were confined to one or two towns or one or two families, but it seems to be general.'"
Vera Brittain served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and had been in France for the last six months when she wrote in January, 1918. Fewer than 200,000 American troops were in Europe, and were not on the front lines as American commander John Pershing built his army. The United Kingdom's food shortages paled beside those of Russia and Austria-Hungary.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 by Vera Brittain, page 401, copyright © Vera Brittain, 1933, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 1978, originally 1933
1918-01-10, 1918, January, food, home front, British tub woman
