German soldiers walking through snow and ruins along a destroyed rail line.
"Before we left Vauchelles some officers were overdue off leave. They and many others were hung up for a week at Havre; owing to a shortage of coal, under the new regime, trains could not be run."
Extract from the entry for January 8, 1917 from the writings — diaries, letters, and memoirs — of Captain J.C. Dunn, Medical Officer of the Second Battalion His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and fellow soldiers who served with him. The Battalion was then serving in the Somme sector, in Vauchelles-les-Quesnoy where Dunn spent 'three dull weeks.' The winter of 1916–1917 — Germany's 'Turnip Winter' — was bitterly cold. A 'coal crisis', a shortage of coal exacerbated by controls and diversion of coal to military uses, hit France, the United Kingdom, and even the United States during the winter. Great Britain appointed a Coal Controller in February 1917, the same month in which it appointed a Food Controller. 'The new regime' included the government of the new British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and a changed French Government.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 290, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
1917-01-08, 1917, January, snowy ruins
