The Front Line Letters of ‘Tommy’ Wyer ― Part Two

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Tommy’s final letter in Part One left us with a sense of reassurance. He had come through the fighting of late September and early October, had been struck but not seriously, and had been able to tell his parents that he was lucky.

Set against the battalion diary, those few words carried considerable substance. Yet by the time his next surviving letter arrives, in November 1917, the emphasis has shifted.

There is still the familiar opening — assurances of his well-being, news of the weather, the ordinary details with which a soldier maintained his connection with those he had left behind — but beneath it there is something new: cold, wet, exhaustion, and the unmistakable weariness of a man who has spent too long at the front.

The war is beginning to occupy more of Tommy’s letter, not because he has chosen to describe it, but because it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep it out.

8th November, 1917: Tired, Cold and Wet

It has been a month since Tommy’s previous letter home, and this one is different again.

The opening is familiar enough:

“Dear Mother and Father I now write a few lines in answer to yours pleased to hear your well as it leaves me at present …”

But beneath those ordinary opening words there is a subtle change. The circumstances in which he is writing have altered, and with them the things that matter.

He reveals that a parcel has arrived from home after taking several days to reach him. He explains that it found its way into his hands while he was on duty in a front line trench, and when he was relieved in the evening of the same day he carried his parcel out of the line to the rest area.

His exhaustion from front line duty then becomes strikingly evident, together with a general war weariness:

“… I was tired too when I came out I had not had any sleep for 5 days and nights it is cold and wet out here now I wish the Germans would get back to their own country …”

It is in these apparently mundane details that the war begins to reveal itself. He is cold, wet, fatigued.

And so, a parcel from home is no longer merely a collection of familiar items. It has travelled the distance between Lincolnshire and the Western Front, arriving after he’s experienced exhausting days and nights in a cold, wet trench.

And even here, after revealing something of the strain of the front line, his thoughts then return to the people he has left behind.

He mentions writing to people in Timberland Fen and expresses his disappointment that he has not received a reply. The correspondence itself has clearly gained importance. This is not surprising.

The war has created an enormous physical distance between Tommy and the world he knows. And this chasm is bridged by letters from the folks at home. Through them, people he knows and loves remain present in his life, just as he remains present in theirs.

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The War Diary — Raiding Enemy Lines

The battalion diary gives us the setting in which Tommy’s letter was written.

During the first days of November, the 8th King’s Own were still operating around Bullecourt before moving to Mory. The diary records the continuing cycle of front-line trench duties, patrols, shelling and troop movements — the repetitive rhythm by which the battalion’s existence was now governed.

On 3 November, for example, a patrol went out against the enemy wire:

“Battalion in front line. A few shells fell near [?] during the day. The G.O.C. visited the Bn early in the morning and stayed to Breakfast.

2/Lt. McLean and 3 men raided the enemy’s lines.

A party of 3 ORs [other ranks] under 2/Lt. McLean, 8th K.O.R.L. left our lines V22 c2.2 at 12.30 am and reached the enemy wire at V22 c25.50.

The wire had been well cut at this point and the party reached [?]. The patrol moved through the belt of wire, which was about 25 yards from the parapet and no other wire was met. The enemy trench, which was about 18′ wide and 6′ deep, was discovered. 4 Germans were seen, but two passed and then a single German.

2/Lt. McLean slipped into the trench, and as the German offering resistance, he shot him in the leg. On the alarm being given, the enemy began throwing bombs over the parapet, and as the German refused to leave his trench, 2/Lt. McLean took one of his shoulder straps.

The 3 men bombed the dug-out, which was found at the point of entrance. The enemy appeared on the alert, and the trench was simply held. 2/Lt. McLean took cover in a shell hole and was cut off from the rest of the party, who returned about 5 am, all being wounded.

2/Lt. McLean returned by daylight about 7 am.”

The entry appears to describe a small raiding party, whose objective seems to have been to penetrate the German wire and obtain information and/or a prisoner. The fact that McLean returned separately at about 7 a.m. while the three men returned around 5 a.m., all wounded, gives the incident considerably more significance than the brief summary initially suggests.

The following day the battalion was relieved and moved to Mory, but not before a further raid was carried out against the enemy line:

“Battalion in front line, very little during the day. Enemy TM [trench mortars] active on the support trench. At 2.45 am. Lt. Hodson and 30 men from D Coy raided the enemy’s lines. The enemy wire well on the look-out and after bombing them, one man returned. 5 wounded, and 1 missing. The Battalion was relieved by the 10th RWF [Royal Welsh Fusiliers].”

Once the men were relieved and away from the front line, the character of life changed almost immediately.

There were parades, training, ‘cleaning up’ and camp activities, such as a football competition. This way, the men attempted to recover from their ordeal in the trenches and prepare themselves for whatever came next.

On 8 November, the very day Tommy was writing to his parents, the diary records the battalion in camp at Mory:

“Battalion in camp at MORY. Parades as usual. The G.O.C. was coming to present medals to the Battalion. Only owing to the weather it was put off.”

The two accounts therefore meet almost perfectly.

Tommy’s letter allows us to glimpse the man emerging from the trenches, exhausted and grateful for a parcel from home. The diary places him among the hundreds of men who had shared the same cycle of experience. But beneath that military rhythm another existed, one which the battalion diary could never record.

The first rhythm was imposed upon Tommy by the army. The second was maintained by the man himself. These two existed side by side, and it is in the space between them that the real character of Tommy’s letters begins to emerge.

Reading Between the Lines

Census returns have given us a description of Tommy that is perfectly clear. He was a farm waggoner, an agricultural worker whose life had been spent among farms, horses and waggons. The documents placed him within that world, identifying his occupation within the working communities of south Lincolnshire.

His letters, however, tell us something that a census return never could.

Tommy, the countryman, emerges from his letters through the things he noticed, the people he remembered and the connections he continued to maintain. People, places, personal contact.

These are small things, easily overlooked when set against the much larger backdrop of the war. Yet together they reveal something of the social world from which Tommy had come — that close-knit landscape of home where connections could run through a farm, a village, a family or simply a shared acquaintance.

The woman he met on the train in June is one example. The people of Timberland Fen whom he mentions in November are another. Neither has any obvious significance to events played out on a wider scale, yet both matter because they tell us where Tommy’s thoughts continued to wander when he was miles from home.

Even in France, Tommy remained connected to the social landscape that made him who he was. And that is perhaps why these letters are so valuable.

They do not give us a heroic soldier, fashioned retrospectively from the circumstances of his death. They do not present him as a figure who belongs solely to the history of the 8th King’s Own.

Instead, they give us Tommy — the young man who had spent his working life around farms and waggons; the son who worried about his parents and remained attentive to the lives of those at home.

Through it all, he remained the man who could appreciate simple, kindly gifts, and who considered himself fortunate to have escaped serious injury after being struck in the thigh.

He was also a man who watched German soldiers surrendering and wondered, in his own way, at what hardships they had endured.

And, perhaps most revealingly, he was the exhausted soldier who could emerge from the front line after days without proper sleep and still find himself concerned that people at home had not answered his letters.

The war may have taken Tommy into an experience utterly removed from the world in which he had grown up, but it had not severed his connection with that world.

Behind the uniform there remained the same Tommy Wyer — a Lincolnshire man whose thoughts continued to turn towards the people, places and ordinary relationships that had shaped his life.

And his letters allow us, for a moment at least, to see him there.

18th January, 1918: Harold Christian

The next surviving letter is dated 18 January 1918, and once again the tone shifts. Firstly, John writes about the weather:

” … we have had some sharp weather here and a lot of snow – the frost has gone now we’re having a lot of rain … “

The letter’s content is almost domestic in its simplicity, and there is little in it to suggest the vast conflict taking place around him. Instead, immediately after his comments on the weather, Tommy’s thoughts turn to Harold Christian.

” … what did Harold Christian think of it [experience of the Western Front?] did he say where he was … “

Tommy goes on to mention that he has seen only one ‘lot of Lincolns’ since coming over — suggesting that Harold Christian was also serving in that area, but that Tommy had not seen him. But who was Harold Christian?

Genealogical research revealed that Harold is Tommy’s 2nd Cousin, once removed. Moreover, both men and their families lived in the conjoined environment of Kirkby Underwood’s Bede houses, a group of alms-houses dating back to the seventeenth century. The two men were therefore not only cousins, but were close neighbours.

It is a small but revealing glimpse into the way soldiers could experience a war; one that on the maps of generals and in the histories written afterwards, involved millions of men and stretched across hundreds of miles. For men such as Tommy, the war was something much more immediate, and far more personal.

The vast armies and distant battlefields were still there, of course, but Tommy’s attention was drawn towards the people he knew. Within the confines of a letter home, a national conflict had been reduced to a series of familiar questions.

For Tommy, these were the things that mattered.

The topography of the Western Front might have stretched across France and Belgium, but Tommy’s own geography remained much smaller and far more intimate. It was the geography of Kirkby Underwood and its surrounding villages and farms, and was carried in the memories of another life.

And perhaps that is one of the most revealing things about his letters. The war had surrounded him, but it had not become the whole of his life. Beyond the trenches, the weather and the movements of armies, there remained the familiar names and faces of home.

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Battalion Diary: In Camp at Hendecourt

The Battalion War Diary provides useful corroboration for the circumstances in which Tommy wrote his letter of 18 January, 1918. By this point the Battalion was out of the front line and in camp at Hendecourt, where the routine was one of training, parades and the maintenance of the camp itself.

The entries also confirm that the weather Tommy describes was not simply a passing impression. On 14 January, the diary records that, “Owing to snow Battalion parade cancelled.” The following day the conditions had changed, but hardly for the better: “Raining heavily.” On 16 January, the rain was still sufficiently persistent for the diary simply to record, “Raining,” while the men were employed repairing and draining their huts.

By 17 January, the weather appears to have improved sufficiently for the normal training programme to resume, with six companies practising a bomb attack in the Blairville trenches. The entry for 18 January, the day of Tommy’s letter, records simply: “In Camp, as yesterday 17/1/18.”

This is significant when the diary is read alongside Tommy’s letter. His comments about the weather were not made against a background of continuous fighting, when opportunities to write would have been unpredictable. He was in camp, with the Battalion engaged in routine activities and training.

There was, therefore, both the opportunity and the circumstance for Tommy to sit down and write home. His letter’s attention to the weather seems entirely natural in this context. The battlefield is, for the moment, distant from his writing. Instead, the weather, the people he is thinking about at home, and questions concerning his cousin occupy his attention.

The War Diary gives us the impersonal military record; Tommy’s letter gives us the subjective experience of those same days. Read together, they suggest something rather more ordinary—and consequently rather more revealing—than the familiar image of the soldier perpetually under fire.

For a few days in January 1918, Tommy was a soldier in camp, training, waiting, and writing home, with the snow and rain sufficiently prominent in his daily life to find their way naturally into his correspondence.

Undated Letter: ‘It is time it was all over’

One final, undated letter is an interesting addition to the sequence of Tommy’s surviving correspondence because it is concerned almost entirely with home and the ordinary business of getting through the day.

It begins conventionally enough:

“Dear Mother and Father / Just a few lines hoping you’re all well…”

But almost immediately Tommy reveals something of his state of mind. He has heard that Fred has been discharged, and his response is instinctive:

“I hope he wont have to go back anymore. I wish all of us could get out of it it is time it was all over…”

There is no attempt here to dress up his feelings. The war has been going on for years, and Tommy is tired of it. “It is time it was all over” is the language of a soldier who has had enough.

From there, his thoughts turn once again towards the familiar names and small pieces of news that connect him with home.

He has received a letter from Flo [his aunt], although it has apparently been delayed due to being addressed incorrectly. He then asks after “the boys from Kirkby“, remarking that he never seems to see anybody he knows.

It’s possible that he is referring here to his cousins, the three Wyer brothers, Robert, Edmund and William — for their stories please see my earlier posts: ‘The Wyer Brothers‘.

These are small matters, but they are precisely the things which make the letter personal. Tommy is maintaining his connection with a world which is physically very far away.

Then comes news of the weather:

“it has been wet out here heavy thunder storms it has been cold too”

The Battalion War Diary has already given us an independent confirmation of just how real these complaints were. Tommy’s substantiated references to cold and wet weather were not merely conversational padding for a letter home, the weather was part of the physical circumstances in which he was living.

Yet it is the final lines of the letter which take us further still into Tommy’s experience of the war, when he asks:

“Could you send me some physic I’m always constipated out here we get a lot of cheese we’re very near worried with lice”

It is difficult to imagine a more prosaic description of soldiering. There is no glamour here whatsoever. Tommy wants some medicine for constipation, he comments on the quantity of cheese in his diet, and then turns to perhaps the most persistent of soldiers’ complaints: lice.

That final sentence is particularly valuable because it strips away any temptation to imagine life in camp as comfortable simply because the Battalion was temporarily out of the front line.

They might have been away from the immediate danger of the trenches, but they were still living under military conditions in which basic comfort was far from assured.

It is the sort of detail which rarely finds its way into formal military histories, yet it tells us something important about the lived experience of the men.

And this helps us understand why Tommy’s letters are so valuable when placed beside the Battalion War Diary.

The diary records snow, rain, parades, training and camp duties. Tommy records cold, thunderstorms, an unbalanced diet, constipation and lice. Neither account contradicts the other. Rather, they operate at different levels.

The official diary may tell us what the Battalion was doing, but Tommy reveals what it was like to be one of the men doing it.

And perhaps that is why the letter’s closing words have such force. Beneath the everyday complaints is the same sentiment with which he began:

“I wish all of us could get out of it it is time it was all over.”

The two ends of the letter almost meet. At one end is his wish that Fred will not have to return; at the other is his own desire for the war to end. Between them lies a catalogue of ordinary discomforts—bad weather, monotonous food, illness and lice—and the familiar names of people at home.

It is a very different picture from the dramatic episodes recorded elsewhere in the Battalion diary. Instead here is a young man sitting in camp, cold, wet, uncomfortable and thoroughly fed up, writing home to his parents and asking them to send him some medicine.

That ordinariness is precisely what makes the letter so revealing.

The Last Stand of the 8th Kings Own

On 12 April 1918, the 8th King’s Own were moved into the Avelette Bridgehead, part of the desperate defensive fighting that followed the German spring offensive.

What awaited them was scarcely a prepared position. When the battalion arrived, there was “no garrison in the line from whom to take over.” The defences consisted largely of scattered, half-dug posts. Nevertheless, the men took up their positions and began the difficult task of holding the ground allotted to them.

For a while there was little indication of what was to come. Then, during the morning, reports began to arrive that the enemy was advancing and that British troops on either side were falling back. The King’s Own were repeatedly called upon to move forward and fill the gaps, maintaining contact with neighbouring units as the defensive line began to unravel.

By early afternoon the situation had become stark. The battalion diary records:

“At the same time what appeared to be the whole of the line on our front was seen to be withdrawing and had reached nearly as far as the canal.”

The 8th King’s Own were now increasingly exposed. They were sent forward again, advancing deep into the abandoned ground in an attempt to maintain a continuous front. But the further they went, the more isolated they became. Enemy machine-gun and rifle fire raked their flanks, while the artillery bombardment grew steadily heavier.

By evening, the men holding the forward positions were effectively fighting without secure support on their right. The diary describes the position with chilling simplicity. They were …

“…being enfiladed from right by M.G. and rifle fire.”

The order eventually came to withdraw towards the La Bassée Canal. It was not a straightforward retreat. Small groups had to make their way back through ground increasingly dominated by the enemy. Some were cut off; others were forced to fight their way through.

And still the battalion remained in action.

The following day, 13 April, the remnants of the 8th King’s Own were reorganised and once again pushed forward. Patrols moved towards Le Vertbois Farm, encountering men of the 51st Division who were themselves under intense pressure. Heavy machine-gun and rifle fire continued to spray them from the surrounding orchards and hedgerows.

The situation deteriorated rapidly. British troops in front began to withdraw, but the King’s Own were ordered to remain. The diary records the instruction in words that seem almost extraordinary given what was happening around them:

“Almost immediately afterwards the 51st Division began to withdraw and Sgt. Hewitt received orders from 2/Lt. Goddard that the King’s Own would on no account withdraw.”

The men of Tommy’s battalion therefore stayed where they were, attempting to hold together a position that was steadily being stripped of its supporting formations. Increasing numbers of officers and men became casualties. Others were cut off. One party was described as being “almost entirely surrounded by the enemy”, suffering heavily from machine-gun fire as it attempted to withdraw.

By the end of the action, the battalion diary recorded the terrible arithmetic:

“Casualties 1 Officer, 155 Other Ranks.”

Among those ‘other ranks’ was Tommy.

Tommy Wyer had survived the fighting of the preceding months and had written home whenever circumstances allowed. His letters rarely described the battle itself. Instead, he wrote about the things that connected him with the home he loved.

As we have seen, in one letter he wrote:

“I wish all of us could get out of it it is time it was all over.”

Those words acquire a different weight when read alongside the battalion diary for those bloody days in April; a diary which graphically recorded the movements of a military unit as it was committed to a collapsing battlefield.

For it was here, on 13th April, 1918, that Tommy Wyer finally ‘got out of it‘ when he fell during the fighting.

Remembering Tommy

Tommy’s body was never identified and, like so many men lost during the German spring offensive, there was no grave to which his family could go.

But he was not forgotten.

Back in Kirkby Underwood, his name was given a permanent place among those from the village who had gone to war.

It appears on the plaque in St Mary and All Saints Church, and again on the names recorded in the church’s stained-glass window. In these quiet memorials, his name remains connected to the village from which he came and to the people who knew him.

Further away, in Belgium, his name is inscribed on Panel 2 of the Ploegsteert Memorial, among thousands of men who have no known grave.

However, as we have seen through this ‘Lost Fenland Generation‘ series, Tommy was not the only member of his family to enter the war.

His cousins (and mine) Edmund Wyer, William Wyer, Robert Wilson Wyer and Harry Sandall also served and were killed. Other cousins, Rippingale’s John William Sandall and Walter Sandall, likewise went to war and never returned. So, too, did cousins Thomas Hutchins, Robert Wand and Thomas Wand.

Their names can be found on the war memorials at Kirkby Underwood, Haconby, Rippingale and Dunsby, extending the story beyond one man and into the wider family networks of the area.

As for Harold Christian, who Tommy enquired about in January, 1918, no military record for him appears to have survived. However, the man himself managed to prevail. When the census was taken in June 1921, Harold was shown to be back living at the Bede houses, Kirkby Underwood, with his widowed mother, Elizabeth, and siblings, Lucy and Ethel.

Harold was working as a farm labourer at Rippingale Fen.

For a family such as the Wyers, the war was therefore not something that happened in a remote land and to other people. It ran through the family itself: brothers and cousins serving together, some returning wounded, some returning safely but irreversibly changed, and others never returning at all.

Tommy’s letters have allowed us to glimpse the man behind the military record. We have heard him asking after family and friends, worrying about those at home, enduring the ordinary discomforts of soldiering and, beneath it all, longing for the war to end.

His final months can then be read against the stark entries of the battalion diary, until finally, on 13 April 1918, the two accounts converge. After that, there is silence.

However, for a brief time, through his letters, we have been able to hear his voice once again. And perhaps, after all is said and done, that is the most fitting way to remember him.

Author’s Note:

My thanks to Jamie Lawrance of the South Linconshire War Memorials website, for kindly supplying the photograph of Tommy in uniform. This became the definitive reference from which the canon images illustrating this post were created.

Thanks, too, to Rebecca Wyer of Kirkby Underwood for supplying copies of Tommy’s letters, valuable family background information, and photographs of the Bede Houses and Tommy’s parents.

The images accompanying these articles have been created or tailored using AI. While I have taken care to achieve a generally authentic impression of the period, they should not be regarded as historically accurate representations. These images are intended simply to illustrate and complement the narrative—to help bring people, places and circumstances of the past to life—and should be understood in that spirit.