World War I diaries reveal story behind 1914 armistice
The diary of a First World War veteran has revealed his crucial role in the Christmas armistice of 1914. Richard McComb reports.
Robert Hamilton was an assiduous diary keeper, recording life’s daily occurrences between 1913 and 1950 with military precision.
The entries were no doubt pertinent to the author but generally were less than gripping for a wider audience. According to Robert’s grandson, Andrew Hamilton, who ploughed through his late forebear’s leather-bound volumes, much of the content was “unexceptional and rather dull”.
Thank goodness Andrew kept looking, however. As he scanned the diaries, the former Birmingham history teacher’s eye was caught by a slim, hardback volume. Unlike the rest of the collection, the text was typed rather than handwritten and was marked: “Diary kept by Captain R C Hamilton from August 5th 1914 to January 12th 1915.”
The volume contained fascinating details about the frontline service of Robert, a captain in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. There were stories of trench warfare, of boredom, random killing and belligerent batmen.
An entry for September 6, 1914, when the Warwicks were in northern France, is a succinct case in point: “On again at daybreak. Captured some skunking spies and shot them. Women and children we passed told awful stories of their atrocities.”
Four days later, Capt Hamilton, who commanded A Company, reports: “Stood to at 3.00am and moved off at 5.00. Halted while the guns opened fire, making a terrible din. This is hell. We came across numerous dead Germans. French farm girls came up with peaches and water.”
Andrew, a baronet living in Walton, Warwickshire, thought his relative’s account of life and death on the Western Front, of the sniping and the shelling, would be an invaluable resource for his pupils at Woodrush High in Hollywood, Birmingham, and later at Evesham High School, where he was appointed head of history. There is nothing like bringing history to life for jaded young minds.
Delight over the diary turned to astonishment, though, when Andrew worked his way through the entries up to December 25 and discovered, in his grandfather’s words: “A day unique in world history.”
It became clear that Capt Hamilton, who died in 1959 aged 81, had played a pivotal yet unrecognised role in one of the First World War’s most famous episodes – the celebrated Christmas truce of 1914, when opposing troops fraternised amid the slaughter and squalor of No Man’s Land.
His diary tells of the first tentative greeting between the frontline soldiers on Christmas Eve, the Germans shouting across the wire entanglements: “Are you the Warwicks?”
Capt Hamilton recounts how his former servant, a Pte Gregory, whom he had just sacked for making sub-standard tea, went “over the top” not on a bayonet charge but to collect his gift of a German cigar.
The officer was then asked to meet his opposite number in the 134th Saxon Regiment, which he pledged to do on Christmas Day. “I said I would meet him at dawn, unarmed,” writes Capt Hamilton.
Soldiers swapped buttons and badges. Others made toasts with mugs of rum. There were gestures of humanity, too, as men buried the dead of both sides.
The details of the extraordinary encounter in Flanders’ shattered fields are featured in a new book by Andrew Hamilton, titled Meet at Dawn, Unarmed, which focuses on his grandfather’s service with the Warwicks during the Great War.
Capt Hamilton, later to be made major and succeed his father, Frederic, as the 8th baronet of Silverton Hill (Andrew is the 10th), was born and brought up at Avon Cliffe, Tiddington, near Stratford-on-Avon. He married Irene (Renie) Mordaunt, second daughter of the dowager Lady Mordaunt, of Walton Hall, near Wellesbourne, in 1907. Her father, Sir Charles Mordaunt, had been MP for South Warwickshire.
The couple were prolific diary writers during Robert’s service on the Western Front and Renie’s entries are interspersed with her husband’s throughout Meet at Dawn, Unarmed, providing an insight into the traumas and tribulations of life on the Home Front. However, it is Capt Hamilton’s account of the Christmas armistice, on the edge of Ploegsteert Wood, known as Plugstreet, south of Messines, that provides the undoubted highlight of the book, co-written with First World War historian Alan Reed.
Capt Hamilton had previously served with the Norfolk Regiment in South Africa and by a weird coincidence the German chef who cooked at a regimental dinner, at Piccadilly’s Trocadero in 1912, cropped up in the “enemy” fire trench during the Christmas armistice. “He seemed quite delighted to meet some of his former clients,” writes Capt Hamilton.
A career soldier and later gentleman farmer, he had been called up into the Warwicks in 1913 and was among the first to sail to France with the British
