We will remember them

My two minutes silence during work on Armistice Day was solitary, but in the evening my daughter went to the drawer where we keep old family photographs, letters, and medals, and we talked about the family members neither of us had ever known but who had died during the 1914-18 war. We reflected on the bitter sadness of bereaved parents opening the envelope and cardboard wrapper of a "King George's Penny" as we ourselves unwrapped it from its original envelope. This one was recompense for a great uncle who had died, not from wounds received on the Western Front, but from infection contracted in central Africa. We have a bundle of his letters home from his last campaign, the overriding impression from reading them being of the plenty of southern Africa compared with the hardships of wartime Britain. But the African campaign, fought around Lake Victoria, was a grim stalemate in which troops were picked off as much by disease as by enemy fire.
Similarly, the strongest impression I got from reading my own grandfather's war diary was of the regular football matches. He was a Lance Corporal in the RAMC and must more often have been risking his life bringing back casualties to field ambulances, but that got little mention. We don't know where that diary is now: lost for good, put somewhere "safe", or given away, perhaps to an archive or museum (I hope).
I recently attempted to trace letters or diaries written by "other ranks" in local regiments about particular battles on the western front in 1915. They are surprisingly scarce.
Should I be surprised? Literacy levels, military censorship, an understandable reluctance to put horrors into words, decisions by family members to either "move on" from the past or to treasure it, accident, and all the social changes of the past 90 years, have all impacted on the written record. Not just about "The War": families have probably in fact kept more wartime than peacetime letters and diaries. Rosemary Sassoon has written about this in her new book Keeping Chronicles: preserving history through written memorabilia (A&C Black, 2010). It is a passionate appeal (born of her own experiences) for families to keep "stuff". But will it be read or implemented by the people who (we might think) need to? Probably not, as we seem to belong to two rival species - hoarders and the shredders. And maybe this is just as well for the planet as well as for historians.