A man who found a collection of World War One postcards 30 years ago is looking for help curating them to pay homage to the soldiers who sent them.
“I want to record the social history and help people recognise the names of the monuments to World War One all over France. These postcards show real people with real thoughts, issues, hopes, fears, annoyances and wishes,” Ian Eastwood told The Connexion.
A retired teacher, Mr Eastwood moved to France from England a decade ago, having bought a holiday home in Normandy in the early 1990s.
Ian Eastwood
While renovating the property, he found a mysterious shoebox stowed away in the roof space of a small outbuilding.
Inside were 122 postcards, six pewter spoons and a broken fobwatch, along with a couple of other items.
“For a little while, they were just a curiosity as I did not have the time to look further into them,” he said.
Over time, he and his wife, a French teacher, grew more and more interested in these wartime relics and began translating them.
They have also visited places mentioned in the letters and found the names of the soldiers on monuments.
The postcards were all addressed to Marie, a woman who used to live in their house, and were written by French soldiers between August 1914, when France mobilised its troops, and 1919, when France still occupied parts of Germany.
Some 80-90% of the postcards were written by the same five serving soldiers, who all came from the same village, and recount their daily lives.
For example, in Vosges in 1917 there was a mutiny of soldiers who were willing to defend France but not attack Germany, as they were losing too many men.
At that time, soldiers with a wife and a family would be placed at the second line of trenches while the youngest soldiers were sent to the front.
“One soldier poignantly wrote: ‘We do not talk about the young soldiers anymore’, meaning that they were all dying on the front line,” said Mr Eastwood.
“It took a long time to transcribe them. They have a beautiful script, but tiny, tiny writing,” he said.
One of the postcards Ian found in the shoeboxIan Eastwood
Two of the soldiers caught Mr and Mrs Eastwood’s eye in particular: Augustin Liot and Victor Paris, who wrote the majority of the letters.
Victor, who faced poison gas and shelling during the war, “clearly loved Marie” according to his postcards.
Unfortunately, she did not love him and was married (possibly subsequently) to another man.
“It makes me wonder why Marie chose to keep them and stash them away, probably hiding them from her husband,” said Mr Eastwood.
The correspondence is always one way but from the content, it was clear that Marie was writing back, at least to Augustin and Victor.
Over the past 30 years, Mr Eastwood has developed a relationship with the people in these postcards and come to like them, jokingly calling his favourite, Victor, “the least annoying”.
Ian Eastwood
One moment that stands out to Mr Eastwood is Victor using the term ‘marmite’ (pot, or cauldron), which confused him at first, until he found out it was used to describe trench mortar.
At one point, Victor was covered by marmite and believed to be dead, an episode he describes in the postcards. Other postcards have more mundane details, describing walks in the countryside, for example, or day-to-day activities.
Though they sometimes referred to cousins, the soldiers and Marie were not family.
The front of the postcards are interesting too: “One postcard featured a picture of a trench with soldiers and various animals such as crows, mice and dogs but no cats. It was captioned ‘in the trenches, we have everything except for a pussy to stroke’,” said Mr Eastwood.
Mr Eastwood now wants to honour the memory of these men, as well as Marie by curating the postcards in some way.
He has been working towards it for the past three decades but feels he needs someone else to help him take it over the line.
“Over the past 30 years I have had lots of ideas, ranging from a basic but well done, academic translation crossing through to maps and illustrations of stories going on to drama work or an audible reading of the letters, to a prose work.”
He is open to suggestions too: “I just want someone to take a look at the postcards and what I have done with them so far and say: ‘Yeah, I can do something with this.’ I want someone to give them a voice to describe what it was like to live during World War One.”
