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  • Printing, Writing and a Family Archive: Recording the First World War
  • Michèle Barrett (bio) and Peter Stallybrass (bio)

On 14 August 1916, Eric Layton addressed a British Army Field Service Post Card to his brother Cyril, who was then serving in the Navy and based at Chatham. On the reverse of the card he deleted the phrases that didn’t apply and signed it. Two days later it was stamped at Field Post Office 184, near where he was stationed in the Somme sector of the Western Front, and sent on its way. This postcard, no doubt one of many that Eric sent during his two years at war, has been preserved among the Layton family’s papers (Figs 1 and 2). British Army Form A2042, the Field Service Post Card, offered the sender a list of statements to be left standing as printed or be deleted by hand. This Field Service Post Card is Eric Layton’s last surviving writing. A paradoxical piece of writing, it begins with the printed instructions: ‘NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed ’.

What Eric had actually ‘written’ was composed mainly by crossing out most of the printed statements: ‘I have been admitted into hospital’; ‘ I am being sent down to the base ’; ‘ I have received no letter from you lately/for a long time ’. He left the remaining sentences, which did apply to him, un-crossed out: ‘I am quite well’; ‘I have received your letter dated’; ‘Letter follows at the first opportunity’. And finally he filled in by hand four blank spaces: two dates, that of the last letter he received and that of the card he had just filled; his signature, next to the printed ‘Signature only’ (in bold); and, on the other side of the card, his brother’s name and address.

The Field Service Post Card, where the soldier had few choices and none that might express his state of mind, has been seen as the epitome of bureaucratization and alienation. In his classic study, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell notes that ‘millions and millions’ of them were sent back from the front.1 He suggests that ‘the Field Service Post Card has the honor of being the first widespread exemplar of that kind of document which uniquely characterizes the modern world: the “Form”. It is the progenitor of all modern forms on which you fill in things or cross out things or check off things ...’. [End Page 1]


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Fig. 1.

Eric Layton’s Field Service Post Card, sent from the Somme to his brother Cyril on 16 August 1916. It is Eric’s last surviving writing.


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Fig. 2.

Eric Layton’s Field Service Post Card (back).

[End Page 2]

Fussell fails to note, however, that there was a simple reason for the success of the Field Service Post Card: it was designed to avoid a bureaucratic process. The FSPC was one of a number of forms introduced by the Army Postal Service to speed mails by bypassing time-consuming censorship without compromising sensitive information. Because both the card and its delivery were free of charge, troops were encouraged to use it in addition to the other letters that they sent.2

Soldiers, who knew that the papers at home were full of engagements on the Western Front, could send an ‘I am quite well’ message that would reach their families within a day or two. At the attack on Messines Ridge in June 1917, a stack of these postcards were available for use by the ‘lightly wounded’ as they came to the Casualty Clearing Stations and ‘special steps were taken to send them by a late night service to the Army Depot in time to connect with the lorry service to the Base and to England’. The cards reached England only twelve hours after they had been posted.3 And although the postcard clearly stated that ‘if anything else is added [the postcard...

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