Portrait of a soldier - Private Archie Surfleet

Although, in the minds of the British public, the story of the first day of the Somme offensive has become particularly associated with the ordeal and sacrifice of the locally raised 'Pals' battalions, not all men in those units on 1 July 1916 were original 1914 recruits. Private Arthur 'Archie' Surfleet, for example, was at Serre that day with the 13th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment - one of four battalions raised by the city of Hull - but he had not enlisted until January 1916 and had only joined 'B' Company of his unit at the front on 8 June. From the start, however, he kept a diary, adding details in the 1920s and 1960s to form a lively and lucid account of a young soldier's service.

Archie Surfleet was born at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, on 23 December 1896 and moved to Hull with his family in 1901. Educated at Hull Grammar School, he worked as a junior reporter for the Hull Daily Mail for about a year before joining a firm of manufacturing chemists, Lofthouse and Saltmer, where his father was a laboratory manager. He enlisted in the Army shortly after his nineteenth birthday. Archie himself confessed to being 'a very ordinary soldier, alternately cheerful and frightened some of the time, and very frightened indeed for much of it', though he also noted how quickly he and his comrades adjusted to their new life. 'After a period of blissful ignorance', he recalled, 'many of us who saw the front line frequently often acquired a sort of fatalistic outlook, but, by some gift of Providence, we nearly always seemed to remember the happier times and forget much of the horror.'

Archie rapidly became familiar with many of the routine hardships of an infantryman's existence. He described the ubiquitous body lice as one of the most unpleasant things he had to endure - 'as soon as you warmed up they did so too, biting and irritating so that only utter exhaustion could induce sleep'. Rats were also a common nuisance, although 'strangely enough, we got partially used to them'. Some of the more primitive latrines, Surfleet remarked, 'made you feel you had plumbed the depths of indelicacy . But we even got used to that!' Food was adequate, if never over-plentiful - 'we often popped the rice pud, unsweetened anyway, into the bully-stew to give it a bit of "body"'. If one was lucky enough to obtain a quarter of a loaf, 'you felt well-fed and happy', he remembered. The constant demands for working or carrying parties always provoked widespread 'grousing' among the infantry. Even before the Somme offensive, such tasks caused Surfleet to comment that 'we all are as fed [up] as hell with this lot. The jobs we get are simply heart-breakingly, almost inhumanly impossible but they have to be done, somehow, and I marvel, daily, that we stick it.'

Entering the battle-zone for a tour of front line duty was always a sobering moment. Approaching the Serre sector for the first time, on 11 June 1916, Surfleet noted 'a kind of torpor peculiar to that shell-infested area came over us'. His introduction to German shelling was 'a terrible experience. The feeling was so utterly indescribable that I cannot hope to portray it; God alone knows how awfully afraid I was.' Archie estimated that 'not one in a thousand goes "up there" without some qualm or other, though most of the lads seem to be able to disguise their feelings pretty well'. There was one man, however, who suffered from shell-shock at Serre in June and succumbed again in the Laventie sector later in July. He was taken out of the line, Archie recorded, 'a really pitiable sight and most unnerving'.

Once out of the line, morale was swiftly restored. In the autumn of 1916 Archie wrote that the boys 'seem very cheerful just now; a few days of peace and sunshine makes all the difference'. The opportunity to spend some francs from their pay on egg and chips or wine and beer in local estaminets helped men briefly forget the terrors of the trenches. Hitherto a strict teetotaller, Surfleet warily sampled his first-ever beer on 6 July: 'I must say I did not find it unpleasant and, so far, I have not felt any of the "after-effects" usually attributed to this stuff!' He did not condemn those who over-indulged in order to blot out the realities of the war. 'There is no wonder those who have a tendency towards drink try to drown their sorrows whenever they get a chance', he commented on 21 July.

Normal grousing aside, Surfleet was clearly a dutiful soldier who respected most of his officers. Theirs was 'a thankless job', he stated in the summer of 1916, later adding, 'I wouldn't be an infantry officer for a mint of money'. He observed with approval how his officers were 'jolly decent' in carrying the rifles of exhausted men during a march in July. He was even impressed by his corps commander, Hunter-Weston, who, in Surfleet's view, 'looked such a real soldier', but he was roused to anger by the sight of a gunner, lashed to a wheel, undergoing Field Punishment No.1. To Surfleet, this seemed 'anti-British' and he wrote that 'feelings amongst our boys' were 'very near to mutiny at such inhuman punishment'.

Archie was fortunate that on 1 July the 31st Division's catastrophic assault on Serre was called off before the Hull battalions, in support, were committed to the attack. In August he was made a linesman with the signallers attached to Battalion Headquarters. Repairing damaged telephone cables under fire was a dangerous job though 'better than the rifleman's life' in Archie's opinion. When his division returned to the Somme for another attack on Serre on 13 November, he was again lucky, being among the troops left in the rear to form the nucleus of a reconstituted battalion in the event of heavy losses. He was, however, required to act as a stretcher-bearer - a harrowing job, but one allowing him to 'look the rest of the lads in the face and claim to be one of them'. Sometimes Archie understandably felt despondent, writing in September, 'our only hope is a good, serious wound to put us out of this lot', yet when in December sickness gave him the opportunity to go to hospital, he declined, not wishing to be parted from his mates. 'This may be hell', he declared, 'but I'd sooner be here, with my pals, than landed with strangers in another, maybe worse, hell'. Such comradeship was perhaps the biggest single factor in enabling soldiers to bear the horrors of the Western Front.

Surfleet continued to serve as a private until March 1918, when he went home to train for a flying commission in the Royal Flying Corps - soon to become the Royal Air Force. After the war he returned to his previous employers, Lofthouse and Saltmer, and was joint managing director of the firm before retiring in 1962. He died, aged 74, in April 1971, just after depositing a copy of his diary in the Imperial War Museum.

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