Random Trench Orders

No. 14 Platoon Trench Orders

1. Equipment must be worn at all times.

2. Sand bags are placed in each fire tray for the collection of Rubbish Dirty Ammunition and Empties and must be used for that purpose. Tins, broken food and other litter must not be thrown about the trench of into sump holes.

3. The N.C.O. in charge of each section will be held personally responsible for the cleanliness of the respective fire bays and sector of trench.

4. It is of great importance that the covers of latrine tins be lowered after use.

SENTRIES – All Sentries must know Number of their post also number of trench sector. The Waiting man must get up and Report "number of post and sector 'all correct'" WHENEVER an officer passes.

Sentries must not have their meals while on look out. N.C.O. on duty must relieve them for sufficient time to enable them to eat each meal.

Waiting man to sit NEXT to sentry on periscope. Sentries must stand where periscope can be arranged for this to be done. By night both sentries stand and look OVER top. Waiting men are to fire should a target be spotted by sentry, to rouse the platoon in case of alarm and to fetch N.C.O. on watch should it be necessary to draw this attention to anything.

D.O. Wilson 2nd Lieut
Platoon Commander

(In an envelope addressed to Field Post Office 12. Postmark Jy 21 16)

Dates, and things

When I read the letter from the previous post (Trench Orders), I took it to be from World War II, until I glanced at the envelope. Oops. Admittedly, it's handwritten on a plain type of paper but I'm not usually that far off. I'm getting pretty good at dating manuscripts and books.

Objects, generally not. I can find books and guides that say when certain material or styles came into use. I can match worn hall marks to images in books. I can look up manufacturers' addresses in the newspapers. But it's only ever an educated guess. Unless I can get confirmation from at least two sources (provenance + style, hall mark + manufacturer's name) then I never felt confident putting a date to objects. This is complicated because I am poor at identifying materials. (I have told the story of the fake tortoiseshell glasses?) This is for the same reason: because I don't know what I'm handling, I can't pick up the clues that let me identify it. I can handle all the "yellow metal" objects I like, but I don't know if they're brass or bronze or something else. But silver I can usually tell, because I've handled objects I know are silver from their hallmarks. Plastic? Bone? I don't know. And add to this that, um, certain materials don't age noticably so it's all very confusing.

But printed materials and manuscripts? They usually come with a date, and after a while I've come to associate particular paper types, writing styles, photo printing, bindings, layouts, decorations with certain periods. I can't always deliberately give something a date (except for books, they have more clues), but when I pick something up, I know what date range to expect or if a date given by a 3rd party is wrong. (I should add, when I grumble about the lack of a century on a date, it's not because I don't know the century--if I can't tell an 1830 manuscript from a 1930 manuscript by now, I shouldn't be doing this--but because I can't tell if I'm looking at a date. The beginning of the 20th C is particularly difficult for this. Is 12-1-16 a date or a price or a sorting code? In the first decade, they didn't always include the 0, so I'm looking at looking at some ledgers and wondering why nothing was dated, then I realised 23/1/7 WAS a date. Bah.)

Of course, sometimes I get caught out. I have my own assumptions about things, that are not always right. A "spirit-copy" of a typed invoice would be from... 1905? Uh. A bound cheque book would be from, um, 1869?? It's a learning process.

This is important, to me, because it's a matter of confidence in what I know. With the first realisation that I could date these things with some degree of accuracy, came another realisation that I knew what I was doing. That was a while back. As I learn more about that strange place called the past from the contents of the manuscripts, I'm also getting better at putting dates on them. I am good.