Great war memoirs of a trench soldier reveal 'Blackadder' humour

In Captain Alexander Stewart of 3rd Scottish Rifles, the BBC's comic anti-hero would have found a kindred spirit.

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The officer's previously unseen Great War diary reveals the black comedy of the trenches which masked the heroism and the horror.

Captain Stewart's diary, which has been published for the first time, reveals how on one occasion he struggled to shoot straight during a battle because of his pipe.

He wrote: "After my third or fourth shot, I found that the bowl of my pipe and the smoke from it was obscuring my line of vision as I was firing slightly downwards all the time. Much to my annoyance, I had to put my pipe in my pocket alight as it was; it was lucky that it did not burn my jacket.

"Just as I got my rifle working I saw a man in the trench calmly kneeling down and taking an aim at me. At the moment I saw him he fired. But in a miraculous way he missed."

The memoirs, entitled The Experiences of a Very Unimportant Officer, were written shortly after Captain Stewart returned home from the battlefields after being injured in 1917.

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In them, he details his annoyance at being woken up by pointless edicts from headquarters asking him how many socks his men have.

"I reply 141 and a half. I then go to sleep; back comes a memo: "please explain at once how you come to be deficient of one sock". I reply "man lost his leg". That's how we make the Huns sit up."

He also records his sleep being disturbed by rats licking the styling cream off his hair.

Captain Stewart made just three copies of his memoirs. They remained undisturbed for almost 70 years until his grandson, Jaime Stewart, 49, stumbled across them.

Mr Stewart, an actor from Bristol, said: "Until now it has only been read by one or two members of my family and close friends.

"But now I'd like to share this amazing piece of personal history of his time in the trenches."

Captain Stewart was commissioned by the Scottish regiment, the Cameronians, in 1915 and, aged 39, was sent to France to command C Company after his training.

His diary records how many of his comrades suffered shell shock followingone episode of heavy shelling in July 1916, a fortnight after the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. He also wrote about a "plague of fat and dirty flies" which covered the bodies of hundreds of fallen men.

Following two years on the frontline, Captain Stewart was sent home to Richmond, Surrey, when he was injured by shrapnel.

Describing the injury, he wrote: "I started to cough and brought up some blood and a bit of the shell which must have stuck in my wind pipe. My servant very kindly retrieved the bit of iron out of the mud and, handing it to me, remarked that I might like to keep it. This I did and my wife has it now."

Captain Stewart suffered severe post-traumatic and spoke little of his experiences before his death in 1964, at the age of 86.

His son, Thomas Stewart, 84, said: "He wanted to record what it was like, and he wrote well. For many years after the war he would wake up screaming in the night, but he never talked about it."