Tweets from the Trenches

FROM AN AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST COMES AN EXTRAORDINARY COLLECTION OF over 150 tiny accounts of what it meant to be on the ground in World War I. Published in the centenary of the critical last days of the “Great War,” Tweets from the Trenches: Little True Stories of Life & Death on the Western is an odyssey into the dugouts of WWI history. Written in flash documentary creative non-fiction, it encompasses excerpts of journals, letters and memoirs of Allied participants from Prince Edward Island to Yorkshire to South Carolina. With a picture on almost every page, the war unfolds chronologically in stories of valour and heartbreak, on everything from rationed rum and brave homing pigeons to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Author Jacqueline Larson Carmichael had two grandfathers on the ground with the Canadian Expeditionary Force throughout the fiery battle on the Western Front. Her curiosity about their  experience led to walking on the Western Front herself as part of a research project.

As a social media experiment, the seasoned journalist gave Black Jack a Twitter account of his own, posting in his name on Twitter and Facebook – as if he were posting from the trenches of Flanders, Belgium and France. She envisioned her grandfather, @BlackJackVowel or #AlbertaWorldWarISoldier, ‘hunkered down under a hunk of tin’ amidst pouring rain and artillery fire, desperately trying to be safe, while using a smartphone to communicate with loved ones a world away.

In 2016, on a travel writing research trip, Carmichael traveled to Belgium, France and Germany, and walked portions of the Western Front where both her grandfathers were soldiers for most of the duration of World War I.

The long-time journalist, whose work has been seen in The Dallas Morning News, the Toronto Sun, Entrepreneur Magazine, found footnoted flash documentary creative non-fiction a great way to quickly tell little stories pulled from history. A fast-paced scrapbook presentation style runs from haiku to memoir excerpt to ornamental concrete poems, gathering momentum in chronological order of the war. Chapter headings timeline the war to help orient the stories year by year in the bigger picture, punctuated with images of WWI-era photos, postcards, and documents, and modern-era photos from the Western Front. The British Columbia resident ventures out past accounts of soldiers and battles to include a nurse executed in German-occupied Belgium for rescuing British soldiers, men “Shot At Dawn” under charges of desertion or cowardice, women cross-dressing to get into battle, terse memoir excerpts of an escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp, and the last letter home from an Olympian.

Life after battle – including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – is addressed in a series of pieces that include the dramatic example of Canadian Member of Parliament Samuel Simpson Sharpe, whos...