We're Not Dead Yet: The First World War Diary of Private Bert Cooke

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

This new addition to Vanwell’s Voices of War series presents excerpts
from the diary of Herbert Bryant “Bert” Cooke, a soldier in the 75th
Canadian Battalion in France and Belgium during the First World War.
Milly Walsh, a relative of Cooke’s, collaborated with John Callan in
writing this slim but informative memoir, and provided many of the
book’s photographs. The authors wisely offer much of Bert Cook’s
original wording verbatim, interspersed with explanatory passages that
provide historical perspective.

Like many World War I volunteers in the Canadian Army, Bert Cook was an
immigrant from Britain. In fact, he arrived here with barely enough time
to establish his butcher shop in Toronto before war was declared against
Germany in 1914. Though he was aged 35 and had a wife and two small
boys, he soon joined up to do his bit in what he considered a righteous
war against “those cursed Huns.” Shortly after enlisting, he started
a diary, as if anticipating his future involvement in momentous events.

The letters he sent to his wife after he reached the front line are a
grim catalogue of discomfort and constant danger: “God knows how our
boys in the trenches have had to suffer, especially in the winter with
the cold and the mud and not the right kind of food for this weather…
a horrifying experience. Sometimes, as they stand by your side. Your
pals are blown to pieces. … Our visitors are the rats and vermin
crawling all over us … Occasionally a joke or two kept up our
spirits.”

No skilled novelist could express the sacrifices and brutal realities
of that distant war any better than this unassuming citizen-soldier. His
diaries help us get to know Bert Cooke, so it is a pleasure to learn he
survived it all and came home to enjoy a long, happy life with his loved
ones.