author
d. 1915
A young South African-born rifleman left behind a brief, vivid World War I diary that still feels immediate more than a century later. His writing captures both the routine and the shock of trench warfare with unusual directness.
Bernard Castle Stubbs was a South African-born writer and soldier whose surviving work is his wartime diary, later published as Diary Kept by Rifleman B. C. Stubbs of the Second Draft Sent to the Queen Victoria Rifles in France. Records connected with that edition identify him as having been born around 1891 and dying in 1915.
Before the war, he worked for the Union-Castle Line at its Fenchurch Street offices in London. When World War I began, he joined the 9th Battalion London Regiment, better known as the Queen Victoria's Rifles, and volunteered for an early draft to France.
Stubbs's diary covers his service in 1915 and ends shortly before his death that June. Though short, it has endured as a clear, personal account of a young soldier's life at the front, valued today for its immediacy and its glimpse of the human side of the First World War.