A Lance-Corporal heard in the trenches of his wife’s misconduct. His commanding officer wrote to make inquiries, and the soldier wrote to the Chief Constable a pitiful letter: “What have I to look forward to at the end of the war?” he said. “Nothing, only sorrow. I never get a letter to know how my loving son is getting on; I think it will drive me mad.”
He came home, opened the door of his house, threw his kit on the floor, and declared that he would kill his wife. He put a razor on the table, and his little boy hid it in a cupboard, but a week later this boy of 12 went home and found his father and mother lying on the floor, the father drunk, the mother dead. The soldier, drowning his misery in drink, had strangled his wife. Rousing himself beside her, he said, as the police found them, “Kiss me, Sally. Aye, but tha are poorly.”
He had been the best of fathers, said the little boy; the best of soldiers, said his commanding officer; and the judge declared that such a man, with such a character, ought not to be with criminals.
Record of Huddersfield Assizes, Autumn 1916
A soldier asked a London magistrate if he could draw the allowance instead of his wife, who was in prison for drunkenness and was neglecting his four children. The magistrate said the only thing was to send the children to the workhouse.
The Soldier: “So I am to be a soldier for my King and country while my children go to the workhouse?” The Magistrate: “That is so, because you have a drunken wife. I am sorry for you.”
Facts in “Sunday Herald,” June 1916
A seaman gunner, who had been torpedoed and had fought in the trenches, arrived home to find his wife, in his own words, “filthy drunk,” and his children utterly deplorable. He reclothed them, but his wife pawned the clothes, though she had £7 a month. He took his children away, but a crowd of women interfered with him, and the police were powerless against the mob.
Facts in “Western Daily Mercury,” July 23, 1915
A soldier just back from the Front was found in the street weeping bitterly on discovering that his wife was in gaol through drink, and his child, through her neglect, had been burned.