With the coming of Remembrance Day we thought we would publish a short note on some preliminary work we undertook on some of the Great War diaries of the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry.
We looked at the messages being passed between the officers in charge of various companies as they battled at the front and the commanders some distance behind the lines. In total there are about 200 dispatches extracted from the war diary from about a dozen officers. We wanted to know: When crises intensify at the Front, do the officers in charge write less or not at all until the fighting slows? We speculated that this would be the case owing to the confusion and the increased need for hands-on leadership at such times.
We found that on the contrary, at the times of greatest activity, messages from the officers in charge at the front not only increased in number but in length at the times of greatest activity, when the troops and their officers were under fire or in other critical situations. These urgent messages tend to be an average of two sentences longer than other non-urgent messages.
