WW1 memories: my grandfather's story

It all begins so cheerfully, in gorgeous weather, with the troops itching to join the great adventure abroad. As the 2nd Battalion of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry sets sail from Dublin for Le Havre on an old cargo ship, the SS Buteshire, on 14 August 1914, a chorus of hoots and sirens fills the riverside air as a large crowd sends them noisily on their way. It feels, in the words of a young medical officer on board, "like the realisation of the dream of every soldier". When they head out into the open sea and are sailing towards Land's End, a message is read out to all those on deck from King George V. "You are leaving home to fight for the safety and honour of my Empire," he tells them. "I pray God to bless you and guard you and bring you back victorious."

Just two and a half months later the same 26-year-old doctor, who kept a daily diary, beautifully written in pencil in his standard-issue Army Book 129, is holed up in a farm in northeastern France which he has chosen as his aid post, just outside a tiny village called Richebourg-l'Avoué. The battalion is already severely depleted. The retreat from Mons in August and early September and the subsequent "race to the sea" have taken a terrible toll. But what is unfolding now is even worse than what went before.

"Hell would be a tame word to describe what we went through," he writes of five dreadful days in October. On the 27th, German shells are raining down around the farm, just 100 yards behind the British fire trench, and he is struggling to cope with the wounded as they flood in. In the garden behind, British and German dead are laid out waiting to be buried as soon as the shelling dies down in the evening. "Many fell in our frontline trenches, causing awful casualties. Men were buried alive whilst others were just dug out in time and brought to, unable to stand, with their backs half broken. My cellar was soon packed, but I could not put any wounded upstairs as any minute I expected the place to be blown up." His work, dressing the injured, is so relentless and intense that at times it takes his mind off the horrors unfolding outside. But when he does pause to listen, the noise almost shatters his nerves. "Unimaginable" is how he describes his feeling at such moments. "There is nothing I know of more trying to the nerves than to sit listening to shells and wondering how long there is before one comes and finds your hiding place."

The farm survives the German fire of 27 October, but the next day at noon it starts up again. Somehow that morning he finds time to write a letter home to his parents. He thanks them for a Thermos flask they sent through the military post and says how sorry he is not to have written for a few days. The reason, he tells them, is because of the "rather trying situation" the battalion has found itself in. His private diary records the much darker reality. The 28th, he writes, "really was a sort of nightmare". "The crumps were coming just over, and then short, until 12 o'clock when there was a blinding flash and a roar. The next thing I knew was that I was leaning up against a wall in pitch darkness with the air full of dust and acrid fumes."

A shell had burst by the cellar where he was working. "After some time we heard tapping and eventually saw light through one of the windows… What a relief it was to see the light, but what a ghastly picture was revealed. Six lay dead about the cellar and many wounded. One poor RAMC orderly who had been standing next to me when the shell burst was lying dead with his chest smashed in by a huge fragment of shell."

The next day saw less shelling, but for the young doctor it was no less painful. By this time, 11 weeks into their war, he and the quartermaster, who worked well behind the front line, were the only two officers remaining of the 27 who had set sail from Dublin in August: 300 men had died in the previous nine days.

"It had been appalling seeing one's friends picked off one after the other," he writes, "and I can only marvel now that I survived. At times, when I realised all those, my pals, had gone, I nearly went off my head."

I had known since 1998, when I began to make inquiries ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the First World War, that Cyril Helm, my grandfather, had kept a diary. I was sent a copy that I think had been typed up in the 1960s by a relative in the autumn of that year. But what I had never seen until a few weeks ago were the pencil notes on which it was based almost word for word, the actual daily entries that my grandfather somehow found the time and the strength to write from his hideouts near the front amid the hell of war in the last four months of 1914 and early 1915.

My father, himself a doctor who served in Normandy in 1944, had rarely talked of his own father's First World War record, but I remembered him referring once or twice to some notes and "pieces of paper" which he thought must still be somewhere, that formed the basis of the diary.

With next year's 100th anniversary of the start of the war approaching, my interest was rekindled and I asked other members of the family to search over the summer. At first we had no luck. We assumed they had been lost as the family had divided, and spread far and wide. But then in July came an email with "great news". One of his two sons by his second marriage, a doctor and professor at the Saint Louis University Hospital, Missouri, had found the two Army Book 129s at the bottom of his father's old trunk as he was packing up in preparation to return to the UK after many years abroad.

A few weeks later, after he arrived back, I saw it for myself: 99 years on it was in almost perfect condition, a prime, contemporaneous pencil account, page after page in his own eccentric handwriting. Almost nothing could beat such a discovery, I thought, as I turned its pages for the first time.

One incident from his typed-up manuscript had always stuck in my mind, about a young soldier, and I wanted to find it. There it was, on 27 October, the same description in full. "A most pathetic thing happened that afternoon. A young gunner subaltern was on his way up to observe a machine-gun position. Just as he got outside my door a shrapnel shell burst full in front of him. The poor fellow was brought in to me absolutely riddled. He lay in my arms until he died, shrieking in his agony and said he hoped I would excuse him for making such a noise as he really could not help it. Pitiful as nothing could be done for him except an injection of morphia. I always will remember that incident, particularly as he was such a fine- looking boy, certainly not more than 19."

The books were not all I found. I was also sent, over the summer, a cache of my grandfather's letters that he had sent home to his parents, mostly in 1914 and 1915, and in which he often addressed them as "My Dearest People".

In these, he shielded his family from the worst, though time after time he wrote emotionally of his longing to come home. There were also adoring birthday greetings to his daughter, his first child, on her first and second birthdays in 1917 and 1918, with little drawings of "naughty Germans" dropping bombs and "Daddy's house" where he was dodging shells at the time. And more: a batch of finely illustrated programmes of swimming and other sports events he had arranged for troops behind the front line in the quieter times; an unopened packet of tobacco and another of cigarettes, a gift to all troops at Christmas 1914 from Princess Mary, the daughter of George V and Queen Mary, with a card wishing them "A Happy Christmas and a victorious New Year"; and photographs of the desolate scenes in and around Ypres and Passchendaele, where Cyril Helm would serve later in the war.

With this treasure trove in my possession, for so long scattered among relatives and stashed away in drawers and trunks, I contacted the Imperial War Museum, wanting it all to have a wider audience. They told me that they too were working on a similar idea for the 100th anniversary of the First World War, but on a massive 21st-century, and global, scale. It is to be called Lives of the First World War, and will be launched in February next year.

It aims to draw millions of hitherto privately held diaries, letters, photographs and other material out of people's bottom drawers, attics and cupboards and to put them on to the internet over the course of the next four years. It is a huge enterprise that will benefit from the passage of time. In many cases survivors of the war did not discuss their experiences much afterwards. Some could not bring themselves to, or did not think their families would want to know, or understand. Information was often hidden away at home, or in the recesses of their minds.

In her Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker explored the way many survivors repressed their worst memories on their return from the front and would not confront or discuss them, often with appalling psychological results. Their experiences sometimes only resurfaced in nightmares.

Now, after 100 years, the IWM is aiming to unearth those hidden histories and assemble up to 8m individual stories from those who served in different capacities, and in all parts of the world, helping their relatives to get in touch with each other and with the families of contemporaries who served alongside them. Established in 1917 with an appeal for any information and records about those who were lost and who had survived, the museum is returning to its founding purpose, but rebooting the enterprise for the internet age.

Many of the stories that will emerge, and be available at the press of a button, have tragic endings. Some 16 million people died in the First World War and another 20 million were wounded. In other cases families will discover more details about relatives, but their searches will ultimately settle nothing for them. The precise fates of many of the tens of thousands who lie anonymously in the cemeteries of northern France and Belgium under headstones bearing the words "A Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God" will remain that way – unknown to their descendants. There will however be plenty of tales, like that of Cyril Helm, that tell of miraculous escape and survival.

The first two weeks of his war were a microcosm of all that would follow. After landing in France, his battalion headed southeast until it confronted the Germans near the Belgian town of Mons. Before crossing into Belgium, life still seemed good for his contingent of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). At times he makes it sound like nothing more arduous than a trekking holiday in the August sun as local French people cheered them on and spoilt them with food along the way.

On 19 and 20 August "the men were given a splendid time in the farms in which they were billeted. People gave them as much butter and milk as they wanted, also fruit and eggs. In fact too much as I as Medical Officer found out to my cost."

On 23 August, however, on reaching Mons, they came face to face with the Germans, and the medical duties changed from tending upset stomachs to saving lives and horribly damaged limbs. Shrapnel shells burst over their billets for the first time and many were wounded and killed. The generals decided they should retreat and a long march ensued towards the French town of Le Cateau.

Although it was a hard slog there were many compensations. "The country in this region was beautiful, miles and miles of rolling hills covered with ripe corn. The wild flowers were gorgeous and all the vegetation most luxurious. By this time we were as brown as berries." But on 26 August the Germans caught up with them at Le Cateau and they got a foretaste of things to come.

Helm became separated from the battalion as he treated the wounded, and was shocked when he came across what was left of it later in the day. "I found the remains of my battalion in a corner of a field and was horrified to find that we mustered seven officers and about 150 men. Roughly speaking 18 officers and 700 of our men were killed wounded or missing on that day." They had been in mainland Europe for just 11 days.

Over the next few weeks there are short idyllic interludes as they head north. He enjoys picking the ripe fruit from the sides of the roads and the men steal into local gardens to get more. The officers take occasional refuge in French châteaux. But most days see skirmishes and brushes with death.

On 15 September they end up by the river Aisne, horribly exposed to the Germans on the other side. The men are told to lie on their stomachs in a single line next to a row of trees. "We knew we had been seen by the German observers and almost immediately four high explosive 5.9 [inches in diameter] shells burst together, exactly over our heads. They were beautifully timed and only a few yards above us. The scene after that was appalling. A great many men had been killed."

Helm describes in his army book the "groans of the wounded" as being "too nerve-racking for words" and admits he felt "like running away", but could not as he had to "set an example to the men." "My thoughts were indescribable as I realised that lying on my belly the next shell might blow me to smithereens." Next to him, an orderly corporal was "frightfully shattered, one of his legs being completely blown away. Of course his death was instantaneous!"

Officer morale was restored a little, some days later, at the French village of Guiscard when the mayor entertained the valiant few still standing in his chateau. "The Mayor was a charming man," my grandfather wrote on 1 October. "When we arrived he prepared a very recherche dinner with champagne."

Another letter was written home on 15 October. He was homesick and frustrated but full of praise for the troops. "The war is expected to last until the spring. The prospect is too awful as we are all heartily sick of it and have no nerves left – but our soldiers are really wonderful the way they fight." In mid-November, two weeks after surviving the German pounding near Richebourg-l'Avoué, Cyril Helm was told he was to be given a rest from the regiment and would switch to No 15 Field Ambulance. "I was not sorry at all as all my friends were gone," he writes, "and the few officers remaining were comparative strangers to me. If any of my old friends had been there I would have applied to stay, hating the thought of leaving them."

Life behind the front line was calmer for periods, but sometimes "strenuous to an extreme". The first battle of Ypres was under way and as transport officer he had 70 horses to look after. Stationed two miles behind the front line his job was to take the horse-drawn ambulances out at 9pm before leaving them not far from the trenches. Stretcher bearers would then trudge back and forth through the muddy fields to the regimental aid posts and bring the wounded back from there. "It was very cold-blooded work as bullets were whistling round the whole time… The bearers had an awful time getting the lying cases back across the sodden country, the worst part being the negotiation of ditches full of water." On one occasion a bullet landed between his legs and he wished it had struck his foot so he could have taken some desperately needed leave.

On Christmas Day 1914 he sat down and wrote again to his parents, and his wife. "Just a line to wish you all a Happy New Year and to thank you for all the presents you have given me," he began. But he ended on a note that betrayed how hard he was finding it to be apart. "It seems awfully unnatural to be spending Xmas away from home and makes me feel more homesick than ever. Your loving boy, Cyril."

Two days later he wrote home again relating details of the now famous festive cessation of hostilities on Christmas Day. "The Germans and our men met between the trenches and gave each other cigars and cigarettes. They then sang hymns together and were very jolly. The officers did the same and some of ours lunched in their trenches… A lot of the Germans spoke English and said they were heartily sick of the war. They said they hated the Kaiser and long live good old King George."

On 1 January 1915 he was awarded the Military Cross. In 1917 he would also receive the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). From early 1915, however, the entries in his diary become far fewer. On Easter day 1915 he went up to Ypres where he stayed in the remains of a convent until the shelling became so bad that all troops and local people had to leave. Much of the town had already been pummelled by German shells, but a good many civilians had insisted on remaining. "It was an absurd sight to see pretty girls dressed in the latest fashions looking into hat shops which consisted of one storey only, all the rest having been blown away."

In late April, shortly after the Germans launched gas attacks on the allied lines north of Ypres, my grandfather was evacuated sick to England. For some reason his diary ends there. The notes in his army book stop, too, though his letters continue. On 18 February 1917 he wrote to his one-year-old daughter to wish her a happy birthday. "My Darling Little Sheila," he says, "Poor Daddy wishes he could be with you, but owing to a nasty thing called war he cannot manage it. Be a good little girl and love your Mummy. With lots and lots of love and kisses, from Daddy."

In a postscript added to his diary years later he accounts for the rest of his war, from early 1915 on, in a couple of paragraphs. He says that after two months at home in spring and early summer that year he returned to the front to take command of No 15 Motor Ambulance Convoy. Later he was put in charge of advanced dressing stations in the Inverness Copse and Passchendaele sectors and eventually took part in the final attacks that ended the war in 1918.

He would serve again in the Second World War, first in West Africa; and then a week after D Day he commanded the first 600-bed mobile hospital to be established in occupied Europe at Bayeux, Normandy. He was appointed an OBE in 1945, and after the war returned to work as a general practitioner. He died in 1972 aged 83.

I have no idea why he stopped writing his diaries so early in the war. Perhaps he couldn't bear to carry on, or he thought he had said all there was to say about one man's survival during those first few dreadful months. Whatever the reason, I would love to find out more. Perhaps with the centenary approaching and the internet at our disposal, the families of soldiers and officers who served with him will get in touch, with private accounts from their attics and trunks, and together we can all build a fuller picture of what they all went through 100 years ago.

Sharing your wartime stories

Like the Imperial War Museum, we would love to see your letters, stories and photographs of any relatives or friends who were involved in the First World War. Whether they were in active service, or in some supporting role at home or abroad, you can tell their story in our GuardianWitness assignment. Find out more at theguardian.com/witness