Norman Crandles on the Villa mailing list posted the following and I thought it deserves a wider audience

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We know of our illustrious past, stretching back to 1874, when the very name of our team was a colonial byword. We`ve discussed it on here many times. I`m currently reading ” The Making of Modern Britain – Queen Victoria to V.E. Day” by Andrew Marr. I `ve just arrived at The Great War. In the hellholes of Ypres, in February 1916, a Capt. F.J.Roberts (M.C.) somehow contrived to produce a ‘newspaper’ ‘ The Wipers Times’.

pg. 131.

‘….The Wipers Times is a fascinating record because it reminds us that in the middle of the horror, many people were not reflecting on religion or politics but were just trying to get by with the same facetious humour and gossip they always liked. Edwardian Britain was a place of bad jokes, bad verse and horsing about, as well as a country in crisis; and the British Expeditionary Force was like that too. One extract of anonymous doggeral perhaps tells us more about how the poor bloody infantry was really thinking than the protest poetry of Owen or Sassoon:

Three Tommies sat in the trench one day,
Discussing the war in the normal way,
They talked of the mud, and they talked of the Hun
Of what was to do, and what had been done.
They talked about rum……
But the point which they argued from post back to pillar,
Was whether Notts County could beat Aston Villa. ……’