RARE personal diaries and letters vividly describing the personal experiences and hardships faced by British soldiers during the First World War have been published for the first time.

The fascinating insights, which include accounts penned one hundred years ago by our gallant men in various theatres of war, are being published by the National Army Museum.

Among the various accounts are the letters written by Winchester-born Regimental Sergeant Major Arthur Harrington of 5th (City of London) Battalion, The London Regiment (London Rifle Brigade), which reveal the excitement, uncertainty and fear felt by soldiers following the outbreak of war.

When war was announced in 1914, Britain entered the fray with a small, professional army that was primarily designed to police its overseas Empire. The entire force consisted of just over 250,000 Regulars, which, together with 250,000 Territorials and 200,000 Reservists, made a total of about 700,000 trained soldiers, which was tiny in comparison to the mass conscripted forces being mobilised by the armies of Germany, France and Russia.

While many expected the war to be ‘over by Christmas’, the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, realised the conflict would be long and on an unprecedented scale.

Britain would have to create a mass army for the first time, and he therefore appealed for volunteers to step into the breach in August 1914.

It was at this time that Regimental Sergeant Major Harrington penned a letter to his wife revealing his feelings of anticipation and excitement following his recall to his unit at 130 Bunhill Row in London.

“It is pretty certain that we shall not be allowed home as before… Everything is going very well but of course I am slogging 12 hours a day and will have to do so for a while… It looks as if the greatest battle in the history of the world will soon be in progress,” claimed Harrington.

In the days and weeks that followed the gravity of the situation clearly starts to affect Harrington as letters home to his pregnant wife begin to be concerned with financial worries as Harrington patiently awaited further details of when and where his battalion would be mobilised.

However, a welcome break from his punishing workload came some weeks later when Harrington was lucky enough to his wife and daughter when they visited the camp at Bisley. A letter sent the day after gushed, ‘It gave me great pleasure yesterday to see you and our little darling looking so well as you did… We must be thankful for the happy reunion and await another opportunity.”

In late October 1914, after days of speculation, Harrington wrote to his wife with news of his imminent departure abroad.

“We were all under the impression that our destination was to be South Africa, then we were informed it would be the Continent though anything more definite than that we have not yet been told,” he wrote.

His letter attempts to reassure and allay the fears of his anxious wife by telling her that he would “not be sent anywhere near any fighting but be employed in guarding lines of communication”.

Arthur’s unit eventually landed at Le Havre in France on November 17, 1914, where they were immediately thrown into the action as reinforcements for the hard-pressed BEF.

Harrington’s belief that the Territorials would not see action proved to be unfounded. He was killed on 28 April 1915 by a shell blast while having his breakfast in a farmhouse at St Jean during the second Battle of Ypres.

Another of the accounts, provided by Lieutenant Henry Curtis Gallup, who was attached to the Hampshire Howziter Battery of the Royal Field Artillery, provides an eye-witness account of a defeat in Mesopotamia that shocked the British Empire.

During the six-month Siege of Kut-al-Amara, British troops experienced starvation, a lack of ammunition and widespread disease – all of which led to eventual surrender in April 1916.

Following Turkey’s entry into the war in 1914, Britain landed troops in Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq. Britain needed to protect its oil supplies and the British command was confident that they could rally the Arabs by defeating Turkey.

Gallup’s unit, the Hampshire Howziter Battery, Royal Field Artillery, was sent to this unfamiliar land and ordered to advance some 250 miles (400km) into Mesopotamia, to Kut and then Baghdad.

By November 1915 the British forces had made good headway to Kut. Their triumph was short lived though, as they quickly found themselves outnumbered and under intense pressure, having encountered relentless attacks from the Turkish forces.

Gallup’s diary entries detail how continuous Turkish offensives, and the insufferable conditions these ill-fated men had to endure, eventually wore down the exhausted British forces.

In one entry for November 21 to 23, he declares himself to be: "I was "frightfully weary and utterly sick of the sound of rifle bullets".

By December 1915 food supplies were desperately low and the prospect of starvation was looming in the months ahead, forcing the soldiers to eat their horses. By the end of April 1916 the Kut garrison was starving, sickness was rife, and with no prospect for relief they surrendered on April 29.

Around 13,000 men, including Gallup, marched into captivity where they faced "fleas", "dirty water" and "cramped conditions", which caused a third of the men to die from disease, malnutrition and cruel treatment by the Turks.

Gallup, who was born in Bloomsbury, London, in 1874 and later moved to Sussex and then Wiltshire with his parents, survived captivity and was repatriated at the end of the war. He went on to become a major and died on November 3, 1942, at Langstone Manor, Brentor, a village in west Devon.

The diaries and letters are being published by the National Army Museum’s commemorative online portal, First World War in Focus, as part of its Soldiers’ Stories series.

The museum's Dr Peter Johnston, from the museum, said: "The diaries and letters offer a unique glimpse into the battles that are sometimes forgotten but are nevertheless important to British history. ‘’They allow us to understand what it was like to be a victim of war and the perils that came with it as well as the desire for home comforts, like chocolate, that added to the hardships faced by First World War soldiers."

The diaries can be found at nam.ac.uk/microsites/ww1/stories.