When his country called for service during the First World War, Winnipeg university student Walter Eggertson answered.
"He was a private, and eventually promoted to sergeant," said University of Manitoba archivist Natalie Vielfaure.
Deployed to France, the Manitoba soldier would face bullets and poison gas. He would chronicle it all in two small diaries he kept by his side throughout the war. One passage reading, “shelled very heavily at night both by explosives & gas. On duty with mask on for a total of 3 hrs.”
Those two diaries with his entire war experience were later brought home.
"They're still pretty startling for someone who hasn't read war diaries like this," said Vielfaure.
But reading war diaries like Eggertson's is a challenge for several reasons unrelated to content. The ink and pencil dashed across the pages a century ago is fading away.
"Some has held up terribly," said Christine Bone, who was tasked with transcribing the diaries.
Bone says even the passages that haven't faded are a challenge to decipher, because they're written longhand.
"So, you've got cursive handwriting, that isn't always the best handwriting, especially when he's under stress, and sometimes misspelled."
Bone says she spent about two weeks painstakingly pouring over Eggertson's diaries to make sense of each word. She then transcribed them into a digital copy.
"In the end there were some I just couldn't get," said Bone. "There were probably half a dozen or so that I just couldn't even make a guess at."
But with cursive writing not being used by many people these days, archivists worry it will become impossible for many people to read diaries like Eggertson's in the future. "The numbers are decreasing definitely," said Natalie Vielfaure. "And I think it’s going to become more of a challenge going forward."
But by transcribing written words into digitized text, the University of Manitoba's archives department is ensuring the accounts of people like Eggertson will be available for generations to come.
