THE pocket diary of a World War One soldier from West Ealing, Rifleman William Eve, has been posted online exactly 100 years later.

The extracts reveal, in horrific detail, dramatic artillery exchanges and sniper fire against a backdrop of punishing rain and cold.

The men of the British Expeditionary Forces were facing the grim reality of their first winter on the front line.

And Rifleman Eve’s diary gives a sense of the wretchedness they faced and is revealed for the first time this week on the National Army Museum’s website.

One entry notes it poured with rain all day and all night.

He writes: “Dropped blanket and fur coat in the water. Slipped down as getting up parapet, got soaked up to waist.”

The entry continues: “Had no dug-out to sleep in, so had to chop and change about”.

The harsh winter caused enormous suffering among soldiers, but they were required to remain on the front line.

Accumulating water meant the trenches quickly turned into bitterly cold and fetid mud baths, sometimes up to waist deep.

It was impossible for the men to stay dry in the squalid environment and many suffered with painful and debilitating ‘trench foot’, a condition manifesting in blisters and infections and often leading to gangrene and amputation.

Rifleman Eve’s diary tells how he was “paraded sick with feet”, though not before seeing considerable action.

A few days before recording his sickness, a response to heavy shelling from the Germans is noted: “Excellent firing, the brewery being shattered, saw chimney fall.

“Snipers shot … before going through the officers’ hut, missing them by about a foot. The best bit of fun we’ve had.”

Describing exchanges of gun-fire with such irony compounds the sadness of the conditions he must have endured.

He was, however, fortunate to survive the War.

Eve’s later entries for January 1915 record more friendly encounters with people he met when he was out of the front line, including warm hospitality from people in France.

His journey back to England via Boulogne and finally on a hospital train is also noted.

Eve, who had been born the son of a silversmith in Clapham in 1894, went on to recover from trench foot and continued to serve his country, achieving two promotions.

Following the War, he moved from Highworth Gardens, Midhurst Road in West Ealing to Harrow and later married and lived in Surrey, where he died in 1981.

His full story appears alongside his diary entries in the Soldiers’ Stories series on the NAM's commemorative portal, First World War in Focus.

These personal accounts are being unveiled month by month and piece together the development of the war from the point of view of those directly involved – 100 years from the time they describe.

The museum hopes that, in sharing these personal stories, the human scale and impact of The Great War can be better felt and understood.

The extracts can be seen on the Museum website here: http://www.nam.ac.uk/microsites/ww1/stories/rifleman-william-eve/#.VMkOO9425z8