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Within the Ransom Center’s extensive collection of papers of British author and poet Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) is a group of printed maps. These maps came into Blunden’s possession during his service as an officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment during World War I. Most of the maps are British Ordnance Survey trench maps detailing various sectors in southwestern Belgium in the vicinity of Ypres and are what one might expect to find among the papers of an officer veteran of a conflict. One, however, differs in that it was acquired by then Lt. Blunden in the village of St. Julien under unusual circumstances.

On this map he has written “German map brought back by me from pillbox near St. Julien in the battle of July 31, 1917.”

That day was the first of the campaign known as Third Ypres or, by a name having special resonance, as Passchendaele. The village of St. Julien is about four miles northeast of Ypres on the road to Langemarck and Poelkapelle and was one of the first objectives taken by British troops in a campaign intended to build upon the success of the earlier battle of Messines Ridge, fought the previous June to the immediate south of Ypres.

As is so often the case in war, the early expectations of success eluded the planners of the offensive. Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s belief the that German army was near collapse proved illusory, and the hope of achieving a decisive breakthrough faded as the campaign wore on. Eventually the capture of the village of Passchendaele, seven miles east of Ypres, and a low ridge just beyond was settled on as a realistic culmination. When Canadian troops took the heights on November 9, 1917, the campaign came to an end, and an Allied victory was declared.

The map Blunden saved from the German bunker is a commercially published map in a scale of 1:300,000, issued by the firm of L. Ravenstein of Frankfurt am Main. Despite its title of Kriegskarte von Belgien und angrenzendem Frankreich (War Map of Belgium and Bordering Areas of France), it appears to be an undated wartime reissue of a conventional prewar political map. It has been updated by overprinting in red indicating “fremde Festungen” (foreign fortresses) and “ungefähre Frontlinie” (approximate frontlines).

The Blunden copy has further been cut into panels and mounted on cloth backing. It has one correction to the “front lines” done in graphite pencil, and, oddly for a map apparently in use in late July 1917, the area from Messines to Wytschaete taken by British forces in the struggle for Messines Ridge nearly two months earlier still appears on the map as a German salient.

Closeup of area where Blunden recovered the map on July 31, 1917. St. Julien is northeast of Ypres, or 'Ypern' in German, at the upper edge of the panel; Passchendaele is just above St. Julien on the next panel. To the left of Passchendaele is seen 'Langhemarcq' or Langemarck. The area shown in this detail was, along with Verdun in France, the most violently fought over terrain in the whole of the Great War.

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A recent project to reorganize some materials in the papers of British author Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972) brought to light specimens of traditional Nepalese handmade paper serving in a most prosaic capacity.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Mackenzie travelled widely and at one point was contacted while in the remote Himalayan kingdom of Nepal by a London publisher. The message from London arrived via New Delhi, India, in the form of a telegram and asked if Mackenzie would consider a “biography of Churchill” upon completion of his present commitment. Unless the biography sought was to be a brief piece for a newspaper or periodical, it would appear it was never written by Mackenzie.

So, in a sense, the telegram was just one more of those numberless pieces of paper that the active life of a published author produces, and a creative dead end at that. But this telegram was very different from most others in that it was written out on paper unlike any I have ever seen.

The form was printed in Devanagari script on two sheets and was accompanied by three more unused blanks. The paper is called lokta and is prepared by hand from fibers obtained from the bark of the Nepalese lokta tree (Daphne cannabina). While lokta paper manufacture requires much the same general techniques as traditional Western handmade paper, the present specimens exhibit a faint but uniform criss-cross design when held up to the light rather than the distinct chain-and-wire lines of their Western equivalents. The finished product is said to be durable and resistant to insect damage.

The sheets in the Mackenzie papers are remarkable for their texture and appearance, exhibiting bits of bark and small twigs worked into the fabric of the paper, dramatic whorls of lokta fiber here and there, and even occasional voids in the paper’s surface. The paper is a mottled pale tan in color and more nearly translucent than opaque. It seems to have been lightly treated during manufacture with sizing, so has a feel more like cloth than traditional paper. The effect is at once one of extreme primitiveness of technique, and yet, at the same time, one of remarkable beauty.

A web search provided several brief histories of lokta paper, which indicate that it was employed by the Nepalese government until the 1950s for its official correspondence and that it continues to find a role there in the preparation of certain classes of documents. Use of the paper is on the decline in Nepal as it is being displaced by conventional machine-made papers, but there is a substantial international market for it among those attracted by its remarkable texture and appearance.

This telegram to Compton Mackenzie was written out in an English hand on two sheets of a paper known as lokta, which is prepared by hand from fibers obtained from the bark of the Nepalese lokta tree.