IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR: The First Battalion

Rudyard Kipling’s supreme labour of love and loss: his official history of the 1st Irish Guards - the regiment in which his only son John - ‘My Boy Jack’ - served, disappeared and died. A matchless account, written in the author’s characteristic prose, informed by his own aching sense of pride and grief.

Of the many regimental histories published in the wake of the Great War, this has to be the most unique, written as it was by Rudyard Kipling, one of our greatest literary geniuses, about the Regiment in which his only son John briefly served before his tragic disappearance and death in the battle of Loos. The recent TV film ‘My Boy Jack’ starring Daniel (’Harry Potter’) Radcliffe as John Kipling and David Haig as his father related the tragic tale of John’s brief and ill-fated spell with the newly-raised 2nd Battalion. This book, therefore, is a marriage of Kipling’s peerless prose and describes the heroic deeds of the 1st Irish Guards in a style informed by the author’s aching loss of his own son. Small wonder that Kipling hailed it as his masterpiece : ‘This will be my great work...It is done with agony and bloody sweat’ - a verdict echoed by universal and unanimous critical acclaim. Kipling spent five years in laborious research while writing this book - simultaneously searching in vain for John’s final resting place - and the book teems with Kipling’s characteristic powers of description, his meticulous eye for detail and his empathy with fighting men at their last extremity as he narrates the Guards’ progress from Mons to the Armistice via the fighting at La Bassee, Loos, Laventie, Ypres, the Somme, Gouzeaucourt and Arras. Even if you have never read a regimental history before you should buy this matchless and beautifully produced account, which is illustrated with photographs and maps and contains Rolls of Honour medals and awards.

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Details


Product Code:	10896
Author:	Rudyard Kipling
ISBN:	9781862274044
Format:	319pp, b/w illustrations,, sb Published Price £18.99
Shipping Time:	This item is usually dispatched Next Day
Retail Price:	~~£18.99~~
Our Price:	£7.95 save 58% January sale price: £6.36