An Infant in Arms War Letters Of A Company Officer 1914-1918

A Classic memoir of the author’s service with 1/4th Battalion of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire. Light Infantry in France & Italy. Graham Greenwell was an 18-year-old public schoolboy in 1914, who had just left Winchester and was about to go up to Christ Church college, Oxford. But when war broke out he joined up, and was commissioned into the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, with whom he served throughout the war, emerging in 1918 as a mature Captain and company commander on the Italian front. Greenwell went through many of the war’s worst battles, including Ploegsteert (Plug Street); the Somme and Third Ypres (Passchendaele). This vivid memoir, based on regular letters to his mother, expresses boredom, depression, fear and his sadness at the loss of his friends and comrades, but the overwhelming impression of the book, in the author’s words is of his enjoyment of his time in the trenches: ‘I look back on the years 1914-18 as among the happiest I have ever spent…to be perfectly fit, live among pleasant companions, to have responsibility and a clearly defined job – these are great compensations when one is very young’.