IRON TIMES WITH THE GUARDS

The author’s pseudonym ‘An O. E.’ (Old Etonian) hides an anonymous officer in a Territorial regiment commissioned in 1914, who served with the elite 2nd Coldstream Guards, Britain’s oldest regiment, on the Western Front from 1915. The narrative covers the author’s experiences at the battle of Festubert, in the Ypres salient, and on the Somme – down to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in the Spring of 1917. The writing is realistic – sometimes grimly so – and, though published in August 1918, when the war was still going on, spares few of his readers’ feelings about the reality of life and death in the trenches.