RICHER DUST

This is a novel about Gallipoli in which the central character is a young officer, Sub-Lieutenant Rodney Wilmot, serving in the [fictitious] Vernon and Keppel Battalions of the Royal Naval Division. The author himself served in the Drake Battalion and the vivid account of the fighting and life in the trenches of Gallipoli is based on personal experience; he was there for six months and spent the last ten days in the front lines, getting away on the last night of the evacuation (8th/9th Jan 1916). Following Gallipoli he served six months in France where he commanded ‘A’ Company of the Drake Battalion before being invalided home from the Somme. But this story, in which all the names of the characters, except in minor instances, are fictitious, is concerned only with the Gallipoli campaign, from when Rodney lands at the end of May 1915 to the evacuation six months later, thus the story mirrors the author’s experience. It may be a novel but it has all the authority of one who went through that terrible campaign and is describing his own experiences – it is real!