WITH MY REGIMENT FROM THE AISNE TO LE BASSEE

The author of this artless, vivid, and all the more moving a memoir of a regular infantry officer in the opening weeks of the Great War for being so simple, wrote under the pseudonym ‘Platoon Commander’. His real name was Lieut A. F. H. Mills of the 1st Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. He writes about the atmosphere in England on the outbreak of war; his reporting to his Regiment and shipping over to France with the British Expeditionary Force a month after the outbreak of war. Mills and his comrades saw severe fighting along the River Aisne for about a month until he was wounded by shrapnel in both legs and invalided home. Beneath the patriotism, humour and bonhomie there is a sombre realisation that the war is going to be both long and tough and that many of the author’s brother officers will not survive it: ‘I used to wonder as we sat round the table, looking at the faces of my brother officers, what fate held in store for them, how many would come back, how others would die. It was going to be a “a hell of a war”. All were agreed on that.’