The book

Bertie, the youngest of three children, was a well-educated middle-class Englishman of the late Victorian era. He joined the Royal Garrison Artillery with a Varsity Commission from Oxford. 

 

Bertie's letters provide insights into military life, his officer colleagues from 108 Heavy Battery, and his experience during the First World War.

 

Posted to the front, his WW1 letters describe day-to-day life as his unit engaged with the enemy, zig-zagging between Flanders and France. He fought in the battles of Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele, before returning to the Somme in 1918, in time for the German Spring Offensive.  

 

The German army pushed through the British lines making rapid progress towards Amiens, the Allied railhead for ammunition and supplies.

 

Bertie's letters describe the hazards and rewards of artillery life, always on the move, frequently in the mud as his Battery maintained the offensive. They describe the loss of colleagues to the indifferent machinery of war.

 

He describes day-to-day events, commenting "Life consists of long periods of boredom interspersed with episodes of intense fear".

 

He gained two gallantry medals, the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre from the French, and an OBE. 

 

After the war, Bertie was posted to the North-West Frontier Province in India, but his life changed with the unexpected and premature death of his wife, May.

 

Getting his life back onto an even keel an attractive young English nurse arrived in India on “The Fishing Fleet”, looking for a husband.