Grant Richards Ltd, 1916, 304 p.

The book is a memoir of the Great War experiences of the author, famous for creating the character of Old Bill in his cartoons for the magazine The Bystander and later collected in various Fragments from France booklets, from late 1914 till he is wounded during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.

In this early stage of the war the trenches were rudimentary to say the least, with men waist deep in water, and what dugouts there were also sodden. Not far behind the front line a few farm buildings not yet destroyed by shellfire gave some cover from the Germans provided no movement whatever could be seen in them.

Bairnsfather was in charge of a machine gun company but seems to have had a lot of time to be able to wander about just behind the line exploring the local area. I assume his sergeant looked after things in his absences. His company was also rotated in and out of the line on a regular basis.

He describes these early days of the war as “delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life,” which he says to his mind gave the war what it sadly needed – a touch of romance. Later, though, “much of the romance had left the trenches.” He says he “wouldn’t have missed that time for anything” and claims “our soldiers” even though living “in a vast bog without being able to utilize modern contrivances for making the fight against adverse circumstances anything like an equal contest” wouldn’t have either.

It was during this time he began his artistic career, drawing on the farmhouse walls and making sketches for fellow officers and then deciding to sending off his first cartoon to The Bystander. The book has some of the author’s sketches scattered throughout and also photographic plates of cartoons which appeared in The Bystander bound in and counting towards the pagination.

As an insight into how a British officer felt in that first year of the war this is probably as good as it gets.

Sensitivity warning: contains the word “gollywog.”

Pedant’s corner:- focussed (focused,) “form part of a slack heap” (since these were now ruined farm walls the author may have meant ‘part of a slag heap’, but no matter,) “gulley”, two lines later followed by “gully”.

(Another entry for Judith’s meme at Reader in the Wilderness.)

These are kept on the bottom two shelves of an old display cabinet. Mostly old books with lovely bindings – Bruce Bairnsfather‘s Bullets and Billets is in there – but also some modern Folio Editions of Siegfried Sassoon‘s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and its sequel plus Crime Stories from the Strand.