We have a number of memoirs recommended on our booklist!

Some standout interesting ones, in my view:

Frederic Manning - The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929)

A. O. Pollard - Fire-Eater: The Memoirs of a V.C. (1932)

Robert Graves - Goodbye to All That (1929)

I highly recommend Now It Can Be Told, which was written by Philip Gibbs, a British war correspondent during the war. Because of censorship during the war the articles that he wrote concurrent to events were sanitized in several ways; after the war he was determined to publish an account representative of the true experience of the British soldier and did so with Now It Can Be Told. The book is split into about six parts or so which cover several topics and several locations where both heavy and light fighting occurred. He was in France from the beginning as one of six correspondents allowed to accompany the BEF in 1914, and remained for the duration of the war. He describes the destruction of Ypres and the Somme offensive, as well as Third Ypres (Passchendaele) and Loos, among others. His accounts of this fighting ranges from talking about how the battle unfolded to speaking of the experience of the individual soldiers involved. He talks about how the state of affairs along the front changed, in that as momentum shifted and the armies attempted to break the stalemate certain sections heated up while others cooled down, and how some places escaped destruction for a considerable length of time before being consumed by the conflict. In addition to talking about events, battles, and individuals he also spends a great deal of time, probably 30-40% of the book, describing what life in general was like- what it was like to be in the trenches, what it was like to be in the rear, what it was like for soldiers on leave behind the lines, what it was to be a trench raider, etc etc, as well as what it was like to be a soldier from the original BEF as compared to a soldier from the “New Army” and how interactions between the two went. It was published in 1926 so some of his perceptions as to the frequency of certain events, such as the execution of deserters, may be a bit inaccurate when compared to the actual data, but this is to be expected somewhat, as the book is essentially a memoir. In general, however, I feel he gives a splendid snapshot of what life was like for a British soldier along the front. The conclusion of the book deals in postwar experiences common to the troops coming home, and includes a bit of a call for the soldiers of the world to join together in a worldwide socialist movement to prevent the aristocratic elite from sending the poor off to war again, which is I think an interesting tidbit considering the postwar socialist movement across the globe.

Thank you this, I have read this book it was really interesting, I’m currently reading he French book Poilu. Trying to locate a British comparison