Memoirs of the Great War

Survivors of a Kind, by Brian Bond

In Survivors of a Kind, Brian Bond, one of our most distinguished modern military historians, has written an absorbing and affectionate study of the military memoirs of the first world war, bearing all the authority of a life- time’s work on the British Army. With some of the 20-odd names in this book the reader will be familiar: Siegfried Sassoon’s and Robert Graves’ sworks have stayed in print, and it is fair to say that most British people’s views of the Great War today are largely shaped by Goodbye to All That and, if not by Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man or Siegfried’s Journey, at least by poems like ‘Base Details’. Bond draws readers’ attention to John (later Lord) Reith’s Wearing Spurs, less well known than his public career — as is Anthony Eden’s Another World, describing his first 20 years of life, to 1917. Because of Frank Richards’s regimental connection with Sassoon and Graves (the latter helped him with writing), his memoir of life in the ranks, Old Soldiers Never Die, is also still remembered, as is the more often read Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden.

Less famed now, save among air-war buffs, are Winged Warfare (the memoirs of Billy Bishop, the fabled Canadian flying ace) and Sagittarius Rising (reprinted in the 1970s) by Cecil Lewis, who entered the Royal Flying Corps at 16. Recently singled out (in Stephen Walker’s Forgotten Soldiers) as a bloodthirsty martinet who executed an Irish soldier for desertion, the egregious General Frank Crozier, after the war a leading pacifist, was the author of three volumes of recollections examined in this book.

Bond has quite rightly picked out Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune as one of the really significant British personal testimonies of the Great War.