Overview

Offering an alternative perspective on the Great War to the sweeping overviews of Max Hastings or Margaret Macmillan, a classic memoir of one soldier's experiences on the Western Front... In the centenary year of the Great War, names such as Ypres, the Marne, the Somme, Passchendaele are heavy with meaning as settings for the near-destruction of a generation of men. It is this aura of tragedy that makes Huntly Gordon's memoir, drawn from his letters written from the Front, such a potent one. He was sensitive, intelligent, unpretentious and, as his account reveals, capable of detached and trenchant judgement. As the summer of 1914 drew to a close, it was difficult for a16 year-old schoolboy to realize that the world for which he had been prepared at Clifton College was itself preparing for war. By 1916, he was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery. By June 1917, he was at the Ypres Salient getting his 'baptism' at Hell Fire Corner in an intensive artillery duel that formed the prologue to Passchendaele itself. Early in 1918, his battery would fight a series of rearguard actions near Baupaume that would help turn the tide of the massive German Spring offensive. Huntly Gordon has given us an enduring and classic memoir- a poignant and extraordinarily human account of history as it happened.

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9780857501950

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Reviews

One of the best First World War memoirs I've read - honest, intelligent and vivid, as fresh as if written yesterday. -- Brigadier Allan Mallinson The Times I loved The Unreturning Army, and thought it one of the best half-dozen memoirs that I read. Your father writes beautfiully, had an interesting war, and emerges as a man who did his bit without being overwhelmed by the horror or elated by the dark beauty of violence. It would be good to see the book back in print again. -- RICHARD HOLMES, author of Redcoat, Tommy etc. I have never read anything that gives such a vivid description of the hell of Passchendaele - nor of the spirit that enabled our troops to survive it. -- Professor Sir Michael Howard A haunting account of the loss of a generation, and the way that the gigantic conflict obliterated the dead and, when the guns fell silent, still managed to destroy any survivors. Good Book Guide, Jan 2014

Author Information

Huntly Strathearn Gordon was born in Perthshire in 1898. Educated at Clifton College, he joined the army in 1916. After the war he studied medicine before going to China with Shell Oil. Returning in 1926, he joined London Transport, spending much of his spare time surveying archaeological sites with Sir Mortimer Wheeler. During the Blitz, he initiated food trains for the thousands sheltering in the Underground, and was awarded an MBE. Huntly Gordon died in 1982. Born in 1956, David Gordon is Huntly Gordon's youngest son. Educated at Sherborne and Sandhurst, he has been a soldier, parliamentary researcher and county councillor. A lifelong campaigner on environmental issues, his passions also include vintage vehicles and old houses. He lives in Somerset.

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