Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

This history reconstructs the life of the British infantryman in France and Flanders from 1914 to 1918. Holmes follows enlistment, training, the journey to the line, trench routine, raid and battle, wounding, discipline, and leave, using letters, diaries, official records, and the memory of surviving veterans. Regulars, Territorials, and Kitchener volunteers appear as a single evolving army rather than as a sequence of famous generals. The book is a social and military study of the soldier's war, not a novel and not a biography of one named man.

Bound in printed and blocked buckram.