Voice from the Ranks

This memoir, assembled from letters and later narrative, records Timothy Gowing's service as a sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers through the Crimean War. He describes the voyage, the landing in the Crimea, the Alma, the siege of Sevastopol, Inkerman, and the winter in the trenches before the Russian works. Food, weather, wounds, and the deaths of comrades occupy as much space as the set battles. The voice stays that of a non-commissioned officer, not a general. The book is a ranker's campaign chronicle, not a staff history and not a novel.

Bound in red cloth blocked with an engraving in dark blue and gold. Red dust-jacket printed in white and dark blue. There were two variants of this book that can most easily distinguished by the presence or absence of multiple rules at the head of each chapter title.