A Record of D.245 Battery,
1914=1Q19.
i6
THE YPRES TIMES
are the instances of premonition, and of unexplained direction-posts, unlike those
encountered by many men at that time of mental elevation.
One small pointthe reviewer, who served for a time in a Canadian C.C.S.
which was admirably run, can assure the reader that the disgraceful hospital from
which the author escaped was by no means typical of the Canadian Medical
Services; his admittance there was just one more item in the string of hardships
with which he successfully competed, hardships and violent stresses which follow
each other so closely that the reader cannot put the book down until he has learnt
the final issue. That issue was, for th$ author, one of deep disgruntlement with
modern warfare; And yet we go on
E. B. W.
By Sgt. A. E. Gee, M.M., and Cpl. A. E. Shaw.
Illustrated by Bdr. N. Tennant, D.C.M., Renwick of Otley, 180, Fleet Street, E.G.
THE war ended thirteen years ago, as we have just been reminded by the
celebration of another Armistice Day, but the stream of war books con
tinues unabated. Times are bad, the history of a unit can only have a
limited appeal but still they come. And it is very right that they should, such
books have an interest for old soldiers and their friends now and will have an
interest of another kind in the future.
And the sooner they are written the better, for memory plays strange tricks.
George IV convinced himself before he died that he had fought at Waterloo,
and an officer, who did fight there, set out in print, fifty years afterwards, that his
regiment routed the whole Imperial Guard!
It is too early for such flights of fancy yet and our authors are very free
from such extravagances. They served in the battery themselves and tell their
story with knowledge and sympathy, duly mingling the little and the great, as
they saw them both; for instance, they note that the battery was hard at work
in April, 1918, repelling- the German attack on the Salient, but in their spare time
every man was in the grip of an epidemic of crown and anchor." The battery
was a Territorial unit, almost up to strength on mobilization, and drawn from the
neighbourhood of Ilkley. After training at home till April, 1915, it proceeded to
the Western Front and remained there till the Armistice. Its treks, duly set out
in a map, led north and south from Nieuport to Amiens, and right to the Somme
in 1916 and to Passchendaele in 1917finally it was as far east as any British
battery on November nth.
There was a local Yorkshire spirit about it and a battery spirit, the combined
forces that make the strength of the Territorial Army. And this was emphatically
a happy battery, as we say of chips, and a fortunate one too. It was com
manded by the same C.O. throughout and had remarkably few casualties.
The book is excellently printed and got up, and the illustrations deserve a
special word of praise.
There are the usual lists of honours and casualties and a nominal roll of all
ranks who proceeded overseas with the battery.
Finally there is the elaborate map already mentioned.
W. H. B. S.
