Personal Memoirs & Diaries Books

To his Mother. It has been extremely wet since I last wrote. On Saturday we could do nothing except laze indoors and play billiards and Friday was the same, with a dull dinner-party at the end of it. It was very nice and cool though, and I enjoyed those two days as much as any. On Sunday we left Government House in order to be with Guy Coles during his three days' leave. It rained all the morning:... more...

CHAPTER I INTRODUCES ONE YOUNG MAN The boys in the office were, I fancy, a bit prejudiced against him before he arrived. It wasn't his fault, for he was a stranger to them all, but it got about that the dear old "chief" had decided to engage a real good Sunday-school boy. Someone had heard him say, or, more likely, thought it would be funny to imagine him saying, that the advent of such a... more...

INTRODUCTORY These laid the world away; poured out the redSweet wine of youth; gave up the years to beOf work and joy ...And those who would have been,Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Rupert Brooke. In deciding to publish some of the letters written by the late Lieutenant H. P. M. Jones during his twenty-seven months' service with the British Army, accompanying them with a memoir, I was... more...

CHAPTER I a few words of introduction Fate has not been unkind to me. I have had my chances, particularly during the last two or three years, and—well, I have done my best to make the most of what has come my way. That and nothing more. How I came to be entrusted with the important commission of acting as Official War Office Kinematographer is an interesting story, and the first few chapters of this... more...

INTRODUCTION The attack on the fortified village of Gommecourt, which Mr. Liveing describes in these pages with such power and colour, was a part of the first great allied attack on July 1, 1916, which began the battle of the Somme. That battle, so far as it concerns our own troops, may be divided into two sectors: one, to the south of the Ancre River, a sector of advance, the other, to the north of... more...

CHAPTER I. IN WHICH MY KING AND COUNTRY NEED ME I left the office of The Scout, 28 Maiden Lane, W.C., on September 8th, 1914, took leave of the editor and the staff, said farewell to my little camp in the beech-woods of Buckinghamshire and to my woodcraft scouts, bade good-bye to my father, and went off to enlist in the Royal Army Medical Corps. I made my way to the Marylebone recruiting office, and... more...

CHAPTER I AT THE AMERICAN EMBASSY Paris, Tuesday, August 4th. I presented myself at the American Embassy today and offered my services to Mr. Herrick. They were promptly accepted. I was put to work with such suddenness that no time was spent in determining my official status. I cannot say whether I am a doorman or an Attaché. At present the duties of the two seem to be identical. Now, as in 1870, the... more...

Chapter I. When the sun arose on the 22nd of June, 1918, three great transports were lying out in the stream of New York harbor. They were filled with American soldiers for duties overseas. They were well camouflaged and well convoyed. The previous afternoon they had pulled away from a Jersey City pier, where they had taken on their human cargoes, and they were undoubtedly under sealed orders. They had... more...

CHAPTER I OFF TO THE FRONT I had been to France before—in 1916, during the Battle of the Somme—but not as an officer; in 1916 I was a private in the Royal Fusiliers, and I had received orders to return to "Blighty" in order to proceed to an officer cadet battalion at Gailes, in Ayrshire, before I had been able to see what a front-line trench was like. So this, then, was my first experience... more...

We had been travelling for many weeks,—Lyra Nickerson, Katherine Schermerhorn, and I,—and after a beautiful tour through Germany, we arrived at Berlin on the evening of July 29, 1914. We had planned to spend a few days there preparatory to embarking at Hamburg in the Viktoria Luise for a northern cruise, and were looking forward to a short stay in the splendid capital. When we had secured our rooms... more...