A Private in the Guards

by Stephen Graham

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Genres: World War I, Military History

364 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Stephen Graham (1884 - 1975) was a British journalist, travel-writer, essayist and novelist. His best-known books recount his travels around pre-revolutionary Russia and his journey to Jerusalem with a group of Russian Christian pilgrims. Most of his works express his sympathy for the poor, for agricultural labourers and for tramps, and his distaste for industrialisation.

Librarian's note: There is more than one author on Goodreads with this name.

List of books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen...

Reviews

[Graham Mott · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent Great War memoir, published in 1919, so in the war’s immediate aftermath. Among the relatively few written by an enlisted man it gives a bottom up view of the war and the experiences of a private soldier, in this case in the Scot’s Guards. However the author was not a typical private soldier, he was a journalist and author who had travelled very widely, notably to Russia and was always apart from his comrades with whom he admits he had little in common. A very honest book it describes in detail the dehumanising discipline and training which he believed was necessary to reduce the soldier to an unquestioning and unthinking agent of the nation’s will. This included, if necessary fighting to the death but also, if necessary the killing of enemy soldiers who in some cases had surrendered. The conflict between this brutal reality and the moral righteousness of the British cause in the war is a quandary he considers. A very detailed book, in that it really only deals with his service in late 1917 and 1918, it deserves a read and should be wider known, expressing the views of an educated man, who knew what war meant at the sharp end and considers the war in it’s immediate aftermath, without the prejudices of later times.

[Gavin Dobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author was a writer and journalist who joined the Scots Guards as a private in 1918. He gives graphic details of life in the training barracks (New Sparta)and the process by which raw recruits transformed into a highly-disciplined body ready to take on the German army. He has the journalist's eye for accuracy, which highlights myriad details of the battlefield that could not possibly be imagined today. He is candid about atrocities towards German prisoners and the bayonetting of wounded. Above all he radiates pride in his regiment and the strength of friendships forged during the last year of a savage war.