Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. No notes or highlighting. Nice older book in good condition. pages excellent. Year 1930. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> If one left such a book any longer it would be very difficult to collect the slang and still more difficult to remember and collect the songs. It may be in place to say that both the editors served actively during the greater part of the War. It is not possible to declare that this collection is complete depending as it does on memory and oral tradition. Moreover propriety has suppressed one or two of the songs and amended a few others. But every endeavour has been made by consulting men of different ranks and widely varying experience to include all soldiers’ songs which were in use through- out the Army during 1914-1918 and not restricted to particular formations. In the glossary the editors have aimed to give not a mere dictionary-list but a record-by-glimpses of the British soldiers’ spirit and life in the years 1914-1918. Some of the comments are far from “official” in tone and in matter but the editors believe there will be no confusion between what is recorded as fact and what is opinion. They do not claim that these war- time “grouses” and post-war reflections mirror the attitude of everyone who served (one of the editors is now a convinced pacifist). But they believe that sub- stantially these are the views of the majority of war- time soldiers and that they have not portrayed their forger comrades either as supermen or as whiners as sots or as saints. The editors wish to thank Major Gordon Innes. (SP)