[DUNN, James Churchill, editor; his name supplied on typed peace of paper pasted at end of title]. The War the Infantry Knew. 1914-1919. A Chronicle of Service in France and Belgium with The Second Battalion His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, The Royal Welch Fusiliers: founded on personal records, recollections and reflections, assembled, edited and partly written by One of their Medical Officers. London, P.S.King And Son Ltd, 1938.
8vo. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt and with Royal Welsh Fusiliers initials in gilt on front cover; pp. xvi, 613, [3], 27 leaves of maps at the end; cloth a little marked, otherwise very good.
Very rare first edition, one of 500 copies printed of one of the best Great War books, with a literary contribution by Siegfried Sassoon, A Subaltern's Service in Camp and in Action, a chapter covering the period from March 12th to April 16th, 1917, which is considered an early draft of pages of Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. The chapter in this volume 'written early in 1926, except for his diaries of 1918, was the first prose Sassoon wrote about the war' (Keynes). The compiler of reminiscences of around 50 members of the Battalion was not a fan of Graves' Goodbye to all that and prevented him from contributing. Robert Graves figures several times in texts by others, as does Sassoon. Dunn, of Glasgow, appears in Sassoon's Sherston's Progress as Dr Munro. John Keegan in Face of War described this book as 'one of the most interesting and revealing books of its type. A genuinely truthful and fascinating picture of the war as it was for the infantry'.
Keynes B16.
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