Jim Counsell’s War 1914-18

Jim Counsell's War 1914-18 is the story, researched and told by his son, of a young man of 18 who, on the day war broke out, volunteered to join the British Army, imagining that war was 'a game for gentlemen.' He was soon disillusioned, and this memoir graphically describes the awfulness of life in the trenches, or, in the case of the Royal Artillery, in the forward observation posts. In 1916 he was commissioned as an officer, and there are graphic descriptions of his life over the next two years, together with top quality photographs of the lighter side of life in the battlefield. Then in 1918 he was ordered to stay behind to watch a gun which was stuck in the mud and had to be abandoned, push one shell in the breech and another down the muzzle, and pull a lanyard to explode the gun when the enemy came close to it. He achieved this safely, but on the way back to rejoin his unit he was hit by shrapnel, and his right arm had to be amputated. This may have saved his life, since he was still in hospital when the war ended. There he met and married the hospital cook, who was the author's mother.