Soldier from the Wars Returning

Soldier from the Wars Returning is one of the truest, most profound and readable personal accounts of the Great War. The author waited nearly fifty years before writing it, and the perspective of history enhances its value. He writes only of the battles in which he participated (including the Somme and Passchendaele), though his comments on affairs beyond his knowledge at the time, through later study and reflection, are pungent and stimulating. Among other topics, he describes the politicians, the generals, Kitchener's Army, Hore-Belisha, German gas attacks, Picardy, dug-outs, tanks, the sex-life of the soldier, scrounging. trench kits and the censoring of letters. The author saw the First World War from below, as a fighting soldier in a line regiment. In the Second World War he served as a staff officer liaising between the Army and the RAF; serving two tours at RAF Bomber Command HQ at High Wycombe. This equipped him to draw forthright comparisons between the conduct of the two wars.

Professor CE Carrington was born in 1897 and enlisted in 1914 at the outbreak of war, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1917. After the war he went up to Oxford and then taught for some years at Haileybury. From 1929 to 1954, apart from war service, he was a publisher at the Cambridge University Press. He was professor of Commonwealth Relations at Chatham House, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee. He died in 1990.