Over the Top with the 25th: Chronicle of Events at Vimy Ridge and Courcellette

One of the most vivid frontline accounts to emerge from the Great War, this memoir captures the 25th Battalion's journey from formation in 1914 through the crucible of the Somme to the triumph and tragedy of Vimy Ridge. Lewis writes as a man still reverberating from the noise - his prose urgent, granular, unforgiving in its detail of bombardments, raids, and the particular hell of trench warfare. But he also captures what the history books cannot: the black humor of soldiers waiting for dawn, the strange peace of shell craters, the weight of losing men you've trained beside. The Vimy Ridge chapter crackles with the tension of preparation - the waiting, the orders, the terrible clarity of knowing what's coming - and renders the battle itself with the fractured intensity of someone who lived through it. This is not polished war literature; it is war literature written in war's immediate aftermath, still warm from the experience.