The Fourth Battalion, the King's Own (royal Lancaster Regiment) and the Great War

In the summer of 1914, the men of the Fourth Battalion, King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment answered the call that would reshape their lives and claim their generation. This intimate regimental history, written by the officers who led them, captures something no grand campaign history can: the particular courage, fear, and fellowship of a specific body of men from a specific corner of England. The book follows the battalion from mobilization in that frantic August, through the long months of training and the uneasy days guarding key positions at home, to their eventual deployment on the Western Front where the true test awaited. The authors weave logistical details and orders of battle with the human texture of soldiership: the tedium, the dread, the strange friendships forged in circumstances no civilian could fathom. What emerges is both a military record and a memorial, preserving for posterity the names, faces, and fates of men who marched away from Lancaster, Morecambe, and the surrounding towns. Written barely two decades after the armistice, the account carries the weight of living memory. The authors knew these men. They buried them. They wrote so that their sacrifice would not vanish into the great anonymous統計 of the war.