The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.)

In the summer of 1914, the men of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment left their homes in Reading and the surrounding Berkshire villages to answer England's call. What began as a territorial battalion of weekend soldiers became a force that would fight across some of the Western Front's most brutal battlefields. C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, himself a lieutenant in the battalion, writes from intimate knowledge: the hurried mobilization, the long months of training, the friendships forged in shared hardship, and the devastating cost of modern industrial warfare. This is not a grand strategic history but something rarer and more precious: the battalion's own memory of itself, preserved in the words of men who were there. Cruttwell captures the particular rhythm of territorial unit life, the pride of ordinary men in their regiment, and the profound transformation that war wrought on a generation. For anyone seeking to understand how WWI actually felt to those who fought it, rather than how historians have since described it, this account offers invaluable firsthand testimony.