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Description: | Ms diary (113pp) of his service with the 19th Battalion Manchester Regiment (90th Brigade, 30th Division until December 1915, then 21st Brigade) from September 1914 to August 1917, written retrospectively while on convalesce at the end of 1917, describing his initial training in Manchester and then Grantham, the exercises, drills and parades he participated in and the equipment he received prior to his embarkation to France from Southampton on 7 November 1915, his journey to Amiens through many desolated French towns and his subsequent movements on the Western Front, reiterating throughout his impressions of the trenches, the exhausting duties he had to perform under atrocious weather conditions, the unrelenting noise of aeroplanes over head and the constant threat of shell fire, whilst detailing particularly meticulously his involvement in the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 and his justification for sparing the life of a German soldier he encounters, also outlining the injuries he sustained to his shoulder when he was shot on 23 July 1917, his being sent to hospital in Rouen, the medical treatment he received when back in England and his dismissal of the doctors' suggestion he has a problem with his nerves, together with a scanned photograph of him and his brother both in uniform and a ts transcription (51pp) of the original diary revealing how, following his discharge in February 1918, he was one of the first patients to be treated in the newly opened John Leigh Memorial Hospital for shell shocked soldiers.
Cataloguer CLS
Catalogue date 2007-09-25 | Publisher: | http://www.iwm.org.uk | Subjects: | 21st Brigade British Army 19th Battalion 90th Brigade 30th Division Manchester Regiment | Source: | Imperial War Museum | Creator: | Andrews, Albert William | Identifier: | http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/o... | Go to resource |
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