It's been a while since our initial episode looking at Forgotten Memoirs of the Great War, and there was a positive reaction to examining this very subject, with several of you getting in touch to suggest some more titles.

So I thought a few months later it was about time we returned to the subject of Forgotten Memoirs and looked at another volume of a lesser known account connected to a soldier's experience of the First World War.

Memoirs are an important part of our understanding of the layers of the Great War, especially in an era when all of the veterans are gone, and the memoirs themselves are all part of the importance of understanding personal testimony, something we discussed recently in some episodes on oral history.

The book for this episode looking at forgotten memoirs is The Years of Remembrance by Harold Maybury, and it was published in Warrington in 1924 by a small publisher connected to the local newspaper.

It was a book that I'd never heard of until a book list of Tom Donovan's, one of my favourite secondhand military book dealers.

He put a list out some months ago and I saw this memoir on there, and what drew me to it was that it was an account written by a soldier who had served in the second fourth battalion of the South Lancashire Regiment.

Now that's probably a little known battalion of the Great War.

Why was I interested in that?

Well one of the veterans that I knew, James Leslie Lovegrove, Smiler Lovegrove, had served as an officer in this battalion, gone out with them in nineteen seventeen, and served until he was wounded in the fighting on the Hindenburg line the following year.

And although I had the regimental history, I wasn't aware that there was this personal account by another member of the same battalion.

And Lovegrove, of course, was an officer, he was a second lieutenant, commissioned, I mean he looks about twelve in the photographs of him, and I have his account of his service which I am going to use for a future podcast, but that's the view from the position of a platoon commander, whereas this account is from the view of an ordinary soldier in the ranks.

So who was the author?

Who was Harold Maybury?

He was born in Warrington in eighteen eighty-nine, from what I can find out.

There's no kind of online biography of him.

This is where I've put together information from the different sources to kind of find out a little bit more about the man behind this memoir.

And by the time of the 1911 census he was living at 55 Lovely Lane, Warrington, and was an advertising clerk to a soap manufacturer there, possibly the Crossfield Company or the Lever Brothers who made the famous sunlight soap.

And you see a lot of adverts for that soap in wartime publications.

He appears to have been an aspiring journalist as well as working as an advertising clerk, as some of the articles he wrote at the very beginning of the First World War appeared in that Warrington local paper The Examiner in nineteen fourteen, and they later published the book itself, but he didn't volunteer straight away.

He was not one of those that responded to that early call for volunteers.

And who knows why?

I mean not everybody did.

Some that were in good, safe jobs bringing in money, perhaps his parents depended on that money.

Not everyone stepped forward straight away.

And what he ends up doing is joining the Derby scheme in December of 1915.

And the Lord Derby Scheme was brought in during that winter of 1915-16 as the introduction of conscription was just round the corner, and this was essentially your last chance to volunteer before conscription, and there would be some advantages in doing that.

You could choose which regiment you went to, you could defer your entry into the army for a short while, and they would give you an armband which you could wear on your civilian clothes, so that no one came up to you in the street and suggested that you weren't doing your bit.

You'd registered for military service, although you weren't necessarily going in straight away.

So he does that, and after whatever amount of period that he had between signing up for it and actually going into his unit, he joined the Second Fourth South Lanks sometime in that either winter of 1915-16 or more likely early 1916 when they were based at Ashford, close to where I now live, and they'd been at Canterbury prior to that, and then he went off for further training elsewhere.

Now he didn't get to France, as was common with the rest of his battalion, until February 1917, because the 2nd 4 South Lanks were part of a wider formation, the 57th Division, which we'll come to later on, that was held back on home service, as was a number of divisions, and not sent overseas until that late stage of the First World War.

We kind of forget this really that not every division went over in the early phase of the war.

Quite a few were held back until 1917, and his battalion was one of those units that suffered this fate.

And then he serves on the Western Front.

We're going to look at his war service through his memoirs.

The records indicate that he was injured on active service, potentially wounded, and was discharged from the army in January 1919 with a silver war badge, aged 30.

So he wasn't a youngster, he wasn't a young lad doing his bit from the very beginning.

And later on, from what I can discover, he worked on the railways in Runcorn and at the Warrington Examiner's office.

He seems to have done a bit more journalism in that interwar period.

He married Jesse, his sweetheart, in 1921, and he died on the twenty ninth of May 1943, still relatively young, perhaps because of his wounds in the Great War.

There's no obituary for him, and I can't discover what his cause of death was.

So there's still a lot we don't know about Harold Maybury.

But what I did find is that there is a photograph of his grave on the internet, he's buried in Warrington, and it has the title of the book actually on his headstone.

It says Years of Remembrance underneath his name, a nice kind of nod to the memoir itself.

So what does this book then tell us about his war through his words, through his eyes, and what insights does it give to the wider subject of the Great War?

That's what we'll look at next.

The book Years of Remembrance is an unusual and important memoir in a number of ways.

It's a voice from the ranks for a start, so this is the viewpoint of an ordinary soldier.

He's not privately educated, he's not a commissioned officer, he's there as part of the PBI, the poor bloody infantry, serving in the ranks of an infantry section, in an infantry platoon, in an infantry company of an infantry battalion.

So that's quite important.

And he was not, as we said, an original 1914 man who responded to Lord Kitchener's call for the raising of Kitchener's army, but he's a Derby man who joins under the Derby scheme, and he joins a territorial battalion, but not a first line territorial battalion, not one that went out straight away, but one that was formed during the war itself.

Because when the war broke out, all of these territorial battalions in the British regiments of the British Army became their own mini regiments and they formed normally three battalions.

So in the case of the 4th Battalion, the South Lancashire Regiment, that territorial battalion, its original unit became the 1st 4th, and they went overseas and eventually became part of the 55th West Lanx Division.

And then a 2nd 4th and a 3rd 4th Battalions were formed.

The 2nd 4th would go on to become part of the 57th 2nd West Lancashire Division, and the 3rd 4th would be a home service unit that would then supply recruits, replacements to the other two battalions.

So the 2nd 4th South Lanks was one of these units that was probably formed initially to just protect the shores of Britain.

There was this continuous threat throughout the war of some kind of German incursion, not so much an invasion, but an incursion, and a lot of troops were kept back to defend Britain, to act as depot units, reserve units, just in case.

And the 57th Division was one of those.

I think there was also a consideration by the War Office that some of these units were, and this is not my view, this is theirs, were kind of dredging the bottom of the barrel, and whether all of these men would be exactly suitable to be sent overseas was perhaps a matter of some discussion.

But the huge casualties on the Western Front meant that eventually all of these kind of units would be sent overseas in some capacity.

And the 57th Division formed in August 1915 that was linked to the 55th Division, the first West Lanx who had gone over much earlier, its units split up, then it was reformed in 1916 in time for the Battle of the Somme.

It had formed around Canterbury in Kent, some of its units in Ashford, like the Second Fourth South Lanks, and then it was based in Surrey before the whole division moved to France in February of nineteen seventeen, and this is where Harold Maybury's war began, and this is how he begins the memoir.

As far as the eye could see, the wasteful ocean lay placid and calm except for the white foam tipped waves lazily lapping against the sides of a transport bound for the shores of La Belle France.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon, and the white grey cliffs of dear old England had receded from view, leaving only a memory pensive and wistful, which we were to carry through many strenuous days.

Overhead a winter sun shone high in the heavens like a ball of fire, a few seagulls cried mournfully, and afar off a ship sirens sounded a warning note, and a trail of smoke heralded the passing of a ship over this vast expanse of water.

Nought else could be seen except two sharp nosed British destroyers throwing out from their steel grey funnels dense black clouds of smoke.

Like greyhounds they raced over dancing waves, omnipient, powerful, a mighty unit of Britain's naval power, keeping watch the while against lurking underseas craft.

So we can see straight away that the author is he's not Wilfred Irwin, he's not Siegfried Sassoon, but equally this is not a straightforward account where he says I did this, I did that.

He's got some ability to write, and being a newspaper man, I guess that was to be considered.

But what we see as he moves forward in his story, and we're going to follow it, is that leaving the port, heading to France and arriving on those French shores, his battalion are sent to the railhead, and like so many soldiers before them, they begin their journey towards the Western Front.

And he says Leaving Boulogne Station, one journeys through a succession of long tunnels, vile smelling, with a stench of mud from a river bed, combined with sulphur fumes from a locomotive primitive and old fashioned, which snorted and jerked horribly every few yards.

The train rumbled on into the light to reveal a countryside, drab, dismal and common, for miles one journeyed through pain tracts of uncultivated land without sign of human habitation.

A few stunted trees devoid of leaf and bird life added to the desolation, and in places overflowing dikes transformed plain into marshland and lake.

Occasionally one came across a thatched farmstead, lattice and shuttered, a flock of sheep grazing on tufted grass that did not look good to eat, seeking their meat pessimistically from God.

A windmill motionless and in a state of dilapidation stood out in contrast to the barren and uneven landscape.

Now and then we rumbled through a wayside station, where a sleepy porter rattled milk cans, cleaned the lamps, and slowly bestirred himself on this early grey February morn.

The rain fell with steady persistency.

The first station of importance on the line is Saint Omere.

So Harold's train journey took him and the lads from his battalion into the heart of northern France close to the battlefield area, towards that long static front sandwiched between Flanders and the area close to Lons, Lens and Arras, the so called forgotten front.

And this was a part of the line that had seen fighting in the early stage of the Great War, had settled down to static trench warfare, had seen offensive after offensive in 1915, but by early 1917 it was a quiet sector, it had been used as a nursery sector in the earlier stage of the fighting on the Western Front to bring in new units to kind of inculcate them into trench warfare, and that was exactly what was about to befall the fate of these men in the 57th Division who were being sent into that so-called quiet sector to do exactly the same thing, learn what trench warfare was about, learn how to take over the trenches, to hold the trenches, be relieved in the trenches, and all the other things that was required for a unit on the front line on a shooting war that the Western Front had become by nineteen seventeen.

And here Maybury and his comrades of the Second Fourth South Lanks arrive at Saley sur la Lis, located in the flat terrain, around the Lis River itself and behind the lines in that northern part of the front of northern France.

And this is what he says about arriving in that area.

A few yards from the river stands Sale Church, a magnificent pile with square tower pierced by loopholes and battlements resembling some ancient fortress of a bygone age.

Part of the masonry is shell ridden, its clock face is smashed beyond repair, and a great hole lays bare its interior.

Instead of a place of worship, it is now a Red Cross hospital, albeit in earlier stages of the war it was used as a place of internment for German prisoners prior to them being sent to camps further inland.

Day was dying in the west, there was a touch of frost in the air, and the white silent snow glistened like a myriad jewel.

A French poilu, erect and stately, stood at his post guarding the bridge, his bayonet reflecting the blood red rays of a sun sunk low down on the horizon.

Gradually the men of the Second Four South Lanks realized that they were now at the war.

This was the reality of them having enlisted all those years before, and now finally, in early nineteen seventeen, coming to France, and he continues.

For two years this Lancastrian regiment had been trained to the highest pitch.

It was efficient, and now it was to achieve its objective, the holding of a little strip of land on the western front.

When we had marched through the woodlands and dells of dear old Kent and Surrey, many of us pictured in mind's eye the days through which we were to pass, of what that goal which we so much desired would be like and how our first moments under fire would leave us.

In those far off days it seemed as if a long, long trail lay in front, the end veiled in a mist through which one could not penetrate, as if a cloud obscured the sun, which we knew must eventually pass away.

We wanted to make good, we wanted those two years to bear fruit in glorious achievements.

We had been sowers, and now it was harvest time, and God knows we realized that there was a reaper stalking ahead, had been stalking a lot more than two years in this land now soaked with blood.

But I think no, I know we were unafraid.

We left Sale regretfully, for it was a place one might abide in for a lifetime and still be interested in.

Heading towards the front line, Maybury and his battalion moved into the forward positions on this part of the forgotten front, a flat part of the front where a lot of the trenches were breastworks rather than just trenches dug into the ground, and he goes on to describe where their part of the trenches fitted into the wider story.

The battle line in the Western Theatre of War in March nineteen seventeen, if one had looked closely at the map, resembled nothing so much as the outline of a human face, and we were in the position of what might be termed the tip of the nose.

The Bois Grenier and La Chapelle d'Armontier sectors were the most advanced positions of a line stretching from the Belgian coast to the Swiss frontier.

To the right of Bois Grenier lay Fleur Bay, where the second tenth Liverpool Scottish and Second Ninth King's Regiment were entrenched.

On our left an Irish regiment, while still further away lay Hoopline and the Ypsalient.

Away on our right past Fleur Bay the line curved towards Arras.

In a sense, therefore, our position was likened to a jutting headland, a place where much might happen, for behind our lines lay Armontier, behind the enemies Lille, the Manchester of France.

The distance between our lines and the enemy varied.

In one place near Cowgate Gap, it was not more than one hundred and forty yards, at others four hundred.

Both sides at a seemingly impassable barrier of vicious barbed wire entanglements, separating also in no man's land, a stream ran much swollen by winter rains.

Behind us a wood stood stark and naked, its bows blown away by artillery fire, but it was an impregnable position for machine guns and others of small calibre.

In nineteen fourteen the trenches we were now in had been the scene of great slaughter, for it was here that the remnants of the army of Mons made its great and glorious stand and succeeded in blocking the enemy's advance to the French capital.

In those early days the conditions must have been terrible, for even on our advent there was much rebuilding to be done.

What it must have been like without duckboards, dugouts, and shelter of any description, one really cannot imagine, for when we arrived in places it was impassable with water, fowl, rank and smelling of dead bodies.

Mud and slush was waist deep, and in our front line there was a sad lack of protection.

The book is full of vivid description like this, giving us a really interesting insight into this static front at this quite late stage in the conflict, and part of I think his ability to do this was that he was often attached to The scouts and snipers section later he became a signaller, but he was doing a lot of observing into no man's land at this point, so this gave him the ability to see the wider battlefield that a normal Tommy just going about the day to day activities of trench warfare might not have seen.

So he continues with his view of what this front was like.

The majority of war readers imagine a British soldier's life on the Western Front to constitute an endless vigil of watching and waiting for the sight of an enemy, in a trench protected by sandy walls of earth, together with a blazing away of ammunition at a foe in much the same manner as one bangs at a bottle in a shooting gallery at a fair, only with more risk and more deadly consequences.

One pictures too the sight of a Bosch squealing camarader when he sees a long waving line of bayonets confronting him, and that he scurries like a rabbit if the odds are too great and the British guns too strong for his liking.

One thinks also of men embraced in deadly combat, the air full of smoke, nostrils and throat choked full of gunpowder, the sound of men's voices in the throes of death, and the fierce cries of swift charging infantry.

On paper it reads vivid and full of excitement, so graphic in description that one weaves phantom pictures at the same time possibly wishing one could be an eye witness.

The painting of battles fought in bygone ages have, to a certain extent, given one these impressions, but in this great European war the effect is not nearly so picturesque, albeit every moment there are acts of heroism and bravery performed.

I have known men grown weary and tired of trench warfare, not because of their lack of patriotism or of their conditions, but because of the deadly monosony day after day without coming to grips with the adversary.

When we came to France with our rifles, our pouches full of ammunition, expecting that within a few short hours after arrival our stock would need replenishing, but we had a rude awakening.

In modern warfare the rifle is little used except in the case of an attack by the enemy.

At other times it is hardly used, for it is the machine guns and artillery that are more deadly weapons of warfare.

The front line trenches are usually only occupied by the infantry at night, or rather from sundown to sunrise, although the intervening period is by no means a sinecure.

Whilst the machine gunners occupy the front lines during the day, the remainder of a battalion are engaged on other branches of work necessary for the preservation of life.

During the morning a detachment may be building trenches, filling sandbags, carrying ammunition to trench mortar stores, ration carrying, doing gas drill, rapid loading, or putting down new duckboards in place of old ones.

Then follows a brief dinner hour.

An hour later, a party may probably be carrying barbed wire and stakes up to the front line, ready for when night has fallen, or cleaning ditches of foul water, refilling water tanks, or cleaning bombs and rifle grenades.

By late afternoon one has earned a brief spell for sleep.

So I think this gives us a really good insight into daily trench warfare on a static front, and again important because it's giving that insight from the point of view of a man who is doing the dirty work, not an officer coordinating it, but one who is actually emptying the toilets, sorting out the replacement of duckboards carrying heavy material and wearing himself out day after day after day.

And he goes on in a position near Bois Grenier to note for two months or more I never saw a German soldier, in spite of my being in a sniper's loophole and stationed at an advanced observation post, only once did I see a man's reflection through a periscope, which at long range is by no means an easy task.

No man's land throughout the day is as lonely and desolate as the desert wilds, the only life existing thereon being the birds who build their nests amongst the shattered boughs of the trees, and the bullfrogs who croak dismally in the marsh and streams separating the lines.

Rows and rows of entanglements stretch across the waste, forming a seemingly impassable barrier.

The horror is something that rapidly becomes apparent to Mabry and his comrades on a front that has been static for so long, and he sees the reminders of that.

A huge grey rat sniffing and purring a yard or so away, one of a vast army who live in companionship with those who like rodents pass their days in burrows beneath the earth.

The battlefields of France is a lysium for King Rat.

He seeks not his food or means of sustenance, for the reaper provides his store in full measure.

By that I mean the bodies of men who once used to inhabit the earth.

It isn't pleasant to think of it, but it is one of the cruelties, one of the penalties of war.

One other interesting element of his account is when he witnesses the Battle of Messines from a distance.

He's holding the front southeast of Armontiers, basically.

Flanders is just across the border, Messines is probably not even twenty miles away, and the front of Messines which has been tunnelled into and the vast mines placed there and the battle about to begin, men in positions to the south could both see and hear what happened at Messines in June of nineteen seventeen, and this is his account of doing just that.

Over Irkingham the sausage shaped observation balloons were ascending in the twilight, and in the clouds somewhere I could hear the dull drone of aeroplanes travelling in a northeasterly direction.

It was nothing out of the ordinary.

At seven minutes past three, with startling suddenness the gates of hell were thrown open, and a volume of sound such as I have never heard before filled the sweetness of the morning air.

With each blast the fire bay where I stood rocked and swayed like a ship at sea.

I gazed along the line and knew that somewhere not far from Armontiers a fierce battle was raging.

Away in the distance, towering to immense heights, giant clouds of smoke wreathed in grotesque form.

I could faintly hear machine guns spitting and the tinkle tinkle of gas gongs.

Each moment the sky was splashed with crimson fire combined with dots of blue, green and red, which bespoke of SOS signals and the bursting of high explosives in continuous roar caused wafts of air gently to touch the face and speed on, elusive, like a will of the wisp.

I knew even as the sun would rise that this was the great British attack.

Having held the line on the part of the front where no major fighting was taking place, finally in november nineteen seventeen, nine months after their arrival in France, the fifty seventh Division and the Second Four South Lanks with them moved up to the Eap Salient to take part in the closing phase of the Third Battle of Epe.

Maybury recalled The month of November dawned cheerlessly, it was bitterly cold with incessant rain, and this sea of mud called Flanders stretched desolate and foreboding.

Everywhere spoke of death, of filth, of baseness, of those things that are not of this beauteous earth, a place that seemed as if God had never abided there, of things living, real, pleasurable, there were none, no song of birds, no beauteous nature, only the stark ridge that hid its gruesome sights from the outer world in the waterlogg shell holes abounding on all sides.

The light of the moon added to the weirdness of the surroundings, filling one with a melancholy that was unexplainable.

The coming of night filled one with dread, men and guns were silhouetted in black relief to change to figures unreal as the red flash of the guns played on them from an instant of time.

Here there was nothing but shell holes filled with dank, evil smelling water, infested with tribes of rodents and traces of gas.

To occupy our positions at Langamark we had to traverse from the ridge five miles of single duckboard track, treacherous with recent slush and rain, where a false step meant death by drowning or suffocation in the cruel clutching mud that clings like an octopus and never gives up its victims.

In the months that had gone we had witnessed few gruesome sights that really sickened all the nauseas, but in this skeleton that once was the village of Langamark we saw all the horrors of ghastly warfare.

In a dip beside the broken road, battered tanks, monsters of twisted iron and steel reared up and exposed their mangled vitals, while scattered about lay human bodies stark and naked that told their own tale.

Broken wheels of limbers and guns obstructed one's path, which oft times the sight of horses and mules steel, inert, lifeless, in some cases headless or devoid of limbs, the sight reminding one of a sidelight of the war little thought of by mankind.

Nearer the line even more ghastly sights showed themselves.

This portion of the Epe front was hell itself.

The fighting here in that closing stage of the Third Battle of Epe was coming to an end, and units of the fifty seventh division like the Second Four Flanks were lucky in that respect as they were never required to go over the top in an attack during the Third Battle of Eape, during that Battle of Passchendale as it's often called, and didn't have to go and fight a battle in that mud in those conditions that he so graphically describes there around Langamark.

They held the line once more, held the line in this case on the northeastern part of the Eap salient, facing the Hutols Forest, and they were there for the next few months in that mass of shell craters on a desolate landscape, and while they lost men to the conditions and the day-to-day activities of holding the line with shell fire, machine guns, trench mortars, and everything else, the battalion was being whittled away by these casualties rather than being wiped out in one big attack.

And after a stint again in northern France, where they met Portuguese forces for the very first time, the Germans had now broken through on the Somme front to the south.

This was March 1918, and the 2nd 4th South Lanks and the 57th Division became one of the formations that was then sent south to hold the line there.

So they move out of the salient after having not had to take part in the Third Battle of Yes.

They arrive back in northern France to be relieved by the Portuguese and then proceed south to the Somme, and just as they do so, literally a week or so later, the Germans attack on the 9th of April 1918, and the ground where they've just come from is overrun and the Portuguese suffer heavy losses.

So again, they are quite a lucky division in terms of how they're moved about and moved out just as a critical moment comes along.

And this next move brought Maybury and his comrades to the village of Gomacor on the Som front and for him the final phase of his war experiences.

He wrote As we approach the ruins of Gomacor Church, the enemy began shelling the roads.

This new sector presented many new aspects.

One turns up a winding lane a short distance from the ruined church to immediately come within sight of the subsidiary line.

Although night was nigh, there was still enough light to pick out the land.

Our positions were in low lying land, and in the distance on the crest of a hill, faintly dim to the naked eye, were the entrenched Huns.

We could see our shells bursting very close and our trench mortars in retaliation to his recent bombardment, and were playfully scattering the barbed wire entanglements close to the German front line.

In getting to forward positions on many occasions it necessitated journeying over the top in the face of machine gun fire until gradually each party took over its respective post.

My own section of signallers, together with a platoon, had to cross the main road leading from the village.

Opposite a couple of tanks, rusty and out of action, poked their noses up over a disused trench.

The stark Everton wood nearby was being bespatted by shrapnel, which for a moment of time showed up crimson against the gaunt, jagged and leafless trees.

Overhead there was a continuous whistling sound, a sound so strange that words cannot properly define, yet we who were familiar with the peculiar noises of the night knew it to be gas shells hurling through the air in the direction of Foncavillier.

The night was untroubled by the wind.

Gomacor, the village of tragic history, lay in shadows.

Occasionally one heard the rumbling of carts afar off, the dull pop of the all insistent gas shells bursting far back, together with the rat, rat of a German machine gun somewhere over in no man's land.

Settling into the sector, Maybury and his comrades found that the Australians were close by, the Germans having pushed hard against lots of different units here in March and April of nineteen eighteen, and they were now holding the line alongside these men, and finally he was able to look around properly.

Gomacor has taken its toll to the utmost.

In nineteen sixteen this village of sad memories was a shambles.

Foes met in hand to hand fighting of the fiercest description, the carnival of death waged long, laughter and song, the yells of men mad with the lust of blood, the thunder of guns near and far, the curses of racing men and sound of flying hoofs of horses have all echoed within the sound of the battered belfry of Gomor's noble edifice of God.

Although life within its streets and its lanes, its homesteads and its church is long since dead, there still remains its ever living history as witness the tragic signboard which one sees in its main thoroughfare.

This was once the village of Gomacor, it reads.

Slowly, day by day the tattered remnants of what once were homes of peaceful villagers are levelled out by hideous shells, and ground where once children played, and old men smoke their pipes of peace in blissful contentment, with beauteous nature to gladden sight and mind, adds dust to the prevalent waste.

Instead of life in quiet cottage and sound of chiming bells, men live and have their being in subterranean passages and caverns under fields that once were ripe with corn, and instead of lowing of cattle at eventide and the atmospheres of peace, there breezed the foul breath of bloody war.

For weeks we inhabited Gomakor as do the rodent tribe, by day hiding from the outer world in its cavernous depths, where the light of the sun was unable to penetrate where men slept under roofs of chalk stone until day had gone and night cast a mantle over all the earth.

Then and only then was there signs of life, then the vigilant watch, the monotonous tasks under which men grow weary, and always the snuffing out like candles of the life of somebody's child.

During a lull in the battle, Harold Maybury was in a dugout with his signallers at Gomacor when their position was suddenly hit by some gas shells, and to his horror he was caught unawares by the gas himself being quite badly gassed and evacuated off the battlefield, bringing his war to an end.

So having looked at the available records of his and seen that he was apparently injured or wounded in the latter part of the war, his account then confirms that, and that gassing at Gomacor in the spring of nineteen eighteen would result in his discharge from the army and the award of a silver war badge because of that.

The final part of the book is unusual because it recounts his travels back to the old battlefields as a veteran in the early nineteen twenties and definitely adds to the uniqueness of this forgotten account of the Great War, but he found when he got there, when he got back to the battlefields, he found it disappointing.

All I saw were fields of waving corn, the new bridges, a few rusty tanks, plenty of pill boxes bespattered with marks of shrapnel bullets, and an acre of graves.

I went on and on and on into the heart of a land I knew, yet all so changed, so devoid of the sight of the real land I wanted to see.

The million shell holes no longer remained, with no sight of the chain bridges, the hutmants, the baby elephants, or the men of China.

It is all given over to a fertile plain, with a way over there a langamark battered church in ruins and a chateau in a rapid state of repair.

Like many battlefield pilgrims at that time, his final destination was Eap, a name that brought back so many memories for him.

I entered the ramparts of Epe near the Little Gate, with its concrete dugout still remaining for all the world to see.

As in the old days all was silent, one could not altogether associate quietitude with Epe for the silent streets emptied of all save wanderers and pilgrims like myself cast a strange spell.

As I stood near the Mening Gate, I seemed to live again the days and nights that were gone.

On the spot I stood for four years from October nineteen fourteen to october nineteen eighteen, the shells had pulverized this now holy ground.

I seemed to see the city in flames, the hurried exit of its eighteen thousand peaceful inhabitants, the lonely trek of Kith and Kin away from this Flemish city, the tottering of the cloth all before the forces of enemy cannon, the coming of Khaki soldiers to stop the onrush of myriad forces, and lived again the underground life of the soldiers who were starving.

stationed in this furnace.

True, today it is a heap of ruins only, a shell swept graveyard, but it is an eternal memorial of British valour.

He said of Eape, it is a city of decay, yet as I went further through its chaotic thoroughfares, I saw many bright spots.

All is not sadness in Eape, and I found it along the station place and the Bouvillard Mallon, with its beds of flowers and scrubs, encircled by grass and a row of newly planted trees to brighten up the lives of those who linger within its walls.

I saw the tragic ruins of the cathedral and walked amongst the stones of the historic belfry bestruing the street, and with it came the thoughts of how once it reared its proud head in the old days of old time prosperity and wealth seeming to share the bustle of life in bygone centuries when the peasants and their carts halted within the squares of Epe, and it was a marketplace of this low lying country.

For Harold Maybury the visit was a moving one not just limited to Flanders as he went on to explore other areas where he'd served too.

On those battlefields being gradually reclaimed, he found some peace, I think, reflecting on what his war experiences meant to him and perhaps standing there on that holy ground as he calls it, perhaps that was what prompted him to publish his memoirs just a few years later.

He said The star of hope still hangs over Seisulalis, and the earth that once was no man's land and over Niepp and the rolling downs, the twinkling lights of cottages show their signs of habitation.

The birds have built their nests in the once stark Everton wood at Gomacor, the long trek of aged peasants under shell fire from hamlet to village farther off is at an end, and old men smoke their pipes of peace in fields once soaked with blood.

How soon therefore do we forget the mirrors of the past back in the sober world we come again to toil and grind each man to his task and to his own thoughts.

In our home towns there's the lights of home, the laughter of children, the ease, the comforts we once long for, but out there the fields, the hedges, the dank shell holes were our abodes, the winking pearly very lights the only gleams of light we knew, and instead of swift moving crowds the swish, swish of marching feet towards the field of battle.

From the mirrors of the past there comes the voices of those that sleep their eternal sleep from Ypres to the Som, and moonbeams play on holy ground till dawn arises from the east.

The guns are silent, so too are men.

The passage of time shall surely not blot out the years of remembrance and that's the closing line of the book that's how Mabury ends his tale with that phrase years of remembrance.

Maybury was a good writer, not a brilliant one but a good writer he expressed his war experience in easy language, easy to understand.

He puts across feeling in his words he has a connection to that landscape of the First World War, something that we often talk about here on the podcast and his view from the ranks gives the account I think greater currency and his return to the battlefield a dimension not often encountered in other books.

It's a title that really deserves to have been reprinted perhaps during the centenary certainly it should be better known and not as rare as it is and that final phrase of his the Years of remembrance was something obviously dear to Mabury, which is why I think it's on his gravestone.

For him I suspect it was the key, the phrase, the words to his mind returning to that landscape of the Great War, returning to his experiences for him to see the faces of his comrades who once marched beside him and marched no more a way to return to that place he described so well which was his very personal Old Frontline You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed.

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