THIS IS A BARGAIN OFFER FOR OUR FIRST TWO OUTLINE PUBLISHING BOOKS! AS REVIEWED IN THE WFA STAND TO MAGAZINE
BEGGAR ME! I’M A PRISONER!
BRITISH POWS IN GERMANY, 1914-18
By Peter Hart & Gary Bain
Nobody really expected to be made a prisoner of war but once captured it was a cruel, hard world, especially if they weren’t officers. At the mercy of bullying captors, often existing on a minimal diet that left them suffering from malnutrition, forced to work long hours in appalling conditions, many were too damn exhausted to try and escape. But a few roused themselves and devoted countless hours to escape plans, some taking opportunistic advantage of any brief opening, others engaging in the hard graft of tunnelling. But escape was no guarantee of liberty; many were all too soon caught, to be ignominiously dragged back to the POW camps. For such men failure was only a spur to greater efforts as they try, try, tried again. This is a story of courage and endurance we should not forget. Signed by the authors!
WELSH WARRIOR A Personal Record of the Great War. Brigadier General Hubert Rees.
Edited by Peter Hart
Outline Publishing, 2025, 181 pages.
This account written by Hubert Rees is one of the finest memoirs of the Great War. The highlights scream for our attention. Firstly, we have his adventures as a captain in the 2nd Welch Regiment during 1914, when the terrible casualties gave him command of his battalion even though he was still only a junior officer. In 1916 as a brigadier, he was placed in temporary command of the 94th Brigade and had to watch as his men were slaughtered in the doomed assault on Serre on 1st July. He then commanded the 11th Brigade and the 149th Brigade during terrible trench warfare at Arras and on the Somme in 1916-17. But his worst year came in 1918, when he was commanding the 150th Brigade. His men clung on for dear life, against successive German offensives in the Somme area, then behind the Lys River, all culminating in the whirlwind that was Operation Blücher launched on the Chemin des Dames on 27th May 1918. Rees himself was captured with only the ‘consolation’ of a private conversation next day with Kaiser Wilhelm. For the rest of the war, he was a prisoner, only released to return home in December 1918.
UK SALES ONLY