Schoolboy into War

This memoir, published in 1978, details the author’s experience of the First World War, starting with his membership of the officer training corps at Berkhamsted School and continuing through his service on the Western Front, during which he was wounded on three occasions. Like Stuart Cloete and his character Jimmie Hilton in How Young They Died, the end of the war brings the marriage of the author to one of his nurses. With his wife, he attended the sixtieth anniversary commemorations of the battle of Passchendaele.

The author, Harold Mellersh (born 28 May 1897), grew up in north London and Hertfordshire. He served in the First World War as a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment. After the war he joined the Civil Service. He began writing and had three novels published between 1926 and 1931, including Ill Wind, a largely autobiographical account of the First World War. He also wrote some 20 works of non-fiction. In the first chapter of his memoir he writes:
“In 1930 I, like quite a few others, got around to writing about World War I. The prevalent fashion was to write in novel form. My novel was largely fictitious so far as the 'home front' was concerned; but naturally it was based on my own personal experiences so far as war training and fighting went. This has helped me remember.”

The author was not immune from a perceived prescience of death:
“It was customary to mark a grave in the trenches, if possible, with a wooden cross. Someone in the Headquarters Company made them. He made one...  for the poor chap whose life had been so suddenly ended; it would be put just outside the part of the trench where he had been blown up. On our next tour of duty it was taken up by one of the men. This man happened to be just in front of me as we made our way up the communications trenches... He was also carrying a bag of coke and having difficulties; I therefore relieved him of the cross. I was immediately fileld with a deep suspicion that this was an omen: I was carrying my own cross obviously, and on this tour of duty I should be killed.”

Towards the end of the memoir, Mellersh explains how deeply his mind remained connected to the war even as an old man:
“I still dream on occasion that I am in World War I — as I dream too that my friend Harold Smith is still alive, though strangely, unhappily unapproachable. Sometimes the war dream is also unhappy, full of foreboding of death such as I felt carrying that cross up the front line or hoping ignobly for reprieve as I marched towards the German attack. But sometimes I am happy and proud and in uniform, and about to be someone important — a wish-fulfilment dream if ever there was one.”