Four Years on the Western Front

One eye closed, the other staring down the scope of a rifle; Aubrey Smith stood in the firing line and witnessed the harsh realities of war – Anxiety and loss, hope and passion, life and death – always with one eye open.

Aubrey Smith was just one of countless thousands of young men who worked in an office in London when the Great War rumbled across Europe, engulfing the whole world in its path; one of countless thousands who enlisted to fight.

These first-hand accounts follow Smith’s adventures with the London Rifle Brigade. Compiled from the letters he sent home during the war, sometimes quoted verbatim, often woven into a narrative, a more vivid or authentic picture of a soldier’s time during the First World War could hardly be wished for.

From the naïve optimism of enlisting for duty, when all thought the fighting would cease before they’d even had to fire a shot and ‘for weeks we simply played at soldiers’, Smith’s epistolary tales take us through his training, his first foray on the firing line, the Battle of the Ypres, the Battle of Somme, the last blows of the British offensive and the eventual armistice four years later.

Retaining the original language of his pen we can peer through the eyes of a rifleman on the lowest rung of the military ladder. Smith’s fascinating journey into the annals of history is recorded with the intimacy of a private journal, full of detail and humour, joy and sadness.

“We were a very jolly party in those days and we felt we were having a glorified holiday. For one thing, we thought the War would soon be over and that there was only a remote possibility of our being required. As the messenger said to me when I called at the office one day in October: “There are twenty millions fighting together, and, if everyone only fired ten rounds a day, it makes two hundred million cartridges fired daily. Now, sir, how can they keep that up till Christmas?”

Aubrey Smith (1893-1935) served with the London Rifle Brigade throughout the Great War, one of the first Territorial battalions to land in France. He was awarded the Military Medal in August, 1917, and a bar to the Medal in November, 1918. After the war he moved to Hong Kong, becoming a prominent businessman as well as playing the piano in the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra with his wife. He died on the 29th September 1935, aged 42 years.

Author: Aubrey Smith

Publisher: Endeavour Press

Released Date: 2016

ISBN: 9781911445180