Mud, Blood and Bullets: Memoirs of a Machine Gunner on the Western Front

A detailed, first-hand account of life in the trenches in World War I from an ordinary soldier's perspective

It is 1915 and the Great War has been raging for a year, when Edward Rowbotham, a coal miner from the Midlands, volunteers for Kitchener's Army. Drafted into the newly-formed Machine Gun Corps, he is sent to fight in places whose names will forever be associated with mud, blood, and sacrifice: Ypres, the Somme, and Passchendaele. He is one of the "lucky" ones, surviving more than two-and-a-half years of the terrible slaughter that left nearly a million British soldiers dead by 1918 and wiped out all but six of his original company. He wrote these memoirs 50 years later, but found his memories of life in the trenches had not diminished at all. The sights and sounds of battle, the excitement, the terror, and the extraordinary comradeship are all vividly described as if they had happened to him only yesterday.

Edward Rowbotham survived a bullet wound to the temple, and won the Military Medal for bravery. Janet Tucker is Edward Rowbotham's granddaughter. She edited and transcribed his memoirs.