The Unreturning Army. This item is unavailable.The Unreturning Army

In the centenary year of World War I, names such as Ypres, the Marne, the Somme, and Passchendaele are heavy with meaning as settings for the near-destruction of a generation of men. It is this aura of tragedy that makes Huntly Gordon’s memoir, drawn from his letters written from the Front, such a potent one. He was sensitive, intelligent, unpretentious, and, as his account reveals, capable of detached and trenchant judgment. As the summer of 1914 drew to a close, it was difficult for a 16 year-old schoolboy to realize that the world for which he had been prepared at Clifton College was itself preparing for war. By 1916, he was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery. By June 1917, he was at the Ypres Salient, getting his "baptism" at Hell Fire Corner in an intensive artillery duel that formed the prolog to Passchendaele itself. Early in 1918, his battery would fight a series of rearguard actions near Baupaume that would help turn the tide of the massive German Spring offensive. Huntly Gordon has given us an enduring and classic memoir: a poignant and extraordinarily human account of history as it happened.

Huntly Gordon was educated at Clifton College and joined the army in 1916. After the war he studied medicine before going to China with Shell Oil. Returning in 1926, he joined London Transport, spending much of his spare time surveying archeological sites with Sir Mortimer Wheeler. During the Blitz, he initiated food trains for the thousands sheltering in the Underground, and was awarded an MBE. He died in 1982. Born in 1956, David Gordon is Huntly Gordon's youngest son. Educated at Sherborne and Sandhurst, he has been a soldier, parliamentary researcher, and county councilor.