To many, the First World War conjures up exclusively a picture of
trench warfare, in which the armies of both sides remained locked in the mud and
despair of their static positions. The war of movement with which the conflict
opened and closed is less well remembered. This book, originally published in
1976, is an attempt to correct that situation, by providing a detailed daily
account of the actions of one of the finest of the battalions of the original
British Expeditionary Force that crossed over to France in the
summer of 1914, the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards – The Models.
The story is told in the words of the officers of the Battalion, few
of whom survived the war, taken from their diaries and letters, and covers all
the major actions of the first five months of the War – Mons and the Retreat, the Marne, the Aisne, culminating in the dark and desperate days of First
Ypres. By the end of that battle the Battalion had lost 959 men killed, wounded
and missing – practically its entire strength. for the most part the story is
told by Major ‘Ma’ Jeffreys, later General the Lord Jeffreys, whose diaries,
supplemented on occasion by the diaries and letters of some of his brother
officers and others, provide a very complete, graphic and deeply moving picture
of those turbulent days as seen by an ordinary regimental officer of the old
school.
