Kitchener's Mob: Adventures of an American in the British Army

TO TOMMY OF THE GREAT WAR WHO IS ADDING IMMORTAL LUSTER TO THE NAME OF ATKINS
This brief narrative is by no means a complete record of life in a battalion of one of Lord Kitchener's first armies. It is, rather, a story in outline, a mere suggestion of that life as it is lived in the British lines along the western front. If those who read gain thereby a more intimate view of trench warfare, and of the men who are so gallantly and cheerfully laying down their lives for England, the purpose of the writer will have been accomplished.
The diagram which appears on the front and rear covers of the book is a partially conventionalized design illustrating some features of trench construction mentioned in Chapter VI. For obvious reasons it is not drawn to scale, and although it is a truthful representation of a typical segment of the British line, it is not an exact sketch of any existing sector.
April , 1916.
JOINING UP
Kitchener's Mob they were called in the early days of August, 1914, when London hoardings were clamorous with the first calls for volunteers. The seasoned regulars of the first British expeditionary force said it patronizingly, the great British public hopefully, the world at large doubtfully. Kitchener's Mob, when there was but a scant sixty thousand under arms with millions yet to come. Kitchener's Mob it remains to-day, fighting in hundreds of thousands in France, Belgium, Africa, the Balkans. And to-morrow, when the war is ended, who will come marching home again, old campaigners, war-worn remnants of once mighty armies? Kitchener's Mob.
It is not a pleasing name for the greatest volunteer army in the history of the world; for more than three millions of toughened, disciplined fighting men, united under one flag, all parts of one magnificent military organization. And yet Kitchener's own Tommies are responsible for it, the rank and file, with their inherent love of ridicule even at their own expense, and their intense dislike of swank. They fastened the name upon themselves, lest the world at large should think they regarded themselves too highly. There it hangs. There it will hang for all time.